So my director was very suddenly fired one morning. Just gone. New director shows up.
In the shuffle a few things happen. My manager, who manages two teams, will only manage one team, the team I am not on. The team of 3 I am on will be merged with a team of 4 from his side. These teams happened to be working on the same problem space. (They should’ve been one team from the beginning, but due to territory issues and bad blood, they weren’t.)
The new director met with me, presumably to figure out what team I will be landing on. The conversation turned out very poorly. I had excellent performance reviews and feel very respected by my peers and manager. I thought he would be reaching out to convince me to stay on that team, which he may have been at first. By the end he seemed intent on making my team out to be underperforming — while my director got fired, this team was performing fine, was my understanding, but my manager’s other team was on fire.
So what can I expect might happen? As of the day before my director got fired, I felt very secure in my career. As of now, I feel like I’m on this new director’s shit list.
I would probably change companies if not for the fact that the companies stock price tripled in the last year. And I would probably move organizations if not for the fact that I work in a specialty that I can’t work in elsewhere in the company.
Clarity on some of these topics will help you navigate the uncertainly - ask questions, open ended, ask for examples of how specific things work with the current team), listen more, talk less. Basically show that your team wants to work constructively with them.
Display your allegiance to the new director before he makes his final decision on who to cut. Find out what the new director wants to hear, and say it. If that means slagging on the old director, then so be it.
Show that you can be a member of the new pack. This is about survival.
It would likely be more fruitful in the long run to learn by rote how and when to lie. Learn some human psychology to help you. The patterns aren't that complicated.
It was more about building cool things that created business value. The layer of politics seeping more into software engineering is giving developers a finance/management experience.
That's not to say politics didn't exist before, but the idea of showing allegiance for survival feels more like Game of Thrones than software development.
I guess the time when software culture had an abundance mindset has ended.
Whenever there are more than two people together, there are politics - even if you try to pretend there aren't. There's no escaping it.
I'll post an excerpt from the current highest-voted comment.
> Like why didn't anyone catch the issue with the logs? Because it doesn't matter, every data team is a cost-centre that unscrupulous managers use to launch their careers by saying they're big on AI. So nothing works, no-one cares it doesn't work, most the data engineers are incapable of coding fizzbuzz but it doesn't matter.
People always wonder why banks etc. use old mainframes. There's like a 0% success rate for new data projects. And that 0% includes projects which had launch parties etc. but no-one ever used the data or noticed how broken it was. I don't think a lot of orgs which use data as core-infra could modernize, the industry is just so broken at this point I don't think we can do what we did 30 years ago.
As you say, there is always politics, but the difference in quantity is large enough to have a quality of its own.
This is an equivocation. Sure, any time there is a group there will be "politics," but that doesn't have to mean the kind of social dynamics many people associate with the word. A group built on trust and cooperation is just as possible.
While office politics has always existed, it used to remain within the context of engineering.
You mention Apple, Steve Jobs was the business person/visionary. But Steve Wozniak, the engineer behind Apple, actually made it very clear he doesn't like nor want to participate in politics or business tricks.
> By the end he seemed intent on making my team out to be under performing.
Do not, under any circumstances, let these people remain vague. As soon as you see them make allusions, make them nail themselves down. Examples: "In your opinion, am I under performing?". If the answer is yes: "In what areas is my performance lacking? What would be an improvement?". If the answer is no or he doesn't know: "Oh. I see. You really gave the impression that you do think so.". He'll apologize. Nine times out of ten the conversation will end with the latter. Even if he intended to make you look bad, get ahead of it and he will be unprepared and reflexively be nice.
Chances are he'll mind his behavior around you in the future. Bullshitters fear the blunt.
If it were me, I would be taking stock of the current situation from a holistic point of view. The most persuasive you could be is if other people that the director trusts are telling them to keep you. So you go on a charm offensive on all the people from the other team, possibly even airing your worries of being shitcanned (depending on how sympathetic the person you're talking to would be). This also has the benefit of you not having to actually lie or mislead anyone.
This is definitely not the time to be dying on any hills from a tech perspective, and you should help people get their work done and their PRs merged. If a rumour starts that you might get fired and you're beloved by those the new director respects, it may well behoove them to deny it, and when someone makes a statement out loud the desire to save face and stay consistent will be strong.
However, if you don't manage to change their actual opinion longer term, or you don't succeed in persuading others, then youwill get fired. So simultaneously, you should be preparing for the worst. If you haven't already, write a brag file about everything you've achieved at the company — this is much easier while you still have access to all the systems and are able to look through history. This file is invaluable for writing your CV (which you might also want to be doing) and referring to before interviews.
Basically, do what you can to get through this political turmoil, and work to reduce the possible downside of you not succeeding, because the odds are against you.
Realize that even though it may be political, the leadership chose your new boss, so he is doing something they like. You are tanking your own role if you go in fighting. So go in and see what is going on that is working. There may be completely different measures of success vs. what you were striving for, which is why there is a discrepancy in how people view performance. Learn what the desired outcomes and expectations are, and why.
And if you spend some time in that mode of learning and acceptance and find they are all idiots, then leave. It is never too late to walk out. But give them a chance - there is a possibility that teams other than your own are different, but still decent teams.
Agree with everything in above post, will add this:
From new director/mgr perspective, he/she wants people that are on board with the mission, which is always success measured by whatever their view is, and frequently their particular experience probably emphasizes some things a previous mgr didn't. Show him/her that you are on board and that your goal is to help that person achieve their vision. You do that by listening and understanding their perspective and making it happen.
I once got a new CIO mgr and when I met with him, this is what I told him (at some point during the conversation):
"I'm an analytical person and I like to debate the pros and cons of things, so I tend to offer my opinion, but don't mistake that for being an obstructionist, I fully understand and respect the chain of command, once a decision is made I'm on board and just want things to get done successfully."
Since I have the option to move teams, I will probably do that to stick with my manager even if he ends up being my director anyway. I just don’t want to be leaving over a years work for which I received great praise in a position where it ends up not being appreciated by this new director.
I think the big turning point in the conversation was when I expressed doubts about staying on his team. I sensed a few sour grapes statements.
I really don’t want to deal with this fallout from the conflict between these directors. It’s unnecessary except for the fact that I now feel like I have to defend myself from this guy.
It's absolutely hilarious how quick HN users are to bend the knee and play politics when the economy is bad. I remember a time when the standard answer would be "fuck the company management and jump ship". Avez-vous perdu votre spine Hacker News?
If you don't like it you can leave.
The willingness to dislike it and stay boils down to your options elsewhere. Not surprisingly in a tough job market options elsewhere might be less, resulting in more tolerance for dislike.
All of this has nothing to do with spine and everything to do with taking the best option for you. Jumping ship into unemployment in a bad job market isn't a good option.
When it comes to company re-orgs, you already have a new job. Mentally and emotionally it helps to treat it as if you just jumped in here.
I think he will most likely be named the new director of both my current team and my manager’s other team, which will make him my skip either way. They drafted an hiring req for the position that seems especially tuned to him. Any thoughts on how I might repair things?
For example, I would consider saying something like "Hey, I was thinking over our meeting the other day and realized I might have given you the wrong impression. I was feeling a little uncertain with the recent shakeups, and might have been a bit too focused on establishing my role in the department going forward, rather than listening to you and understanding what you need from me. I'm actually really looking forward to working with the new broader team and getting a more direct understanding of what the new director's previous team that your team is getting merged with needs from your product! Please let me know if there's anything immediate I can do to help smooth this transition."
I wrote that more as an email, but you can say more or less the same things in person. Just reassure him that you're going to play ball, give an understandable, mostly-true justification for your poor communication that's slightly more politic than "I thought I was about to be fired lol," and communicate that you understand and are committed to what he already said he wanted (working more with the other team) and you'll probably be fine.
The only alternative is to brown nose good and hard and convince the new boss you will be an asset for his shenanigans. But odds are good he’s already decided you aren’t a piece in the puzzle he’s building and nothing you can do will change that.
Just after 20+ years in the business, as the LP song went, in the end it doesn't even matter. So just look after yourself, your own, and f* the rest. If there is something you can take advantage of, do so, because companies will do their most on their end to do the same. Saw friends thrown out in the street while manager/bosses took big bonuses for 'reducing costs' (aka firing people). So just flip that shit, make them pay, make them suffer. make them PAY!!!
this is not good
to me sound pretty medioeval
(What you described actually happened to me once. It took me a year to realise that the new director doesn't like me and is sabotaging my work. I left immediately once I saw that)
1. Known quality of life and work decrease for having to focus on middle management tasks instead of getting my hands dirty.
2. Big gamble on not knowing what kind of manager we might get.
So, I declined and gambled on a new manager. So far, this has gone terribly. Our group morale and productivity is super low as we now have a petty micromanager with no technical skills a technical team. They insert themselves into our processes with no knowledge of how any of it works, demand that they are cc’d on all communications with any manager or above, and complain when we disagree with their opinions, calling that disagreement disrespectful.
I have been looking at job boards just about every day since.
In my case, the director who is new actually has a good reputation among engineers. The manager who would be replacing mine seems fine and not a power monger.
Just like a male lion defeating the old king and taking over a pride, he’s looking to clear out all the “dead wood” (kits from the prior king) with his entrance.
You may want to update your CV and start putting yourself out there, as you might end up getting canned no matter what you do or how well you perform. After all, the best time to look for a new job is while you are still employed.
That advice comes from people with no other leverage other than the fact that they can remain in a (in a case like this one) miserable job indefinitely if needed…doesn’t sound like much in the way of leverage to me.
Better to have some other leverage, like real skill or financial independence.
(Opposite suggestion to some sibling comments which recommend to look for another job)
The groups merging is like a corporate merge, or buy out. The people bought out are at risk. I have so many stories but not the time.
Wow.
You seem to be an “I would…if not for…”. Those people never amount to anything. Try to be something else.