It got me thinking to the other times I've moved on from a company, with 2x of those being due to my immediate manager being completely AWOL. Literally for multiple months these guys just didn't come into the office, a constant stream of excuses.
Which gets to my question, if I've seen this 2x in 10ish years it's got to be somewhat common.
What is the deal with these people? Aren't they immolating their careers? I just don't understand it.
I am in 50s. I rode a late state startup to IPO and back to PE with a an exit soon. I have got kids to put through college and a parent to be taken care of. I saw nepokids be handed, HANDED , a company they had no business running. So yes I am grabbing what I can.
I just saw the best lead java developers be laid off after 20 years with the product because he was overpaid salary wise when compared to 10 other contractors from India. All that tribal knowledge is gone and never coming back. Mind you this person could run laps around all 10 of these contractors but corporate America only cares about vanity metrics and looks at employees as cogs in a machine.
One of my old managers had it. I would rarely see the dude -- except for once or twice a month, when we'd happen to be in the same meeting. He'd wait until the last bit of the meeting, and then he'd come in -- calm and measured -- with a comment that would blow everyone away. While everyone was nodding at what a good point it was, he'd disappear, never to be seen again until next quarter.
Meanwhile, I'm over here working a steady 50 hours/week and barely keeping up. Most weeks are wall-to-wall meetings, combined with a few over-caffeinated nights writing up some doc or another, and then it's a stumble into the weekend with just enough time to recover and start the whole thing over on Monday.
I'd like to hear from those kinds of AWOL managers. I have no idea how they do it.
I started by automating systems in my department. This bought me a lot of time. I was down to around 15-30 hours a week. If my phone rang, I saw it as an opportunity to eliminate future phone calls by fixing or automating whatever caused the call. If it was something that required manual effort, I made it a one click procedure for whoever called me. They'd rather push a button than pick up the phone. After a couple of years, I was only working 10 hours a week. I still wanted more freedom, and I was bored. I thought about taking a second job, but I realized I was worth more to myself than the money of another job. I wanted time. This is critical. Realizing that I want time, not money, caused me to focus on the right thing.
I invited people who had no jobs and no skills to my house and spent the next two years training them to automate systems. I did this for free. Typically one and sometimes two at a time. We all became friends. When someone was good enough, I hired them. If I got push back from my superiors about why we needed to hire, I would ask, "Do we want this to be as smooth as the last thing I did?" Some people quit part way through learning. This was frustrating, but it's a price you have to pay to get really really good people who trust you.
The handful who stayed earn better than average full time salaries, work 10 hours a week most weeks, sometimes none at all, and maybe a couple of weeks a year they buckle down to rebuild something, or change something for a customer. They don't carry second jobs.
The last part is also very important. If you or your team carries a second job, then you don't care enough about the importance of free time to invest a ton of time when it matters to meticulously automate the shit out of everything, down to the finest detail.
There is almost nothing to call my department about. Everything almost runs itself, including my people, and their people.
Culture is key. I don't run the company, but I run the culture in my little corner of it. It's a culture of making time, not money. And, not just for ourselves, for others. When we make time for other people they don't have any reason to care when we are "AWOL."
I manage a team and we have a return to office policy that I'm waiting to be reprimanded for not following before I actually come in, but I also don't hold my people to any standard beyond what I'm willing to do. I couldn't imagine ordering them to go in and not doing so myself.
As a result, he basically spent most of his time in transit between meetings (not even in the meetings themselves...).
If it sounds great, it wasn't. He was notionally in charge of ~50 projects or so and a blocker on each one. Nothing definitive could be done without his approval, which was hard, as he wasn't even au fait with the project's status. So to get anything done you had to (a) physically find him and pin him down, (b) explain what approval he needs to give and why, (c) let him go to think about it, and (d) repeat every few days until he makes a decision (or lets you make it instead).
His desk was flanked by two piles of "in-tray" papers about a foot tall, from earlier years when people thought leaving reports and forms on his desk was a way to get them in his job queue. Alas, he basically never sat at his desk, and when he did, he just peeked at the flanked screen with no sense of irony.
Small company that used to be bigger and we needed to finalize a migration that'd been in progress for like 7 years. It kept being delayed by leadership who'd get distracted, so the final 20% would never get done, we'd build more tech debt, and then the 20% turned into 23%. We'd argue to pay down the debt, get 1.5 weeks to tackle it, get it down to 20% remaining again and then delay for another couple months. Repeat this for years and you have a treading water situation for years.
This manager got hired, saw this was holding the company back (spend too high since 2 systems of infra and 2 places to wrangle features) and lobbied hard to finish it off. Said it'll take 7 months but we'd cut our spend by like 30%. Leadership agreed. Manager kicked off the project and then just disappeared.
Leadership then got distracted and wanted new things. Manager would re-appear for discussions EXCLUSIVELY with leadership, convince them to stay the course, and then disappear again. This happened repeatedly, probably every couple weeks, but he only interacted with leadership, firewalling us from them.
This manager had probably 3 meetings total with us the team over the course of the project because he trusted us to carry it out. Each meeting was him saying, "it looks like you're all making great progress, let's keep it that way." Then disappear again.
We had two of those meetings after the start meeting, and the final meeting at month 7 was "hooray, you did it, everything's implemented, all traffic's migrated, all error rates are well within tolerances, and we've turned off the old machines, saving us loads of money. Congratulations! Here's a nice gift and a bonus, let's celebrate!"
We did, and then not long after he left for greener pastures. Leadership loved him, the team loves him, but he saw his time had come. Love you Ahti, you were probably the best manager I ever had!
So some of it is probably being Overemployed. I have a job where I am just doing the minimum to keep it.
Some of it is just waiting to be fired while their build their own businesses.
I cannot imagine doing a job just for the money myself; I rather sleep under a bridge (probably not really but luckily I don’t have that issue).
I just cannot belief it’s true; people here whine about tech all the time and updating to the latest stuff etc while you can make 250-350/hr doing CRUD in Java + Oracle in enterprises with knowledge you hardly have to update for the past two decades. If you are really in it ‘only for the money’, you have a Delaware company, cayman accounts, live in dubai and you do multiple boring crud jobs for Fortune 500 companies that require no learning with max income and you invest that money in ETFs. You don’t build your own business (very large chance of failure aka wasted no-money time) or you build one by talking your vc friend in investing in you so there exists no waste. And you don’t wait to get fired, you try continuously to find more higher paying and easier stuff and just do it concurrently. In most boring non tech companies with 100k+ employees no one will notice you underperform as that is the norm.
Realistically, this is the source of 90% of misery in developed nations. It is logistically impossible for even half of all people to have jobs they enjoy so much it doesn't make them at least somewhat miserable doing it 40 hours a week.
If you don't bring more value to the table and just coast off without learning anything, you will not get hike and effectively be taking demotion year after year. You will not have any bargaining power since they can replace you with a new grad anytime.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39942397 (examples of useless work)
If I only cared about money, I'd probably just make drugs :)
Companies haven't been loyal to employees in a long time, so now they get to enjoy employees not being loyal to them.
Some companies have, some companies haven't.
There is no loyalty or trust from companies and you can be axed at any minute without notice. It's time to realize that a "career" was just indentured service with extra steps. Take what you can from corporations and give nothing back.
On the other hand, sometimes it is culture. I had manager that had 100+ direct reports. He never had 1x1 and barely managed to get all of the payrol/timesheet/pto aprovals on time.
I’ve worked with a manager at a customer that rarely turned up to even online meetings and even complained that this was taking time away from his personal business!
He was a full-time employee using business hours at his job to run a side-hussle.
After this experience I’ve learned to recognise the signs.
