I've been on a few engineering teams that turned toxic, some over time, and some from the start. While on these teams, I:

• Felt anxious and stressed, all the time
  • I was not good at compartmentalizing, so I allowed the bad work situation to affect my personal life.
• Obsessed with the technical work
  • As a defense mechanism against the difficult people situation
• Fluctuated between anger and sadness
  • I felt disempowered to effect change, which affected my wellbeing differently day to day.

These were not pleasant experiences, but in retrospect, they shaped who I am today. I've spent a lot of time reflecting on what caused those experiences to turn so sour. So here's what I've got. I believe any of the following will eventually result in a toxic team:

• A single toxic individual who asserts strong opinions and inserts themselves everywhere
  • It causes the toxic disease to spread because if I want my opinions heard, I have to compete with this individual, so I inevitably become toxic too.
• Not enough work to go around
  • We need to compete with each other for the “good” projects, resulting in tense relationships between people who should be collaborating.
  • And it results in a lot of downtime, which, given the existing tense relationships, leads to bickering.
• Visionless management, which is also opinionated
  • As a motivated team member, I must constantly guess at what management wants us to build, which may or may not align with what our users need.
  • And when we ask for clarification, we don’t get anything actionable or concrete because management does not know what it wants.
  • However, since management knows what it does not want, it shuts projects down, resulting in a few individuals becoming demotivated as they watch their work crumble.
  • This inevitably spreads to the rest of the team during the myriad ranting sessions between team members.

In these circumstances, earned authority engineers will have a tough time turning the ship around. These are complex people issues, and I believe this is exactly what management is paid to deal with. They need to step in and remedy the situation:

• Toxic individual
  • A behavior performance conversation, followed by requests for actionable changes, leading to either a change or termination
• Not enough work to go around
  • Either working with the team to create new scope, a higher level of ambition given the resourcing, or a reduction in the team’s size
• Visionless management
  Either stop having opinions and let the team guide in a bottom-up approach, or come in with a stronger vision - you can’t have both

1. Hacker news: how to build toxic software teams
2. Uplevel, 15 symptoms of a toxic engineering culture
3. James Kip, how toxic engineering cultures undermine innovation and growth
4. Reddit, stories of toxic coworkers/teams