> you literally have no incentive (besides immediate salary) to waste precious time off your life in a hierarchy that isn't going anywhere and is utterly clueless.
I beg to differ. It sounds like the whole department is at risk. If I was in the position I wouldn't want to just quit and leave everyone else - who I work with on a daily basis - to face the consequences. I would try speaking to upper management and seeing how that goes. At the very least let them know about the PMs regime to rewrite everything - "What, you didn't know this was happening?". I would actually speak to them rather than just emails. If they don't seem bothered, and nothing happens, then get out. But at least you know that you tried, and don't have to feel guilty about leaving.
It sounds noble, but lets face it, he is not on a battlefield with dying comrades or something. Colleagues are not your family, they are in charge of their own lives and they can leave too if they want to. Would you want someone to come work a job he now hates just so that you wouldn't feel bad about him leaving? Grow up.
Just start looking for a new job and leave as soon as you can. A company that makes these kinds of choices in terms of job filling cannot be worth your time.
Depending on how dysfunctional things are, doing what you propose could blow-up in the guy's face. I think it is a fine thing to do, but make sure you've got job offers in hand before you do it.
I agree with this because it seems to be essentially one bad apple that is screwing everything up. If the team was working okay before under the previous PM and lead developer then there's no reason to think all hope is lost. At least not yet.
Yet this bad apple sunk one department and then got transferred to a highly profitable one. It sounds to me that he is very well connected or otherwise good at office politics. Taking him on would likely end in defeat. I would suggest to get out of there.
He doesn't need to "take him on". He needs to gather information to decide whether or not he needs to leave. If one jumps to conclusions and passive aggressively resigns every time one encounters dysfunction in an organization then one will never be able to work on a team larger than 3 or 4 people.
I beg to differ. It sounds like the whole department is at risk. If I was in the position I wouldn't want to just quit and leave everyone else - who I work with on a daily basis - to face the consequences. I would try speaking to upper management and seeing how that goes. At the very least let them know about the PMs regime to rewrite everything - "What, you didn't know this was happening?". I would actually speak to them rather than just emails. If they don't seem bothered, and nothing happens, then get out. But at least you know that you tried, and don't have to feel guilty about leaving.