Can you elaborate more about the part of being messy? Is it really like the open sourced of lobste.rs with messy code that just works? Also I am sorry for your job experience.
When Reddit rolled out their new mobile site I had strong suspicions the org must be a mess internally. Out of all the problems one stuck out to me. For many months the comment sorting dropdown took 15 seconds to open from a warm start. That is a billion dollar company making newbie mistakes with React as if it was an intern doing the rewrite.
But the situation employees like you have been describing is surreal, I would never have imagined.
I think when it truly clicked for me was when they had a workable ecperience (old reddit) that was made pretty great by a plugin (reddit enhancement suite), and then when they did their redesign in an attempt to make RES obsolete, they managed to make something even worse.
They had a perfect opportunity to just roll all of RES's functionality into reddit, and messed it up. Can't even collapse comment trees in the browser app, but you can on mobile.
No comment on the internal management issues, but why is drug use considered an issue unless it is in the work environment? I'm really sick of people thinking that "drugs" are bad, while alcohol/tobacco are not.
If someone's substance use is affecting their work, then that's a legit issue. Otherwise it's as irrelevant as which (if any) football team they support.
