DREWspective

I’ve had two permanent jobs in two years, all of which lasted for less than 12 months. That’s when I decided to move into freelancing, but unfortunately it didn’t work out. So now I’m back to the predictable grind, which—in this position, anyway—I’m beginning to hate.

I tell you this because there’s a reason why I’ve left the other two jobs. I realise now that it’s had nothing to do with money: one of them was a well-paid job, which was relatively easy to get to in the mornings. The other one wasn’t either.

No, the primary reason for me leaving both jobs, and why I might leave this one, was blame culture.

Some of you may know what I mean by blame culture, but I’ll explain further. My definition of blame culture is where you’re in any size group of people, and you find they use excessive negative language for just about anything. These people never seem to be satisfied; actually, whenever something good happens, they act as if they’re entitled to it. But give them a problem, or something they don’t like, and they’ll talk your ass off about it.

People call me negative, and I freely admit I have moments where everything that comes out of my mouth is negatively charged. That comes with the way I’ve been treated by people, who are just as negative if not more so. But there’s a difference.

Despite my negative nature, I prefer spending time focusing on solutions and methods. I don’t like beating myself up over mistakes I’ve made, whether it’s being late or messing something up on a web site I’m working on. Fuck belly-aching; let’s see if we can learn from the problem and prevent these things from happening again.
But I end up beating myself up anyway, because most people I’ve worked with are firmly entrenched in blame culture (at least, on the job): they spend time focusing on problems and fault-finding. They’re not happy unless they’ve assigned or passed blame on someone else.

Now you’ll find out just what the heck this has to do with anything.

A couple of weeks ago, I was brought up on a few "mistakes" I’d made since starting my current job: trivial things such as being late on occasion. Under normal circumstances, you’d probably agree that this would be a one-to-one conversation, wouldn’t you?
Well imagine my horror when I found myself "locked" in a narrow room, mostly taken up by a large table, with three people.

(This was particularly bad because, when I was at university, I received a barrage of criticism while being trapped in an "interrogation room", with a large heavy table and two senior staff members standing directly between me and the door. I don’t appreciate being trapped.)

While I was arguably being criticised for the heck of it, I was a little dizzy from reliving that moment at university. But it was the discovery of a disturbing trend within the office, that I’m very sure is being replicated in many other companies: the trend of withholding praise and dishing out criticism (hence the title). How many of us have worked in a company where that was the norm?

I’ve calculated that for every positive comment I’ve been given at this job, I’ve had roughly nine times as much criticism, nit-picking and blame assigning - possibly more.

I have made a number of mistakes on the job, ranging from coding issues to almost bringing down a site, which were mostly to do with a lack of information and people unwilling to help. But boy do they love to talk about it when it happens. They bring at least one other person to crowd you; they ridicule your comments and methods (even if subtly); they talk your ears off for several minutes.

The only thing that results is in me being afraid to make any more mistakes, and consequently becoming more mistake-prone.

I want to keep this post short because it’s been long enough already.  I will end by saying, it’s likely I won’t be there much longer at this rate.