EngineerHer

I have left jobs describing the culture as the problem.

I have sat across from friends, partners, coaches and recruiters and said versions of the same thing. The culture wasn’t right. The environment wasn’t healthy. The place just didn’t work for me.

And I believed it. Because it was true.

What I didn’t understand – not for a long time, not until I’d repeated the pattern enough times to finally have to look at it – was that “the culture wasn’t right” is a description, not a diagnosis. It tells you what it felt like. It doesn’t tell you what was actually happening, or why it kept happening, or what you’d need to look for to make sure it didn’t happen again.

I had to learn that the hard way. Twice, memorably.

The managers who changed everything – and not in a good way

Both times, it started the same way. A manager I worked well with. A relationship built on trust, on clear communication, on knowing where I stood and what was expected. Work that felt manageable because the environment around it was stable.

And then that manager moved on.

The first replacement was nit-picky in a way that felt relentless. The focus that mattered on Tuesday afternoon was different from the focus that mattered on Wednesday morning. I’d spend hours on a report – genuinely hours, reworking and refining – and it would come back covered in corrections. Not factual corrections. Rewording. Restructuring. A different way of saying the same thing. I’d incorporate the changes and send it back. More changes would come. I started to feel like I was chasing a standard that kept moving, and I could never quite catch it.

The second was different but equally exhausting. Every report, every presentation needed more. More back-up slides. More detail. More supporting data. More evidence for conclusions that seemed, to me, self-evident. I’d prepare thoroughly and leave meetings feeling like I hadn’t prepared at all.

I left both situations describing the managers as the problem. Micromanagers. Difficult personalities. People I just couldn’t work with.

And I moved on, looking for somewhere with a better culture.

What I understood much later

It took distance – and if I’m honest, it took doing this enough times that I couldn’t ignore the pattern anymore – to understand what was actually happening.

Both of those managers were new to their roles. And both of them were less than confident in those roles. Not bad people. Not even necessarily bad managers in every context. But people who didn’t yet trust their own judgment – and because they didn’t trust themselves, they couldn’t trust anyone else either.

The nit-picking wasn’t about my reports. It was about his anxiety. The endless requests for more detail weren’t about the quality of my work. They were about her need for reassurance that she had enough to defend her position if challenged.

None of that was about me. But it cost me enormously, because I didn’t understand it at the time.

Here’s what I know now that I didn’t know then. I need to work with managers who trust themselves. Not managers who never question me – that’s not what I’m describing. I get questioned. Sometimes things make complete sense to me but land differently for the person I’m reporting to, and a good question can sharpen my thinking considerably. That’s fine. That’s healthy.

What I need is a manager who has enough confidence in their own judgment to extend some of that confidence to me. Who can look at my work and say “I trust that this person knows what they’re doing” – even when they might have done it differently themselves.

That is a very specific thing to need. And “the culture wasn’t right” would never have led me to it.

Why “bad culture” keeps you stuck

When we leave a role describing the culture as the problem, we go looking for a better culture. But we’re looking for something we haven’t defined. We ask in interviews whether the culture is collaborative. We look at Glassdoor reviews. We try to read the room during the hiring process.

And sometimes we get it right. But often we get six months in and realise we’ve landed somewhere that feels oddly familiar. The specifics are different. The feeling isn’t.

Because we didn’t diagnose the problem. We described it and moved on.

The culture of a workplace is made up of thousands of specific things. The way decisions get made. The way conflict gets handled. The relationship between seniority and autonomy. Whether expertise is trusted or constantly second-guessed. Whether new managers are supported to build confidence or thrown in and expected to sink or swim.

“Bad culture” can mean any of those things. It can mean all of them. Without knowing which ones specifically affected you – and why – you can’t possibly know what to look for or what questions to ask next time.

The diagnosis underneath the description

So here’s the question I’d ask you to sit with, whether you’re in the middle of a role that isn’t working or looking back at one that didn’t.

What specifically was the thing that made it hard? Not the label – the actual, specific, concrete thing.

Not “micromanagement” – but what did that look like in practice? What was being controlled, how often, in what way? What did it cost you?

Not “no room to grow” – but grow in which direction? What specifically were you being blocked from doing or becoming?

Not “the culture was toxic” – but what happened, specifically, that made it feel that way? Who was involved? What were the dynamics? What did it do to you?

The more specific you can be, the more useful the diagnosis. And the more useful the diagnosis, the better equipped you are to choose somewhere that actually fits – rather than somewhere that just isn’t the place you left.

I spent years leaving jobs and describing the culture as the problem. It was only when I got specific – really specific, uncomfortably specific – that I understood what I actually needed. And once I understood that, I stopped recreating the same situation in different buildings.

Going deeper on culture

If you want to go deeper on understanding what culture actually is and how it gets built, Erin Meyer’s The Culture Map is one of the most useful books I’ve encountered on the subject. It was written primarily for understanding cross-cultural differences in international business – but the framework it uses for mapping how organisations communicate, make decisions and build trust is genuinely illuminating for anyone trying to understand why a particular environment worked or didn’t work for them.

It won’t tell you what you specifically need. But it will give you a much richer vocabulary for understanding what you experienced.

And if you want to get specific about your own situation

The Engineering Career Clarity Guide is designed to help you do exactly that. It’s a structured set of questions that takes you underneath the surface explanations and into the real ones. It’s free and it’s the right place to start if you’re trying to figure out what actually went wrong – before you go looking for what comes next.

[Download it here: Before You Update Your CV, Do This First]