Toxic culture almost always comes with an excuse. Constant urgency gets blamed on the market. Favorites get protected because everything depends on them. With explanations like these, it’s easy to miss what’s actually gone wrong.
I’ve seen plenty of situations like this. I’m writing this mostly for myself: I want to understand how to recognize a toxic culture so I don’t end up in one again.
You’re always putting out fires
At every Web3 or crypto company I’ve worked for, we were constantly rushing. Everything was urgent. Everything needed to happen faster. The explanation was always the same: that’s the nature of the market. Crypto and Web3 move too fast, the market keeps changing, so we have to adapt quickly, keep pivoting, and live in a permanent state of crisis.
Years later, I look at where this led and realize my suspicions at the time were right. The team was always quietly unhappy. We never defined a shared goal or understood exactly what we were supposed to do. Instead, we kept changing direction, chasing quick growth and constantly reacting to the market. The strange part is that we may have missed our biggest opportunity during the strongest periods of growth. If we’d focused on a few specific things, we could have achieved much more. But our small team was overwhelmed by constant changes. The problem had less to do with the crypto market and more to do with the lack of a clear direction.
No one explains where you’re going
I’ve run into the problem with goals even more often. “We want to be number one in our niche.” “We want to increase revenue by a certain percentage.” Sounds good, but I still don’t understand what’s expected of me. What can I actually do? What can I influence? And where exactly are we trying to get to?
Goals can sound beautiful while remaining vague and confusing. Something along the lines of: “When someone writes a book about us in 10 years, our goal statement will make a great title.”
Sometimes I understand the goal but don’t believe in it. I don’t think it will help us. Maybe I’m wrong. But no one has explained why it’s worth pursuing. They’ve told me the idea without helping me see its value, understand why we need it, or believe in it. Even if an idea seems strange or confusing, a leader needs to explain it, get the team excited, and make people want to bring it to life. Sell the team on the idea!
That’s where the feeling of being kept in the dark comes from. You’re given a goal and assigned tasks, but no one explains why any of it matters or what they’re really trying to achieve. They just tell you what to do. You’re left feeling that management doesn’t quite know what to do either and doesn’t believe in the idea.
The company plays favorites
I’ve seen two kinds of favoritism. The explanation I hear most often is: they’ve been here so long, everything depends on them.
In the first case, the favorite is one person. At one company, we had a colleague who took on a huge number of responsibilities. Over time, he started acting like an informal leader because he wanted to secure his position, rather than understand what was happening and help others. He tried to influence everyone and get involved where he wasn’t wanted.
Management depended on him. A lot really did rest on his shoulders. So it suited everyone to keep him exactly where he was. That became a trap for him too. He couldn’t grow within the company or move to another position, department, or role because management didn’t want to let him go. Everyone was perfectly happy with him staying put.
The rest of us became dependent on him too. Every question had to go through him. Everyone had to deal with him, even when their work had nothing to do with him. Meanwhile, with no room to grow and too many responsibilities, he gradually became exhausted, burned out, and increasingly toxic, taking his frustration and fatigue out on everyone around him.
In the second case, an entire discipline gets favored. Say the manager is a programmer. They have little interest in the work that goes into hypotheses, decisions, testing, and so on. What matters to them is trying the finished product the developers deliver and judging the work based on the developers’ account of it.
The team ships a major feature. Before that came hypotheses, interviews, design, and testing. But after launch, the developers get most of the thanks. Everything depends on them, after all. By then, the designers and researchers who did so much of the work earlier have been forgotten. That hits the design team’s morale hard. It feels like their contribution doesn’t count, and over time it leads to burnout.
Nobody needs your experience, and there’s nowhere to grow
The problem here isn’t a lack of experience. It’s that once you’re hired, nobody needs the experience you have. They bring you in as a strong specialist with deep knowledge of the field, research experience, and plenty of problems already solved. The expectation is that you’ll quickly understand the existing problems and help the company precisely because of what you already know and have done.
But in practice, it often turns out that none of this matters. What mattered was hiring someone from a well-known company, pointing to their résumé, and filling the position. Somehow, listening to their opinion, trusting their professional judgment, and using their knowledge never follows. There’s no trust within the company, so they hire a specialist for their expertise and then work with them as if that expertise doesn’t exist.
It’s like buying a supercomputer to do basic multiplication.
In those moments, I don’t understand why they hired me at all. The tasks are simple. Nobody asks for my opinion, and when I offer it, nobody listens. Some of the problems I’m given are ones I’ve solved before. I understand the context. I have knowledge and research experience to draw on. None of it gets used.
Over time, it becomes clear that your contribution is undervalued. Tasks get assigned without considering your strengths or professional interests, and your development slows down. There’s barely any opportunity to discuss with management how you could contribute. In that situation, it’s hard to feel secure or see a future there.
Nobody is interested in your growth either. They want you to keep doing one job well. You might become indispensable at it, but you won’t get any further.
No one asks questions, and no one wants to hear them
Another major red flag for me is when someone isn’t engaged in the conversation or the work itself. They show no interest in the person they’re talking to, make no effort to understand the context, ask no questions, and take no initiative. It’s especially obvious when tasks are assigned and discussed. There’s no attempt to understand what we’re doing or why, how the problem came about, what constraints and challenges we’ve faced, how it connects to the overall goal, or what the result should be.
When someone brings you a task, asking questions isn’t a formality or an attempt to slow things down. It’s how you work out whether you’re addressing a real problem that actually needs solving, and whether you share the same understanding of its causes and context.
There are several excuses. “Let’s not waste time. We need to move faster.” “Let’s just do what our competitor did.” Sometimes they say it outright: “I’m paying, so we’ll do it my way.” Yes, I’ve heard that one too.
They treat you like Design-GPT. They tell you what to make and wait for the result. Nobody explains where the task came from or why it has to be done that way. You bring back a solution and hear: “No, that’s wrong. Do it differently.” Nobody asks why you chose that approach. And when you respond to criticism with clarifying questions, all you get back is irritation.
But understanding a solution means giving the person who made it a chance to present it and explain their thinking. Before saying it’s all wrong and needs to be redone, you need to understand why they chose that approach and what problem it solves. Otherwise, the discussion stops being a shared effort to find a better solution and becomes a one-way stream of instructions.
People communicate with you through prompts. There’s no room for your questions, explanations, or a presentation of your solution. And this can happen in any role, not just design.
Work drains you
This is the consequence of everything else. There’s a saying: by the time you start wondering whether you’re burned out, you’ve probably been burned out for a while.
When two or more of these signs come together in one company, you eventually realize that you no longer enjoy working there at all. You don’t understand why you’re staying. You constantly worry that you’re standing still, not developing, and becoming less employable. And you’re not getting any younger. Those thoughts wear you down.
I know it can be different. At RetailCRM, I worked with Dmitry Borozdin and Ilyas Salikhov. They were the best managers I’ve ever had.
We understood where we were going, what we were doing, and what we wanted to achieve. We made strategic decisions together; they didn’t only come from the top. I was trusted and given room to try what I proposed. At the same time, they always asked why I wanted to do things a certain way. My ideas were discussed and challenged, and I had the chance to explain and defend my decisions.
I did eventually have a reason to leave: I was offered a better-paid job working in the international market. But of all the managers I’ve worked with, I consider those two the most professional.
For me, the hardest part of a toxic job is this: you already want to leave, but you no longer know how to find another one. You keep dragging yourself through a job you hate, knowing you let yourself end up there.
Your time and energy are worth at least as much as the salary you receive. Pay attention to these signs, and don’t wait for the perfect moment to make a change. Start taking steps before things get bad enough to send you to a doctor.