I decided I NEVER wanted to manage anyone at a large or even medium sized tech company.
Politically there is no winning:
- Your peer competitors (other VPs) are after you
- Your direct reports are after you (or you are accountable for them)
- The direct reports of other VPs are after you
- Your CEO is after you
You only have ways to lose. I dont know why anyoner would ever want one of those jobs, they are horrible.
Same, I was at the level I was directly working with Directors and indirectly with VPs.
I literally had projects blocked because I didn’t provide a promo vision for the Directors to make VP if they funded me. This is business critical shit, my direct supervisor literally told me this. They were angry I didn’t devote any time to showing the promo opportunities. No complaint with any part of my justification beyond that.
Business case was open and shut, low technical requirements, minimal overhead and low cost. All they wanted to know was how to make VP, that’s it.
So yeah, I quit.
(Also to the down-voters who likely work at Google, if you’re not in the room when decisions are made you don’t know how the company works.)
I hear you; that is exactly why I noped out of management and decided I'm perfectly happy to continue living at the bottom of the org chart.
It seems like one of the great tragedies of tech is that the kind of personality and temperament that would predispose a person to being able to genuinely enjoy this kind of work probably also tends to greatly diminish that person's chances of ever being promoted into a position where they'd be asked to do that kind of work.
I have an unofficial policy of only working for small companies. I broke that rule once, and I was consistently miserable. Completing features consistently took 3x longer than they should have, and the team was too big to be able to make the necessary changes to fix the accumulating problems that caused it.
Additionally, people I hadn't met during the interviews but were in my direct chain of command were obnoxiously political. I am pretty much done with working at places where I dont have a direct line to the owners, and meet the owners before I accept the job.
Accepting management position instead of focusing on my technical skills.
I ended up having some interesting experience but boy I would have been better off honing my tech skills instead.
Whenever I sense politics is more important to promotion that great job, I am leaving. I went into this field idealistic, driven for creating technology that can change lives for the better, and way too often artificial red tape is put everywhere by clueless or outright evil managers in order to drive their agenda and increase their chances for promotions and more $ into their pockets. It's literally negation of every single value I stand for and often have no choice but to leave and work on my own projects. Even the best companies like author mentioned aren't immune to human nature and have many blind spots.
I too have worked for two small technology companies. The first one was great. Smart boss, heavy but realistic workload. Got bought out by a much larger competitor. Sales people making unrealistic commitments to clients, then project managers driving the tech team to breaking point with unattainable deadlines and budgets. It became toxic. Got bought out by an even bigger competitor, a multinational company. I refused to sign on to the third company. They had a reputation. If the second company hadn't been bought out I would have probably quit anyway.
I hate my job. I stick with it because it seems that nothing better exists. All the other job postings seem terrible. One thing I will do is post to other positions internally. Sometimes just being on a new team will give you a very brief period of hope that the work or tech is interesting, or that the political environment is more friendly. Sadly, this fades quickly. Every team I've been on violates company performance management policies.
And do you know why you didn’t get the job when they added the new layer of management? Were you considered but rejected, did you even get a chance to apply or did you wake up one morning to a new boss and new title?
I really feel for what happened to you, but I have trouble believing that a whole raft of incompetent VPs were hired just because they had BigCo du jour in their CV.
In other words, what would you have done differently to avoid this outcome, if you believe it was avoidable?
I'm actually leaving my current company because our current PM and CEO aren't big enough assholes. I brought up a problem that can be partially fixed right now with small technical debt that can be rolled back but has a big impact on the customer. One said no and the other doesn't care enough to push the PM. The apathy, lack of aggressiveness and drive annoy me. The CEO also is unwilling to hold 2 unproductive employees accountable for frankly doing little/nothing. I'm sick of feeling like one of the few to care about the product and mission. I love this field too much to deliver poor products and results.
I quit all my previous jobs (maybe one exception) because of a very bad Manager. These managers are extremely hurtful for companies and I believe upper management does not get the same side of the story. Surprisingly, I always get along with senior managers over direct managers. If people want to improve the tech industry in general from an employer perspective, I'd start by cleaning that 1st layer of management pretty hard.
Currently working as a developer for a company that organizes itself in small groups without bosses and I must say I could not think about going to work for a company where I would have a boss.
I worked at a big software company and will never go back. The aspiring to mediocrity is the order of the day. I should never have gone to a fortune 500 and I never will again. The culture is corrosive.
I would not want to work at any company with a recently-gutted workforce where people are constantly looking over their shoulder, and where people with institutional knowledge have been pushed out.
I had a bad experience. I have top tech companies on my resume and they made the role look cool and I was trying to slow down a little . They instead put me into support . The codebase wasn’t in source control ; it was just a few scripts in any case . They didn’t have a sane deploy. The people that they had me working under had been there for decades but were not good . They talked down to me and did not give me tasks that aligned to my experience. I thought I would ruin my career if I stayed so I left. Much happier with a principal role where I’m at now .
After 15yrs of aggressive, upward growth positions and three years of my own startup, I landed what seemed to be an awesome job at a Series A startup.
The company is completely mismanaged, overstaffed, on a collision course, and yet the best job I ever had. I'm not a crook - so I do put in an honest 40hrs to collect my modest 200k salary (modest given my experience.)
However, the company is so mismanaged by the C-Suite and so far gone there is no pressure to go beyond the 40hrs/week. The C-Suite is already destroying the firm, why bother plugging holes on a sinking ship on my spare time?
I enjoy the work, my co-workers, but really enjoy the free evenings and free weekends. Best experience of my life while it lasts. No longer have headaches. Have friends that I spend time with. Enjoy the outdoors.
I wish I could have the same at a company that was not mismanaged, because i'm sure it can happen. Our tech org is strong, just the MBAs in the CSuite cant seem to get out of our way.
Politically there is no winning:
- Your peer competitors (other VPs) are after you - Your direct reports are after you (or you are accountable for them) - The direct reports of other VPs are after you - Your CEO is after you
You only have ways to lose. I dont know why anyoner would ever want one of those jobs, they are horrible.
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