Ask HN: My director got fired. His rival is taking his place. What to expect?
As title says, my director, my initial hiring manager, was fired, presumably for underperformance. He was apparently pretty broadly disliked, since he came through a startup acquisition and ruffled feathers early on and had continual territory conflicts with the guy who eventually took his place.
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.
Change is hard, but to succeed in a political organization with political currents in the mix, you have to embrace it, so if you choose to stay, I recommend adopting a fresh perspective -- Your old job is over. This is a new job. Forget all past attachments to your old boss and walk into this new team with an open mind. Maybe the new boss is a decent leader, maybe not, but go in without any preconceived notions, do the work and see what happens.
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.
> you have to embrace it, so if you choose to stay, I recommend adopting a fresh perspective -- Your old job is over
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."
> I fully understand and respect the chain of command
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?
They write the checks and we do what they tell us. Anything else is a fantasy, not a job.
Firstly, if you are an employee they are paying you to bend the knee and do what they ask. That is the very definition of employment.
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.
What do you expect of people? Also these are undoubtably not the same people.
wat. When your company re-orgs, finding out what the new strategy is and what the expectations are is not bending a knee. There are absolutely times to stand up for yourself and defy what corporations try to pull, but "They rearranged the management structure" is not one of them.
Frankly it seems like he is upset my team wasn’t prioritizing his team. He managed an upstream service that called mine, and called my service out for not meeting our availability SLO — in our case, we host applications, so degraded availability depends in part on application availability, not platform. Instead, we onboarded an entire organization, tripling our request volume and meeting a very strict latency SLO. It was much higher priority than supporting his own platform.
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.
Thanks. I didn’t do a good job of listening to what the new director wants when we met. Frankly I was (understandably, I think) concerned for my career, and asked things mostly related to myself. I should’ve planned the conversation better. It’s unfortunate that a 30 minute conversation like that can establish a first impression that’ll be hard to get rid of.
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?
I say this from my experience with people, more than with managers in particular, so bear that in mind: It's actually usually pretty easy to repair first impressions. Ask for another brief meeting with him, or shoot him an email, or try to just casually run into him at work, and communicate your concerns, reframed in a way that's likely to land with him.
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.
This is a political battle that will only be won with politics. Your performance won't save you; only your display of loyalty stands a chance.
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.
Sure, do this if the compensation is worth debasing yourself. If it's not or you can easily find something else, there's no reason to put on the clown costume. If you are respected for your work alone and clearly shut down any attempts to recruit you into the political circus, chances are the children will not drag you into their squabbles. They'll be happy someone reliable is doing the work while they're busy playing fiefdom and leave you alone, rather than risk having it crash down around themselves over confronting someone who has no issues calling the act for what it is.
> 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.
This might be good advice in times of plenty. But given the downturn, I wouldn’t do this unless you want some time off and are financially solid, or have an offer lined up.
In all seriousness, if the director has someone on the shit list, then I don't think there's much that person could directly do to change that (in the short term at least), and suddenly changing one's tune to be sucking up to the new leader will be seen as what it is.
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.
Software engineering used to be focused more on actual engineering.
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.
The focus hasn't changed; only the rose-colored glasses looking into a few gems of the past.
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.
The focus has changed, and the outcomes of that are felt throughout the industry. Even today, they are being discussed on HN in another thread[0].
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.
[0]https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42010249
Was this ever different? I bet ever since first COBOL app was written, there were failed projects, or projects which appeared successful but were just barely limping along. "Mythical Man Month" was published in 1975.
> 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.
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.
No, it’s definitely changed. As tech has become bigger and bigger the demographics of the field have approached the demographics of the overall population. Back in the 90s the tiny subset of self-selected people involved were almost all mission oriented true believers. As it grew and became extremely lucrative the folks with other priorities were attracted.
As you say, there is always politics, but the difference in quantity is large enough to have a quality of its own.
Really? I must have been working for the wrong tech companies in the 90s then...
Ah yes, back when spirits were brave, the stakes were high, men were real men, women were real women and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were real small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri
As long as humans have had to work together, politics exist. Whether you are isolated from it is solely down to your manager and leadership. But it’s always there.
I hate to be that guy, but politics has always been part of the story of software development. The history of Apple is filled with all sorts of drama, with projects getting cancelled and people getting fired due to politics. Xerox PARC’s glory days in the 1970s were not politics-free; there were clashes between Bob Taylor and other high-level people, which finally reached a breaking point in 1983, leading to Taylor moving on to Digital Equipment Corporation and many PARC researchers following him there. Even in the non-profit open source world (some would say especially instead of even), there’s plenty of politics.
Actually, you've reinforced my point. Those examples are, as you said, high-level executives, not software engineers.
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.
This amount of disloyalty can only ensure depression and a loss of identity IMO, for people like me.
As an autistic worker, I find it impossible to lie... could this help in a discrimination case?
That might be a tall order...
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 won't help a case of you phrase it as not being as good of a liar. It would come across as you attempting to deceive the employer, but failing.
Talk to the new director with your team (ask for a meeting. You need clarity from him on a) his expectations on what the teams needs to be considered performing - his expectation of good. b) clarity on goals for next period (6-12 months) c) how he likes to work, his processes and preferences for the working relations ship. i.e email vs messaging, meetings to explore a topic vs written proposals and then a discussion.
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.
Update your resume immediately. If you want to remain at the company then start looking for an internal transfer before he inevitably gives you a bad rating for your next review (and a PIP will inevitably follow). Also start looking externally either way.
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.
Trust your gut, keep the stock and find a gig where you feel welcome.
> By the end he seemed intent on making my team out to be underperforming
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.
> 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.
Similar thing has happened to me. Close to a year ago, it was decided that my old manager had too many direct reports, so our group was split into 2. I was asked by my manager if I wanted to apply to manage the new team, which I was not enthusiastic about. I had considered it and weighed my options:
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.
Sorry to hear that.
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.
Had a similar situation and decided to leave. In the hindsight that was a correct decision. In the end one works for a manager, not a whole company. At least it feels like that for an individual contributor.
I have the choice to follow my current manager, who is very supportive of me, to the manager’s other team, but it will likely end up reporting to the new director. It’s just a bad situation where I’m leaving my current team where the new director happens to have a poor impression of my work, since we weren’t prioritizing his team in particular.
Isn't your manager supposed to be a buffer between you and the director? Stay with your manager and if you feel the director is trying to make life harder for either of you then leave the company.
(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)
As with any new role/team/etc, the best course forward is to set some "evaluation time frames" at the start and then follow through with the process of deeply reconsidering whether it is actually a good fit at each checkpoint. My rough set of early such milestones happen at one month, three months, six months, and one year. If it is not, then the best way forward is to simply start looking for a new role/team/etc either internally or externally.
> 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.
You seem to be an “I would…if not for…”. Those people never amount to anything. Try to be something else.
Not what you asked, but: Accept this challenge as an opportunity. Find ways to deal with it. You will grow a lot because of that. Good luck!
(Opposite suggestion to some sibling comments which recommend to look for another job)
The way we eliminate all politics where I work, all problem-solving interactions are solution-focused. Someone may lay some blame, that is immediately met with one of the team asking “what’s the solution look like to you?” Enough repetition of this creates an environment where nobody opens their mouth unless prepared to suggest a solution to be discussed.
This is a VERY clear sign your days there are numbered. Remember you will often loss 15 to 30 percent if you let them fire you verses finding a new 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.
Well, just come out as gay or recovering alcoholic or something that will make them think twice about firing you by being afraid of a lawsuit. Should work at least for a few months until you have some time to figure your next move
Evil but might actually work ... I am now worried about you ...
Haha don't! But appreciate the concern, and evil is in the eye of the beholder or something like that no?
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!!!
You will most likely be fired.
Make your boss successful and you'll be successful. Unless your boss is an asshole, in which case you'll just be another asshole.
Anyone who is perceived as close to your director will be pushed out.
> I would probably change companies if not for the fact that the companies stock price tripled in the last year.
Wow.
> So my director was very suddenly fired one morning. Just gone
this is not good
to me sound pretty medioeval
Start interviewing.