My journey through employment has been quite long, and at times, I think that I’m still figuring it out. Last year was 25 years of professional software development for me, fifteen in management positions. And while I’ve been a manager, I haven’t stopped understanding and learning about technology, programming, participating, challenging myself some. The last few leadership roles have really made me think seriously about work and who you work with. Even my last development role was problematic at the end, with a situation where I was actively being targeted and it made me want to leave. I think it’s a situation that people should know about, and how do you handle it when your manager is making up things to try to manage you out of your role. As someone who had been a manager, I was more prepared to handle that situation than most were and I wasn’t the only one who had to deal with it.

My last two jobs have really burned me out on leadership and management in general. I’ve wanted to get back to a place where I can be a full time developer again, as I really enjoy creating things. I enjoy being a leader, but I’m not interested in playing games and being political. I want to have a career that involves my successes and skills not how well I can schmooze the right people.

I started working for a large retail company in 2019. I was hired to be a senior software engineering manager, a role I’ve held a few times before. I started with a largish team, had another team added to my workload, and had to create an entirely new team to work on 3D stuff. It was a lot of responsibility, definitely something a senior manager could handle for a reasonable amount of time. Three years I did that. I asked to get a manager hired to take one of my teams, not even working for me, just to get someone to focus on the needs of that team. The large, old, retail company that I was working for had many people that had been there for 15-20 or more years. Many relationships form in that amount of time, relationships that go between different levels of careers. I understand how that all works, as I’ve been in a similar situation being one of the people that had been around a while at Rackspace.

I was given the chance to join one of my teams, working on 3D tools, as a Staff Software Engineer. I wasn’t sure when that happend if I had the chops to be at that level, but I quickly realized that I did, and do. I was able to successfully lead multiple levels of our projects with some amount of success.

Since I was no longer a manager, someone had to take my place. We spent two months interviewing people until we hired a new manager to take my old job. Lets call her Lana. Lana took over my old teams, having been an employee of the company for over twenty years. Very little of this experience was in management, leadership, or even technology, but she interviewed well and my old boss gave her the role. And for a while, she was a good partner in getting stuff done. We communicated almost every day, I would escalate concerns and share the teams successes. Since she had my old role, she did not have managers for the teams and relied on me to effectively lead the team, even though my role was to be a technical leader on the team. She made it clear after about eight months that she was relying on me to actually manage the team and manage their work. Managing the work was something I was doing already, trying to get team members to complete their tasks that were dependencies for others. I had no authority to manage the people, in that, I was not their manager. They didn’t have to listen to me, so I really had to lean on my experience on trying to influence outcomes. As a leader, I never wanted to be the person that would have to “order” or demand that anyone do anything. We build mutual respect and we go and work together to get things done. I had one member of my team that was doing nothing. As I said before, I had been escalating issues, this was one of the issues. Myself and one other team member were doing all of the development work.

So for about 6 months, things got weird. I got told by Lana, “you’re doing a great job, keep doing that”, but lots of other signals that I was being punished for something. By this I mean, left out of critical meetings where technical team discussions are taking place, interview loops for a new team member, product discussions. Every one-on-one, I asked if there was something I needed to change, do better, stop doing, etc, and continued to be told “nope you’re doing a great job”. After a good review at the end of March, in May I was connecting to Zoom for my one-on-one with my manager when our director popped on. I had no previous interaction with this director, at all. My manager and this director proceeded to berate me for 20 minutes about my performance, how they were going to demote me, how my salary was so high and they were going to take away my pay going forward. This was quite a shock, considering I had actively solved several issues with the system we were trying to deliver and was continually dealing with my manager actively sabotaging our project. We had gone from a prototype that we couldn’t possibly let people utilize to something that was accessable and scalable long term, with a strategy on how to continue to develop features going forward.

This is where my experience as a manager and advice from my wife really kicked in. I reached out to HR, because there was no way they weren’t in on this kind of an event and were probably lied to about the state of what they had. I had extensive documentation and data about what I’d been doing and what had been going on. I shared this with HR over a 2 hour meeting and the resolution was that I would be supported in finding a role on another team. Additionally, I said that if there was feedback, I had not received it and would appreciate that as it happens, not all at once. My manager and my director did not have any documentation or anyway to prove their claims. Over the next couple months, I tried to find a new role in the company, interviewed with a couple teams. My manager continued to try to dig up stuff to manage me out. Those interview loops I was left out of? Yeah she hired a friend from a previous team to replace me as the lead on the team.

To bring this story to an end, I had a great interview with another internal team and they were going to make me an offer to join their team. In the end, their VP killed my offer and I wasn’t going to be allowed to move over. That VP and my manager, they had worked together for years previously. So there was a good amount of underhanded nonsense going on. In the end I decided to leave, was offered a severance, and found a new job as a manager.

I guess some of the takeaways here are document your collaboration with your manager and team members and not all management is “leadership”.

First, documentation is important. It’s hard to do, but necessary. Even with the documentation I had, I got lazy and if I’d been better, I could have probably had a solid legal case for retaliation. My review, which had been delivered a month previous for the previous year I was being dressed down for, was good. In this case, I’m not sure HR is going to be your friend. I definitely showed HR that there was problems with how this was being done and their management had not done the documentation necessary to bring these kinds of threats against me and they really did nothing. Easiest way to do this is to send a follow-up email to your one-on-one that just reiterates the discussion, outcomes, and deliverables or things that need doing. In the case of my situation, I started recording all meetings starting with that bomb drop one.

Second, not all management is leadership. Some people are leaders, they work to collaborate and help be an advocate for their team memebers, teams, and organizations, in that order. Most managers are not and just work throught metrics and grade you upon how those are perceived. These are they kinds of people who shove some kind of work methodology on the team without discussion. They are the kind of people who have to threaten their team with words like “insubordination” or talk about how big and bad they are when managing people. Leaders say things like “we” and not “I” when they talk about the accomplishments of the team.

This certainly wasn’t the first frustrating interaction with a manager, but it definitely was one of the hardest I had to deal with. It’s never easy to have your life, livelihood, and family’s security threated and come out okay. A year later, I’m able to think about it without getting upset, but it still frustrates me, because I really liked what I was doing and the team I got to work with.