I have this illusion in my head that I stayed so long at my last company that almost all of my favorite people left, but one of my coworkers had my number.

After a person I liaised with on another team left, I asked his superior if there was someone else I should build bridges with. We started talking about one of the team members and he said, “I don’t want you to talk to him. We like him, and if you talk to him he’ll leave.”

This was on Slack so I don’t know if this was a jest or he was serious/mad. But it’s entirely true. I’ve convinced at least half a dozen people that we should expect better from a team environment and ourselves, and that this org (not the whole company, just this division) is a cult of stupidity.

I was trying to recruit collaborators to fix the bullshit but apparently they decided it would be much easier to just start over.

There's some finer points to parse in your comment that I'm not 100% on (ex. if "this org" is your division or the partner division), so I'm out on a ledge a little bit here, might not relate to what you meant.

I was lucky enough to get ~6 years running my own tech company after 6 years as a waiter. Then I sold it, yadda yadda, went to Google 6 months later, got ~7 years in there.

It really, really, really, disturbed me how approximately every situation, in every division, with any people, ended up being boiling down to "how do we muddle through one more day without challenging anyones preconceptions", 95% of the time it was tribal antisocial stuff, and no one would speak up about it.

Direct example, for posterity.

I don't wanna speak too directly to it, so lets imagine Google Division A (hereafter, dApps).

New division lead (ex-dApps) joins dBytes with apparent bias against partnering division (dConsumer). Despite the project being previously framed as top priority, new lead consistently undermines dConsumer in meetings and shows little interest in understanding their work. Team adopts leader's negative attitude, becoming obstructive and uncooperative. I ended up carrying a critical launch, virtually alone, for 6 months. At performance review time, my boss questions why I didn't get more team involvement - despite the hostile environment that prevented exactly that - and speaks glowingly about how we need to support peer going for promotion based on their excellent job on part Y...which they didn't do. They spent 2 days on it then said it was impossible. And they were definitively the most cooperative because at least they tried, and wouldn't actively be aggressive in meetings with the outgroup.

Everything, always, came down to: A) don't cause conflict at all, at home, or you will be buried B) we'll bend over backwards to accomodate conflict you invent, as long as we can clearly define them as an out-group with 0 ability to affect us day to day.

At prior jobs we had an escape hatch for this: go to a fancy coffee shop with the dissenters and have all of our bitchfests out of earshot of the muggles.

But it’s trickier to coax people still on the fence to come out for multiple coffees.

The good news is that, since the others are also looking for work elsewhere, there will be more engineers out in gen pop that actually thinks tests are useful, hah.