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.
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."
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?
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.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
This sounds like someone who hasn’t had to look for a new job in well over a decade.
Hint: shit has changed in the employment sector, and dramatically so. Ghost jobs, job ads that demand an entire IT team of skills for a single position, employers stuck with analysis paralysis trying to find perfect employees, and wildly toxic employers for starters. If you don’t start looking while you are still employed, you run a very real risk of exhausting all savings before you do find one.
And no, vanishingly few people under the age of 40 are “financially independent”. The retirement plans of most millennials, for example, are wholly dependent on catastrophic societal and economic collapse. And when almost 80% of Americans are living paycheque to paycheque, not many over 50 are such either.
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.
(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)