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Pollyanna posted:So in theory, if I want to change teams, I shouldn’t talk to my manager or his +1s at all. I’ve jumped teams/departments thrice at one place and twice in another; 4/5 times I already had a good relationship with future manager and would secure a “that’s a good idea, we’d love to have you, clear it with your current manager” before raising the subject. The odd time out was because I very clearly hated my job, current manager called me out in 1:1, and I counteroffered with “put me on that team instead where I might be able to give a poo poo.” It worked!
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Jun 26, 2023 03:18
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TooMuchAbstraction posted:Given what you've told us, if I were your boss I'd assume you were already looking for a new job. I'm not gonna fire you, but my incentives to go to bat for you are pretty low unless I have a personal connection with you. Agree
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Jun 26, 2023 03:18
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https://youtu.be/KOaeDHeJ80I
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Jun 26, 2023 03:29
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Pollyanna posted:Come to think of it, is it a good idea to tip my hand at all here? If tomorrow I give my reasons and request a transfer and instead I get stonewalled, I’ll be in a position where management will know I’m checked out and unhappy and the natural decision will be to say “eh gently caress it” and kick me to the curb, leaving me with a zero BATNA. If folks know you're looking for work: - Unless your manager is a jerk you generally won't be fired because you're looking. That's sometimes illegal and generally doesn't make sense unless your manager is super petty and vindictive. You _will_ be fired if they think you're angry enough to break things. - Maybe you'll be laid off when folks try to reduce head count? Occasionally they'll think you're going to leave anyways so they shouldn't give you severance. - You'll get the poo poo work and minimal raise/bonus. You may be asked to document more of your existing stuff Unless your manager is a saint or a friend, they won't help you get a transfer. I think Amazon put in rules to prevent jerk managers from blocking transfers, don't know about google, but folks know how it is. If you have an idea for how you could be happy or productive, it is probably worth talking to someone. We're all on the same side if you consider that the side is "Just get something working so we can gently caress off to a better job somewhere else". Your manager's job is to make sure you're productive. As a human they probably care if you're happy. But still, if you just say "I hate this place and nothing will change that" they'll tell you to gently caress off so they can go back to reading comics (not me, other people do this). Saying "It hasn't worked out here and I don't think it will, I'm looking for another team" will make things awkward but not bad. "Things obviously aren't working, here's what would make it work" may work, depending on what you ask for and your manager's faith it will help.
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Jun 26, 2023 04:04
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Pollyanna posted:Come to think of it, is it a good idea to tip my hand at all here? If tomorrow I give my reasons and request a transfer and instead I get stonewalled, I’ll be in a position where management will know I’m checked out and unhappy and the natural decision will be to say “eh gently caress it” and kick me to the curb, leaving me with a zero BATNA. The stone cold GTFO strat is to get FMLA for stress and use that time to secure an outside role and interview prep. Your position is always better with a stronger BATNA, yes. If you want to change teams, you need to talk with your manager and your skip, but you'd want to do that only after you already know you'll sail through and the other team/manager actively wants you. It's always better to work things through informally. You don't want to be in a position where you apply for a transfer and get rejected.
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Jun 26, 2023 05:34
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leper khan posted:The stone cold GTFO strat is to get FMLA for stress and use that time to secure an outside role and interview prep. Your position is always better with a stronger BATNA, yes. I've taken FMLA for stress before and the big problem I ran into is that I was actually ill and extremely burned out, and it was very difficult to get into the job seeking frame of mind. Granted it was two months off paid by short term disability and it definitely reduced my symptoms from about an 11 (ted kaczynski was right about technology) to about 7 (all programming languages and all code is terrible how can these people work on this poo poo with a straight face), so it still might be a good idea, but don't beat yourself up if you don't find another job during stress leave.
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Jun 26, 2023 07:19
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As nice as it would be to get time off, I don’t think I have a health emergency. I still have energy for things I enjoy, for chores, for live improvement like finding a new apartment or going out to dinner with my siblings. When I’m not at work I can tell that life is inherently good - my trip to Japan reminded me of how fascinating the world really is and how much more there is to life than working a job in software engineering. I am still a good person and good engineer at my core, and I can still do this. I’m burned out, not sick. I just need a break and a change of scenery. I’ll be fine. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 15:12 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 14:45
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Pollyanna posted:Alright, here's how we got here. Ohhhh my god! It's like an organization was created specifically to gently caress you. What an . . . honor . . . ? So everybody's making it clear that this one ain't your fault, and I would agree. I saw some stuff I figured I'd point out anyways. I also have some sense that you may ironically just hit some kind of zen and then suddenly everything turns out okay, but that may only work at your next job wherever and whenever. I'll just say some stuff from experience working in dysfunctional megacorps, but don't take any of this as if you were supposed to be an ultra-confident mega-brain psychic and done anything differently. I think the biggest problem at large companies is a push for employees to be the ones completely in control of their career from day zero. Then the managers end up walking all over them and they don't have the agency to do anything about it afterwards. I bet you got cursed this way too. quote:To this very day the ACLs are still breaking poo poo and blocking project delivery. Because we are passing those ACLs along, we break poo poo and block delivery. You can repeat that story for every other kind of configuration that goes on a networking device, and there are a lot. You'd think there'd be some method of testing this poo poo. I would bet your customers started to actually institute the testing strategies to find these problems for you because they kept getting burnt. The problem is that testing should have been moved closer to your team and never was. Of course, that's because . . . quote:In reality, we are software engineers with responsibilities that require a non-trivial amount of network engineering experience. Yes this hubris of software engineering where they forget that it's a means to an ends and we need to have some understanding of the domain we're working. I assume the team was treated as a bunch of liquid, generic commodities instead of an accumulation of technical experience and knowledge that had value. I am sure half the reason your customers got annoyed is because their expertise was trivialized like this. They might not know that's why they are pissed. quote:We've regularly asked for assistance from actual network engineers, to which the response has been "no and gently caress you for asking". I am no longer interested in network engineering, I'd rather go back to fart apps. Yeah gently caress these guys, but there's probably something dysfunctional from even before your time that caused that to happen. Some people are probably very butthurt about it. The trick here now is to be like "gently caress you back because this is my career and I'm the one getting blown away by your scorn, while nothing you want to see happen or change is ever going to come to be. What the hell do you want from me?" But of course you can't just say that and you probably shouldn't, but there's at least one opportunity that came up later with that shouting match with the one person that seemed to care enough. quote:The reasons why are complicated and incredibly stupid Yeah, it's a technical expertise that somebody up the org chart decided just needed Random Joe Coder. I'm going to guess they take software engineers that do services in containers and tell them to write Linux device drivers too, with predictable results. quote:What our team does happens to be the nexus of many different stakeholders and services that I don't feel comfortable elaborating on. If anything goes wrong along this entire pipeline, it shows up in our service first. It's especially bad when something breaks further up this pipeline and we get pinged for a breakage that isn't our own! This kind of thing could be leveraged into one of those "center of excellence" thingamajigs but it looks like everybody's obsessed with shooting the messenger. I'd imagine this situation would actually be desirable in a better economy. The problem is that this kind of thing isn't your job so you are going to get dinged for doing it, and it's not their job to have to deal with you about it, so they'll get dinged if they deal with you about it. quote:Then recently, the internal library team got mad because they assumed we were depending directly on that library and would be able to handle some new feature that needed it - turns out we couldn't cause the hardcode was too old! When we pinned ourselves back to the internal library, the tests broke again and we were interrogated about it - back to the goddamn hardcoded version. Cynical comedy option: Clearly the solution is to write your own thing, so there can be three ways to do it instead. quote:2021 Q4: Dude's a total yes-man I think I saw something with a similar culture twice before. Usually these people come in packs because of a force coming above in the organization. They've been inured to agree to the last thought upper management had. It probably even works for them because as soon as that thought is gone and replaced, the old thing doesn't matter any more. quote:Then, our team gets merged with another, similar team. Like four people total now or something. Okay, a reorg - I'm new, so I don't think much of it. Plus, I'm happy to get team members again! quote:(We eventually get a new manager, he's cool and I get along well enough.) quote:2022 H1: Outside of our team, a brain drain as network engineering experts and project/product leaders announce their departures from our organization - including the original writers of the codebase I now have to speak for. Then our team lead announces he's leaving Presumably here's where it went turbofucked. It was getting into that Donald Rumsfeld "unknown unknowns" world. The people left were so ignorant of what they didn't know that they couldn't even figure out how to know what they didn't know. I would be curious if this is around when the customers became toxic or if it's been toxic the whole time. If any of these people are around, you might as well reach out to them and ask what the hell happened. quote:I start experiencing the poor working relationship between our team and every other team as we get yelled at for breaking test devices during our efforts to prove our service works as expected. quote:2022 H2: Like three or four more reorgs. Our org changes names, leadership, reorganize a bunch. None of it really matters to me in terms of day to day work, so I don't care for the details. Our complaints for headcount and assistance result in a couple hires! quote:I heavily disagreed with the decision, but kept my mouth shut. quote:One morning, I get DMed by an owner from the old team in an absolute conniption because of some change to the codebase that he really really really disliked for some architectural reason and starts whining to me about how THIS IS REAAAAAALLY UNFORTUNAAAAATE. I get genuinely upset and start ranting about giving my two weeks because I'm sick of being blamed for everything, I'm sick of having to take responsibility for something I never wanted, etc. He and I quickly calm down, I apologize for my frustration and outburst, and we get to talking about how badly this handoff is going. He and I agree that things are Not Good, and I agree to pass word up the chain. quote:I tell my new manager about my experience and how upset it made me to be personally fingered as a representative of our team's failure, and warn him about how badly we feel this handoff is going. He gives some handwavy response, and nothing comes of it. Cool beans. quote:2023 Q2: Burnout era. At this point, I've lost confidence in my team's higher-level management and the organization's competence at large. I now have a mental block on even thinking about the code or our product's design - basic requirements and features just roll off my brain, and doing my day-to-day work is like pulling teeth. If this was a situation where you could still live in this spot and wanted to function in it, I would be looking for some quick "poo poo sandwiches" you could make for people as a starting point. I'm sure there were plenty of things you delivered to customers beyond the core commitment that they appreciated even more than that, and there are a problem a few quickies like that laying around you kind just do to reconnect with people. I would use that to reconnect. But, also, gently caress all of these people. quote:Look, let's not beat around the bush: there's no way Google isn't signaling further layoffs. This sounds like an early PIP warning. It's upsetting, but not that much of a surprise - managers probably got the order to start reducing headcount. I got laid off in 2008 from AMD. It's a rite of passage here so whatever. Our team had gone through three managers in less than three years. The last one was ... meh, but then he went through some manager training. I called it "rear end in a top hat training" training because when he came out, he came swinging for me. I later saw some stuff on "how to know your manager is preparing to fire you." I swear that training had them told there would be layoffs and they should just pick somebody right now and follow some steps to isolate and remove them. I'd be alarmed, but I'd compare the current situation to those kind of checklists where they are clearly just documenting to cover their rear end before ejecting you any which way. If you're not actually getting that pressure then it might actually be salvageable. I mean, "salvageable" in a "can stay on board long enough to transfer when that becomes possible again because gently caress this organization" kind of way.
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Jun 26, 2023 15:01
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^^ Thank you for your response! Give me some time and I’ll write some words or something idkkkkkk I’m tired So, I’ve decided it’s time to find a new position. Either a new team in Google or one of its acquisitions, or a new team outside of Google. This is going to take some networking and interviewing, and will take some time. In the meantime, I still want to do right by my role. I have a habit of being stoic and not telling people about my problems until it’s too late. From now on, I want to adopt transparency in myself - I’m going to speak up earlier about my problems, be forthright about my concerns and feelings, and cultivate better communication habits with my team and my TL (let me think about my manager). I’m gonna get some lunch or coffee with the other engineers on my team, one on one. I’ve been too reclusive while stressed out. I’m also gonna start writing down and reporting on every blocker or annoying bullshit detail I run into while trying to do my work. Not communicating well enough is how I got in this situation. I’m…probably not going to start writing high-level project or implementation documents (aka bluedocs/greendocs) because I simply don’t enjoy doing that right now for a number of reasons. Low confidence in the org’s engineering quality, low expectations for being heard and being able to affect meaningful change, and just starting to think of the product I’m on like a bad SO. Someday I’ll write them, just not here. Anyway, just wanted to vent. Pollyanna fucked around with this message at 15:18 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 15:12
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Pollyanna posted:Come to think of it, is it a good idea to tip my hand at all here? If tomorrow I give my reasons and request a transfer and instead I get stonewalled, I’ll be in a position where management will know I’m checked out and unhappy and the natural decision will be to say “eh gently caress it” and kick me to the curb, leaving me with a zero BATNA. Pollyanna posted:So, I’ve decided it’s time to find a new position. Either a new team in Google or one of its acquisitions, or a new team outside of Google. This is going to take some networking and interviewing, and will take some time. This was what I was just about to suggest. Start looking for a transfer/new job. Job market is tough, though senior devs are still in demand, so an internal transfer may be easier. At the same time you can still work to make things better. Unless your new manager is an absolute twat, you can use your 1:1 time to identify blockers to your current job. If they're a twat, skip-level them, and keep skip-leveling until you reach someone that you can talk to to say, "here's what's going on and here's how it can be better." Unless you really like/trust your EM, don't ever let on that you're looking. Just approach it as trying to make the situation better. Anyway, good luck and don't hesitate to reach out if I can do anything to help.
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Jun 26, 2023 15:22
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Pollyanna posted:As nice as it would be to get time off, I don’t think I have a health emergency. They don't need to know that.
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Jun 26, 2023 15:55
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Pollyanna posted:As nice as it would be to get time off, I don’t think I have a health emergency. I still have energy for things I enjoy, for chores, for live improvement like finding a new apartment or going out to dinner with my siblings. When I’m not at work I can tell that life is inherently good - my trip to Japan reminded me of how fascinating the world really is and how much more there is to life than working a job in software engineering. I am still a good person and good engineer at my core, and I can still do this. You can take time off for stress and it can be an emergency. Hell you can take time off for whatever reason you want and just hand waive it! You do not owe the billion dollar corporation your life and soul.
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Jun 26, 2023 16:07
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loyalty is fine if you own 10%. maybe 5%. if you owned 10% of this "google" corporation here, we wouldnt be having this talk, would we?
bob dobbs is dead fucked around with this message at 16:14 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 16:12
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Rocko Bonaparte posted:I'm going to guess they take software engineers that do services in containers and tell them to write Linux device drivers too, with predictable results. I feel like there is this idea that generalists can learn anything but also this disbelief that generalists need to learn anything and you can just throw them in and they will simply absorb everything important in a couple months by doing a bunch of lovely tasks. Just another flavor of "one year ten times" experience except encouraged.
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Jun 26, 2023 16:50
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oliveoil posted:I feel like there is this idea that generalists can learn anything but also this disbelief that generalists need to learn anything and you can just throw them in and they will simply absorb everything important in a couple months by doing a bunch of lovely tasks. Just another flavor of "one year ten times" experience except encouraged. Heh I couldn't tell you. Maybe? I was interviewing at FAANGs as a generalist previously and the feedback was that I aced all the technical and behavioral questions--even the system design stuff for distributed systems I never normally even do, but they still didn't think I had the skills. So whoever I was stepping in front of was able to keep me out. I developed a bit of a complex over that but the solution so far has been to just dive all-in on whatever Linux kernel stuff I can get out of my current job and at least specialize in that. As far as I can tell, those roles tended to be pretty remote even before the pandemic, so I could do that under a rock somewhere and nobody would complain.
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Jun 26, 2023 17:12
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Two more notes about this whole thing: 1. It is part of your job responsibilities to raise legitimate concerns about your job at any sane company BUT learning how to land that feedback is tricky sometimes for folks. At Amazon they have a concept called Disagree and Commit, which I think is honestly a very smart setup: the idea being 'you should always raise concerns, but also recognize there's a time to disagree with the plan and commit to it anyways'. I've been operating this way for years and my managers have generally appreciated that I'm willing to say 'Hey I think this is a bad idea because XYZ', because if the answer is 'well we have to do it anyway because of random management thing' I generally just shrug and go 'alright, here's what we should worry about risk-wise'. That being said, this process really does require trust in your organization to not be retaliated against or a sort of dead-eyed madness I gained at some point. 2. Sometimes I think that people get too cynical about management (which is not surprising given everything about late stage capitalism). The purpose of management, and really any hierarchy in business is not to 'manage down', it's to make individual workers more effective at doing their job. If this wasn't the case, we'd probably have a lot more completely horizontal companies. A good manager not only helps direct work, which is top down, but also takes feedback and pushes it back upstairs, as well as helps organize decision making/etc to reduce the need for individuals to duplicate effort/etc. You should expect your managers to be actively helpful, if they aren't, that's feedback. If your manager views your relationship as purely one-way, then frankly put, they're not worth working for, although obviously that's a complex problem and we can't all pick who we work for. But IMO a good manager is way more important to me than TC at this point in my life because it influences so much about my job not being a pain in the rear end. Rocko Bonaparte posted:Heh I couldn't tell you. Maybe? I was interviewing at FAANGs as a generalist previously and the feedback was that I aced all the technical and behavioral questions--even the system design stuff for distributed systems I never normally even do, but they still didn't think I had the skills. So whoever I was stepping in front of was able to keep me out. I developed a bit of a complex over that but the solution so far has been to just dive all-in on whatever Linux kernel stuff I can get out of my current job and at least specialize in that. As far as I can tell, those roles tended to be pretty remote even before the pandemic, so I could do that under a rock somewhere and nobody would complain. In my experience big tech companies have a weird relationship with generalists because one of the concrete differences between big and large companies is scope: a big company lets you be someone who specializes extremely narrowly, such as being a BGP specialist, whereas a company with 30-40 people is going to require your networking guy to know literally everything at least a little bit. So by nature, a lot of big tech tends to produce very specialized people, which can sometimes be a problem when you try and go somewhere smaller or move around. On the other hand, people that move regularly in a big company tend to figure out the similarities between specialties and understand how to generalize things in a way that's frankly very helpful to do. Add onto that individual org decisions on how they feel about generalists. I really struggled with the same thing you did while trying to switch roles to a junior dev title (along with the pearl clutching 'but your tc will go down!!' conversations I had with people) but once I did move I was pretty immediately helpful because it turns out have a broad knowledge base to draw on does make you reasonably good at picking up new things quickly, even if it doesn't help you get extremely specialized quickly. Some managers really get hung up on 'we need someone with our exact skillset' instead of considering the possibility of training someone into the role, which I find to be a really poor decision. Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 17:30 on Jun 26, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 17:14
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I also am burned out and disengaged. I've been at my place for ~3 years, prior to that had a decade experience in a heavily quantitative academic field. My org traditionally hired career shifting PhDs moving to DS, then situated us at the center of a very large enterprise. We could generally quickly get up to speed on open source DS models and use our system analysis skills from our various experimental/academic backgrounds to translate vague business desires to something solid enough to put into concrete metrics & run some training algorithms to get a solid, useful result. Our group is growing rapidly and will soon be about a hundred people strong total, organized in a large number of smaller, agile teams. I'm a senior DS on the team, and most teams just have 1, (or zero) DS on them plus several SWEs. I started managing one of the junior employees at the end of February. My manager has always been pushing interchangeability on our team, for example expecting absolutely instant domain transitions for employees who have worked on text for years to image models or vice versa. Multiple team mates have been chided for not producing on an aggressively optimistic product timeline regardless of having been moved to entirely new agile teams, with new business partners, new data types, new library packages, etc. We are also being pushed to be more "delivery" minded, which basically means we are expected also to instantly pick up & perform masterfully at a variety of MLOps, DevOps, & other production-oriented SWE tasks, because the engineers who picked up our hastily written out of domain code had occasionally had longer than expected transitions to get it running at scale. Within two weeks of getting management duties to my direct report (my first EVER official management experience), my own manager started explaining how deeply dissatisfied he had been with my direct's performance, & how I was expected to be turning this around immediately or, preferably, managing him off the team. I assessed my direct as primarily being disengaged and confused. He was also one of those employees who had been assigned, a month prior, to a totally new team, as the only DS, in a data type he had never worked on previously, EVER, & in a business domain he had never interfaced with. In addition he was being expected to perform extremely senior design-level tasks, but as a very junior employee had no intuition for what this would look like and had received no concrete direction on what it would entail. I put my foot down when my manager raised the idea of PIPing him, & instead I have worked with product and we've designed a much more achievable "next step" project scope that a junior employee can actually deeply engage with but still provides incremental value to the business. Four months in, and it appears that my direct is now very deeply engaged and I ( and product & business partners ) are very pleased with his performance. However, just because I'm able to help his disengagement doesn't really touch anything of my own. GenerativeAI hype has reached absolute catastrophic levels, & our org is under constant attention from the c-levels as the place that is supposed to 'deliver' on this. Traditionally, there had been speed pressure, but we were able to ship things that felt solid and that we could vouch for on performance & value. Now we're shoving out the door langchain demo level poo poo, & not really caring to consider conflicting business desires. Example: Csuit wants this chatbot poo poo to sound more colloquial and fluid, legal wants it more factual & grounded. Vs reality, we don't have any actual measurement of any of those directions, someone just hit it with a couple dozen qs and we're pitching it towards prod on the strength of vibes & hype. I've been told explicitly by a senior member of the SWE team that he's not terribly worried about whether any given thing works, & my own manager has explained that in the next few months we aren't to worry about anything except just "swimming in the code" & learning what the SWE are doing with the demo-langchain poo poo. Longer term, the idea seems to be for the DS team to be either 1) gatekeepers of idea feasibility, or 2) eventually evaluating LLM performance. But, reading the tea leaves & organizational power here, that's setting us up to be the bearers of bad news without any org cred to be able to back it up, & against a lot of excitement and energy that honestly doesn't care about functionality anyway. I'm extremely frustrated.
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Jun 26, 2023 19:31
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Pollyanna posted:^^ Thank you for your response! Give me some time and I’ll write some words or something idkkkkkk I’m tired That bolded part everyone should always be doing IMO. Comments and annotations are cheap and easy, and blockers should always be literally noted somewhere. They often are recurring blockers for more than one person or team.
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Jun 26, 2023 20:02
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Oh for sure, and to be clear I do let my team know about blockers I run into - hell, that’s the entire point of standup. What I’m referring to is getting it down in writing and logged so that no one conveniently forgets or claims that I’m being uncommunicative.
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Jun 26, 2023 20:10
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Having a work journal is great. I keep an editor open (or did when I was still employed!) and type "gave something to someone, asked someone else for something" as it happens, making a new section for each day.
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Jun 26, 2023 21:00
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jemand posted:More lovely workplace talk Some questions and comments: 1. Has your team tried pushing back on these expectations around instant interchangeability and timelines around that? If not, you should probably sit down and try explaining "this isn't how this works, and the proof is *gestures around at everything*." If you have folks on your team that are rapidly able to switch between expectations, maybe highlight what lets them do that. FWIW: some level of interchangeability is a good thing and prevents your team from having a single important person win the lottery and move on and leaving you high and dry, but the answer to this is not 'magically everyone's good at everything', it's a process involving cross training and having specific domains be covered by multiple people. It's a team problem, not an individual one. 2. This whole 'have a direct, now deal with it' is pretty lovely and I'd just be blunt with your manager about that. A first time manager should not be generally getting someone who needs to be managed out or has large improvements to make, that's basically asking for an HR nightmare, not to mention a burned out new manager. IMO you did exactly the right thing here, and this is a good experience in how a good manager can do more than simply manage down and gently caress over people. However, your manager needs to be doing the same for you, and it sounds like that's not the case. 3. There's a lot here's that falls into 'there's a buzzword train we just got hit by' in regards to generative AI and I don't have any good answers for you there. Management is suddenly going to be very interested in something they are absolutely lacking in fundamental knowledge about, and are getting fed massive amounts of PR bullshit from marketing at companies frantic to catch the wave. This is yet another example where your team should be having reasonable discussions about reasonableness and effectiveness. I've had luck very bluntly asking management before questions along the lines of "So our team doesn't think this is feasible to do X in Y time, why do you think it is?" Getting into a sort discussion of first principles can sometimes help drag up what is actually the disagreement, instead of arguing about second-order issues. For example, if your boss wants you to turn around a new solution in 4 months and thinks that basic setup should take 1 week but actually takes 3 months, you might both not realize that's the actual problem if you're stuck on the overall timeline. Sometimes the answer is 'well leadership says it needs to be done in 4 months' and then I mostly shift it to a discussion of 'Alright, we could do that in 4 months if X feature and Y feature aren't included, or if Other Project Z is deprioritized and the folks working on it can work on this instead', but there's also a time to just say 'There's no way we can deliver that in this timeline; leadership can want what they want, but it's not feasible and I'm not signing off on that timeline, but we'll do our best.' A lot of this is org dependent, but I did a lot of work in a space where we had constantly shifting leadership priorities and luckily the 'Alright we'll focus on X, what do we deprioritize instead' was a pretty good line of inquiry, because most of the time dumb requests from last month were no longer important. 4. If you want to pick a single fight to really have, it's around requirements gathering and being clear on expectations. "This should sound more colloquial" is not a requirement; you're never going to get the c suite to sit down and open tickets, but at the bare minimum you can take those and scope them yourself into requirements and get buyoff from your manager and maybe skiplevel first, then move forward. If you exist in a state of trying to read tea leaves from c suites all the time you're never going to escape this nightmare cycle. Once you have it down to actual requirements, you can then have discussions about delivery dates/etc in a more structured, "delivery-oriented" way. One trick on that is to frame all your conversations in terms of doing your best to meet these delivery targets/etc. "In order to meet deadline X, we need to priority X over Y" / etc. Figure out the language of your management structure and use that against them whenever possible. Unfortunately though, none of this advice might be helpful; as it requires management to listen. But ultimately if they don't listen, it won't produce the results they want, it will just produce burnout and loss of productivity and failure to meet deadlines, and finally attrition (see the Dead Sea analogy that's popped up in this thread recently). They might not know it, but that's the reality and countless businesses have hosed around in this exact same way and found out.
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Jun 26, 2023 21:23
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Falcon2001 posted:more notes about this whole thing: Strong agree I would expect this from any of my coworkers as well Otherwise you're deep in "just another cog in the machine" The greenest junior developers are exempt from this, they often have trouble telling the line on the floor directing them where they need to go from the shadows on the wall
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Jun 26, 2023 21:30
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Don't people need doctor approval for leave? Or are the people citing burnout talking about taking time off without pay?
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Jun 26, 2023 23:05
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Pollyanna posted:I’m burned out, not sick. I just need a break and a change of scenery. I’ll be fine. I'm not going to tell you you're wrong about your own health. I will say that I have personally had pretty much exactly this thought and then realized later that I was wrong. I was sick, and needed a lot of time to recover to something resembling normalcy again. Don't underestimate the effects that chronic stress (from a crappy job and being gaslighted) can have on your body. That poo poo takes time to heal, and possibly therapy.
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Jun 26, 2023 23:12
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My wife managed a group of people. Or inherited managing a group of people. One of the people was in charge of publishing a set of interior design standards as a book for buying/deploying furniture etc. It was like 2 years overdue and each draft was taking 6-8 months. Each draft had like six minor corrections like spelling errors or wrong page numbers. Apparently the person my wife replaced had just been letting this go on for years Anyways two months after she started, she started having weekly meetings and the next day he went to the doctor complained about undue anxiety from harsh working conditions, got short term disability, and managed to get ~75% pay and stretched it out to 6 months. On his second day back he put in his two weeks notice and started a new job Everyone is fighting a struggle you don't know about, but, come on Anyways yeah there's a playbook for this and it's generally tolerated as it's way cheaper than a lawsuit and it's paid out of insurance which is a fixed cost responsible to a different department's budget and everybody is happy to get rid of an unhappy employee You need a doctor's note but the standard is pretty low as they're gonna side with the patient in most cases
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Jun 26, 2023 23:16
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Hadlock posted:there's a playbook for this Seen anyone talk about it? Frankly I'm extremely burned out but my primary didn't see anything on my previous blood tests so just told me he couldn't approve anything.
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Jun 26, 2023 23:33
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oliveoil posted:Don't people need doctor approval for leave? Or are the people citing burnout talking about taking time off without pay? For like formal disability or something ya sure, but for a few days / week off? No way
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Jun 26, 2023 23:45
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oliveoil posted:Don't people need doctor approval for leave? Or are the people citing burnout talking about taking time off without pay? Yeah. I have a headshrinker (nurse practitioner with a specialization in mental health) and after one really bad day, I called her up and was like "I need help, this job is killing me." She set up an appointment over zoom, we talked, she gave me the note and pulled me out of work. I had to check in with her over zoom once a week and she dealt with the paperwork for insurance and giving advice on how to get this covered by insurance etc. Also burnout IS an illness. Lack of enthusiasm for projects, feelings of hopelessness and cynicism are completely debilitating for quality of life. I remember initiating the process cynically, having a mindset of "haha gently caress this company, I'm just going to get paid to do nothing and find another job" - and then it took two weeks before I stopped thinking about bad things that happened to me at work constantly while lying in bed. Bruegels Fuckbooks fucked around with this message at 00:31 on Jun 27, 2023 |
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Jun 26, 2023 23:47
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oliveoil posted:Seen anyone talk about it? Frankly I'm extremely burned out but my primary didn't see anything on my previous blood tests so just told me he couldn't approve anything. Yeah you need a headshrinker I think Probably helps if you embellish a little bit and have a developed story with concrete things that have happened and how it made you feel. I haven't tried it myself, and I haven't looked into it. I bet if you ask the office gossip they can give you a list of 10 people who have done this and develop a game plan by interviewing/researching them Bruegels Fuckbooks posted:Also burnout IS an illness. True
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Jun 27, 2023 00:03
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Falcon2001 posted:Helpful Words Thanks so much. I'm going to pull some of the questions out & answer in a bit of a different order, since it might help organize themes better. Falcon2001 posted:I'd just be blunt with your manager about that But something backward facing like "hey dude, what you did to me as a brand new manager was super uncool" -- what's he supposed to do with that? Even trying to spin that into a more forward looking statement, I don't think he's super clued into, at all, the like, emotional "morale assessment" type of thing managers are supposed to do. Comments I make to the point of "I think our team needs more team-building time & room to be people" results in him taking 20 seconds at the beginning of staff meetings to ask how our weekend was, not listen to the answer, & launch into some product detail nobody on the team has the context for. The weekly 30 minute "coffee chat" meetings we coordinated ourselves to just chill as humans, he'll come on, engage for maybe 2 minutes on whatever topic we had, then hard swerve into some latest AI hype or ask someone to give an impromptu project status update for everyone to "swarm" onto & "help." For team allocations: his preferred methodology suggested way back when he first started managing us (2.5 years ago) was flipping coins. At the time, I suggested some more strategic reasons he might wish to consider but was extremely careful not to let him offload his sense of responsibility for owning the outcome of allocation choice to me, but at least he hasn't offloaded it to chance since then either (or at least, hasn't said so). I've contributed occasional ideas on strategy as it relates to people assignments since, & sometimes he hears some of it, but I don't think he really gets the principles involved here, that individuals have unique experience, skills, & career desires to balance. Instead I've started indirectly helping some of the colleagues that get hit hardest by this -- encouraging them to be extra clear with the product team on expectations & then following up after planning sessions with our senior product leaders. From a general performance standpoint, I basically consider my manager a paper weather-vane. He'll push basically whatever the last thing he heard was, but there's not really any SUBSTANCE for me to push on if I try to manage up, he'd either crumple fold or just get mad at me (or misunderstand entirely). Also: he doesn't have the greatest reputation in the org at large and has basically zero political capital, so this is also a frustrating position for me. My skip level is a rising star in the org, & being on his team is good for my career, but I do have my concerns about our larger strategic direction and also wondering exactly why he's left my rather poorly performing manager in place for so long. Falcon2001 posted:If you have folks on your team that are rapidly able to switch between expectations, maybe highlight what lets them do that. There are a few of us who produce pretty well after sudden switches. One such colleague I'm really worried for, since the methodology they use is to just work like 80 hr weeks and they are appearing more and more overwhelmed recently. And I actually have been quite good at it myself, but mostly because my focus has been identifying the specific problem first, then working back from that to whatever tools are needed. Now all the energy in the room is in having GenAI as the solution in hand and trying to shop it around for whatever problems it might fit for. The "specific problem" now basically appears to be "empire building by executives during an active hype cycle" -- and this isn't really the type of problem my skills are best matched for. Falcon2001 posted:4. If you want to pick a single fight to really have, it's around requirements gathering and being clear on expectations. "This should sound more colloquial" is not a requirement; you're never going to get the c suite to sit down and open tickets, but at the bare minimum you can take those and scope them yourself into requirements and get buyoff from your manager and maybe skiplevel first, then move forward. If you exist in a state of trying to read tea leaves from c suites all the time you're never going to escape this nightmare cycle. Once you have it down to actual requirements, you can then have discussions about delivery dates/etc in a more structured, "delivery-oriented" way. I don't see much org interest here. A lot of the hype is actually not coming from external consultants, but people on our team who have fully bought in. Example: someone recently was promoted up from not-a-DS title to a senior DS title higher than my manager's on the strength of how he slings demo poo poo out the door fastest & doesn't worry too much about any specific measures of value or requirements. His favorite saying is "we're building the plane in the air here!" and is basically allergic to set requirements that touch on any sort of end-use specificity. My manager, bless his heart, is actually fighting the good fight here and has been doing what basically feels like rearguard action to get some seriousness on requirements here. But for reasons described above, my manager is just generally ineffective and marginalized, probably because the same sorts of skills lacks that drive his poor managerial performance also restricts his ability to influence the org generally as well. Falcon2001 posted:it will just produce burnout and loss of productivity and failure to meet deadlines, and finally attrition I'm definitely worried about burnout & attrition, I'm a lot less worried about "loss of productivity and failure to meet deadlines" because, if it doesn't matter at all WHAT you ship, just ship any random thing by date and you hit those metrics.
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Jun 27, 2023 00:16
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jemand posted:How do people actually do this?? "Hey boss, ur doing a bad job?" Even dressed up a lot, that isn't something I'm comfortable with. There's nothing wrong with this, so long as the next sentence out of your mouth is "how I think we should fix this is," capped off by something nice like "but this isn't your fault because X left you with Y when they should have been doing (how we should fix this) all along! what an rear end in a top hat". Bringing solutions to the table is fine
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Jun 27, 2023 00:51
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jemand posted:Thanks so much. I'm going to pull some of the questions out & answer in a bit of a different order, since it might help organize themes better. Landing messages like this isn't easy, and it takes some getting used to, especially if you're used to the idea that your manager just demands things of you. For example though, let's talk about delivery deadlines/etc. "Hey boss, I'm concerned that our delivery deadlines aren't realistic and that we're going to run into problems once we start missing them." is a reasonable way to broach the topic without calling him an rear end in a top hat or something. jemand posted:But something backward facing like "hey dude, what you did to me as a brand new manager was super uncool" -- what's he supposed to do with that? So really, the right time to push back would have been when he started dumping his concerns about your direct report onto you. "It sounds like you have a lot of pretty big concerns about this person, I'm worried that's not a very good fit for my first management position because I don't have a lot of experience in dealing with those sorts of issues, and I don't want to fail to support this person in improving." is a kind of generic example that hits on the major points. jemand posted:Even trying to spin that into a more forward looking statement, I don't think he's super clued into, at all, the like, emotional "morale assessment" type of thing managers are supposed to do. Comments I make to the point of "I think our team needs more team-building time & room to be people" results in him taking 20 seconds at the beginning of staff meetings to ask how our weekend was, not listen to the answer, & launch into some product detail nobody on the team has the context for. The weekly 30 minute "coffee chat" meetings we coordinated ourselves to just chill as humans, he'll come on, engage for maybe 2 minutes on whatever topic we had, then hard swerve into some latest AI hype or ask someone to give an impromptu project status update for everyone to "swarm" onto & "help." So this just gets into 'I have a manager who isn't very good at people management', to be blunt, and that's not a fun place to be in, and honestly might be in 'reach out to Ask A Manager' territory. It sounds like you're making some decent attempts at working around him, but I think one key point is that it's not a bad thing for your manager to know you expect more out of them. There might not be a lot of solid things you can do to fix that. If possible in your company's culture, I recommend getting semi-regular 1:1s with your skip level (every two months or so is probably fine, but even a few ad-hoc ones would be good). This is tricky, since you don't want to do an end-run around your boss because that doesn't look good, but one thing you can do is mention general issues your team is having without blaming anyone. This is also an opportunity for you to ask them questions like 'Can you let me know more about why we're doing X' - their perspective on it might be really interesting or illuminating, and it wouldn't surprise me if your manager isn't disseminating that information well. jemand posted:There are a few of us who produce pretty well after sudden switches. One such colleague I'm really worried for, since the methodology they use is to just work like 80 hr weeks and they are appearing more and more overwhelmed recently. And I actually have been quite good at it myself, but mostly because my focus has been identifying the specific problem first, then working back from that to whatever tools are needed. Now all the energy in the room is in having GenAI as the solution in hand and trying to shop it around for whatever problems it might fit for. The "specific problem" now basically appears to be "empire building by executives during an active hype cycle" -- and this isn't really the type of problem my skills are best matched for. Any business process that revolves around people working regular 80 hour weeks is already a failure waiting to happen. I assume you are all salaried, so yeah, there's gonna be crunch times/etc around major events where people have to put in extra time in most companies, but you're just robbing from yourself when you work hours like that, so any time you start doing it regularly it's a surefire sign of failures starting to come down the pipe. This is absolutely something where you should be vocal about it, because surprise surprise the consequences are a lot of stuff you've been talking about, like people getting overwhelmed and burned out and ineffective. I don't have any good answers for surviving the hype train though, good luck with that. jemand posted:I don't see much org interest here. A lot of the hype is actually not coming from external consultants, but people on our team who have fully bought in. Example: someone recently was promoted up from not-a-DS title to a senior DS title higher than my manager's on the strength of how he slings demo poo poo out the door fastest & doesn't worry too much about any specific measures of value or requirements. His favorite saying is "we're building the plane in the air here!" and is basically allergic to set requirements that touch on any sort of end-use specificity. My manager, bless his heart, is actually fighting the good fight here and has been doing what basically feels like rearguard action to get some seriousness on requirements here. But for reasons described above, my manager is just generally ineffective and marginalized, probably because the same sorts of skills lacks that drive his poor managerial performance also restricts his ability to influence the org generally as well. Basically every single book about managing software development workflows nails this point home in one form or another; you'd be hard pressed to find any written resource that doesn't list requirements gathering and solidifying as important. One thing you can do on this, is look backwards and start pulling together examples of where this has cost your company time and money. For example, I wasted a month on a project on my current team because my lead was being handwavy about the requirements and I didn't have enough comfort to push back on it yet. We ended up having to drop the feature entirely once we realized that his expectations were wildly different than the two sentence blurb in the task, and I wasted a month figuring that out - and now I use that experience as a direct example for why we need to be clearer on requirements. Other places to find this sort of waste would be projects that never get delivered, or have massive changes in scope or scale. You can pretty quickly start assigning actual cash numbers to that, too - or at least engineering hours, which starts talking the language of management. One note: Be careful not to mistake 'we didn't know X at all and it surprised us' with a lack of requirements. Sometimes stuff will surprise you and you'll have to pivot, which is why your requirements can't ever be absolutely set in stone, but you do need to have some basic level of 'the person working on this will output something that the requestor expects'. Extra note: This also sometimes requires senior people to be able to identify and call out bullshit like the demo-slinger. "We're writing code that's going to take us 2-3x as long to expand or improve on later" is the sort of thing managers should be taking seriously, unless you're specifically writing proof of concept or demo stuff. Nothing wrong with writing lovely demos/POCs, to be clear: management just have to understand there's a tradeoff. jemand posted:Our larger enterprise is in general extremely conservative and highly risk-averse, and I keep hoping that we'll hit the downswing of the hype cycle and have some cooling action come from areas that are increasingly getting annoyed at the current empire-building. Then we'll get to a more sensible steady state, where we can get back to building specific stuff for a specific business context that produces a specific piece of value. I guarantee that somewhere your management probably cares about loss of productivity and failure to meet deadlines, and I also guarantee that most of them don't give a poo poo about burnout until you start talking about it in terms of productivity and failure to meet deadlines. You can sometimes make an emotional appeal when something sucks hard enough, but the cold hard truth of business is that if you can't represent a problem in the form of cost savings or efficiency gains or ability to deliver X thing, you have a huge uphill battle to getting those changes made. Falcon2001 fucked around with this message at 01:19 on Jun 27, 2023 |
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Jun 27, 2023 01:17
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Falcon2001 posted:If possible in your company's culture, I recommend getting semi-regular 1:1s with your skip level (every two months or so is probably fine, but even a few ad-hoc ones would be good). This is tricky, since you don't want to do an end-run around your boss because that doesn't look good, but one thing you can do is mention general issues your team is having without blaming anyone. You've been slinging some great advice. How do you find out who your skip level is to even ask this. I've only worked for one company where I knew without looking up an org-chart. And I only knew because the new skip level made a big deal of moving his office into the same hallway as all his teams so I literally walked past his door every day. I guess looking up an org-chart is a good solution, but a lot of places I've worked don't have public org-charts, or at least don't tell front-line engineers about them. (I've worked at some very bad companies while doing contract work; so, so happy to not be doing that anymore).
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Jun 27, 2023 03:41
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LLSix posted:You've been slinging some great advice. How do you find out who your skip level is to even ask this. 
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Jun 27, 2023 03:50
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Jun 27, 2023 04:04
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LLSix posted:How do you find out who your skip level is to even ask this.  
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Jun 27, 2023 04:19
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LLSix posted:How do you find out who your skip level is to even ask this. 
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Jun 27, 2023 04:30
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maybe they don't know what skip level means?
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Jun 27, 2023 04:32
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One of my friends is a remote employee and they ended up doing some kind of genetic test to find their skip level. It was a little awkward at first but they're ok friends now.
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Jun 27, 2023 04:33
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What's a skip level? Is that when you side-step your 5 bosses on the org chart to talk to the person who actually determines what you work on?
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Jun 27, 2023 04:33
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