Ask HN: How to handle being sidelined gracefully? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How to handle being sidelined gracefully?

74 pointsqetuo1357935 comments

Our team’s engineering and project managers are based overseas. This year I’ve been acting as the local manager as well as a developer on some projects.

The company has recently hired an additional project manager overseas who has already started excluding me from project meetings. Another project manager has been hired to work in the local office and is starting next week.

I get the feeling I’m now meant to be sitting in the corner with my headphones on.

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> The company has recently hired an additional project manager overseas who has already started excluding me from project meetings.

This is a big red flag. There may be innocent reasons (e.g., new PM wants to hold meetings at times convenient to him and his team and feels guilty inviting you to meetings at 2AM your time), but it is more often a prep for pushing old PM out the door.

You have two options: change things at your old company, or move. In first option, I would try to get a candid face to face time with one of the senior leadership folks. Ask about their plans. Say that your old project does not need two PMs and ask if he can suggest other PM opportunities. This only works if you are appreciated at your current company, but if you are the company will likely work hard to accommodate your wishes -- good PMs are rare.

Second this. There is nothing more professional than asking earnestly about changes, especially in more senior roles. If you still see a role for yourself in the company, create a sketch of the new situation and bring it to the table. If not, prepare for yourself what time you need to transition and offer them that as a way out. If they are hesitant to bring the changes to your table, help them with your openness to the situation. If you have to leave, leave with the best possible memory.

I agree with the above. I would also start actively looking. A similar thing happened to me, and I'm glad I was already in the process of interviewing BEFORE I asked a lot of questions.

It is possible that you are not being intentionally sidelined. This has happened to me, where a company hired a new PM to help us scale, but just took over the parts of my job that I most loved, leaving me with just the drudge work.

I was livid. “We have a new guy... who doesn’t understand the product or our customers or our process... and I am supposed to answer to HIM now‽”

Some advice I wish I could go back 10 years and give myself:

1. “Own what you own” which is a variation of “choose which hill to die on”. If you feel like something is “yours” you will resent people coming in and fucking it up. If you conceptualize something as “theirs” you can feel good doing your best to make it better. Being a humble servant can feel bad, but it feels better than being fired for having angry outbursts (trust me on this one).

2. Understand your feelings well enough to talk about them. That might involve talk therapy. Modern CBT is really great.

3. Remember that anything you love can break your heart. And that is OK. Better than not loving what you do. Maybe it is time for the relationship to end? Maybe you can salvage it?

4. Think and talk in terms of both work/life balance and work-life balance. If having a diverse set of things to do at work is important to you (it is to me, but not everyone) tell the company this. Some people love to be heads down coders in one layer. Other people need to work across more layers. Some people like to do PM or architecture work in addition to coding. Your managers won’t know what you need if you don’t tell them, and you can’t tell them if you don’t understand it yourself. (See #2).

Good luck! You are not in this alone!

I found your story intriguing, as I struggled with something similar, and very much know what that feeling you described is.

I would love to know, in hindsight: why did the company decide to replace you on something that you loved doing? Was this a case of under performance and the new person effectively performed much better than you, or something else?

I have been victim of being replaced on something that I loved doing and I was very passionate about (a couple times over my career), and to this day (years later) I still think I was hands down much better than the person I was replaced with at that task, under every aspect: pure delivery performance, communication, sticking to improvements that provided value, maniacal customer support when bugs arose. In other words, I deeply and truly cared, too much actually and fell under the trap you described as “own what you own” (it was a feature I actually patented while working under the company). For the other person, that piece was just “meh, another thing I have to work on and maintain”, which ended up being my attitude when I was moved to something else.

I’ve tried repeatedly to assess the situation from an objective point of view to see if my line of thinking missed some aspects which might have caused my removal, but I just couldn’t find any bias in my reasoning if not of clueless upper management.

I don’t think in my case that it was necessarily about me and my performance. Just like I don’t think that the OP’s story is necessarily about him and his performance. When teams grow, they change. There is an all-too-often unspoken assumption that roles will get more and more specialized as the team expands. You can go from being a dev/pm/architect/analyst to being “just a dev” or “just an architect” so slowly that you don’t even notice the de-facto demotion until it is too late.

A metaphor I use with management to prevent this from happening again is “I eat my broccoli so I get to eat my ice cream. Hiring someone to eat ice cream for me so I can focus on just broccoli might make intuitive sense to you, but will have a detrimental effect on me”

That's a metaphor that I know is now stuck permanently. My only addition would be that this is your broccoli and ice-cream. I'm eternally mystified as to what some of my colleagues like. Maybe the greatest benefit of agile I found is I can just shove my needs/rankings into it - and can then just let people pull out whatever they fancy from it. Running the other way there seemed to be surprise when a dev found some major issue or came up with some great idea and I was more than happy for them to add it themselves - and I'd happily rank up it at the cost of one of my planned features. I get the distinct impression that previous occupiers of my role were less flexible. What I've done (I hope) is just to be as open as possible about what "I like" and be open, consistent and say the same thing to anybody who asks.

One of my old managers used to say that time and time again he would fret about which of his people would wind up stuck having to work on the shitty, boring parts of a project, only to find that someone else on the team was really excited to work on what he had thought were the shitty, boring parts; and on the flip side they would have seen as shitty and boring the stuff he thought was most interesting. The lesson for him was that as tempting as it can be as a manager to try to puppeteer everything, you can often get better results by just stepping back and letting a team figure out how they want to divide the work.

As a dev manager (small team) I am trying to never “assign” work. I just prioritize and describe, and let fellow coders pull the items that are most appealing to them.

Sometimes it means that I wind up doing work I would rather delegate if I were being selfish, but for the most part, everyone benefits.

Is it possible that management felt that most development work on the thing you loved was done, and your talents were wasted on maintenance? Did they move you to projects at an earlier stage of development?

In a sense, they did, but:

1) The new project was massively less interesting to me than the one I was solving (a completely different field with skills I didn’t possess - think moving from hardcore low level system scalability to designing a new type of UI widget, for example), and I tried to make that as clear as possible without undermining management or jeopardizing my job safety.

2) The project was just 80% completed, whereas I like bringing things to production myself, and handle all the maintenance and support. Especially the things that I design and lead from scratch.

Thanks for your support.

My boss has always been happy with my performance as an engineer. He likes people to take ownership of their projects and always thanks me whenever I step outside of my direct area of responsibility to solve problems that would otherwise fester if left alone.

The main problems at work can really be boiled down to a lack of communication and collaboration between employees. Engineers and managers alike. I'm hopeful that the new PM will be able to help improve things where the other managers have failed.

As for me, I'm hopeful that I can communicate my desire to continue to have a role in technical leadership.

If you enjoyed being a PM, ask that you want to become one in your company, if you can't, just look for a new job in that role.

There are many companies hiring PMs and to be honest, it is hard to find good ones, passionate about their job and that were previously coders or know well about tech, as not many developers enjoy that route(they would rather become tech leads or something else).

The grass is greener on your side as you might think.

Seconded. The grass is indeed greener than you think.

One of my buddies on the dev team I am on has been going through a very similar situation. He has worked there much longer than myself yet he ends up with most of the drudge work. Instead of working on cool full-stack JS PWAs and SPAs he is stuck putting content on WordPress sites and fixing WP plugins. He has on occasion asked me how I managed to get all the fun stuff despite being so new. My advice to him was as follows:

1) Communication is key, a lot of times management don't realize you hold resentment and a simple conversation could really clear things up. Make your wants known, don't expect them to just be presented to you.

2) Take the time to shine. Push yourself to impress those in charge. Demonstrating value is always a good way to get more responsibility.

3) Try not to take it personally but instead ask yourself are some valid reasons why they have made such a decision. Also try and ask yourself what you could do to help the new hire. It isn't their fault and would probably love the assistance.

In the case of my friend, although he is a fantastic worker, he struggles at times to vocalize his contempt. Instead he will brood. Do not do this. People can't read minds and at the end of the day it is managements job to do what they think is best for the company as a whole. Good luck, hope all ends up alright!

He has worked there much longer than myself yet he ends up with most of the drudge work. Instead of working on cool full-stack JS PWAs and SPAs he is stuck putting content on WordPress sites and fixing WP plugins

Your friend’s mistake is that he is too professional, doing the work that needs doing and pays everyone else’s salaries, while other more selfish people prioritise getting some more buzzwords on their CV. I have fallen victim to this mentality myself. It may be too late if he has been typecast, he’ll need to reboot by going somewhere else. But it’s a sad state of affairs that being conscientious is a career killer.

I'd worry working anywhere where being "conscientious" isn't appreciated. From another thread I've got it stuck in my head that there is "broccoli" and "ice cream" work - and yes, if everybody concludes that WP work is "broccoli", somebody needs to eat it, and for now it's the person who can eat it the fastest is going to get landed with it.. ..then ask them what their ice cream is and make sure they get some. And maybe most importantly, be up-front that it's broccoli and that nobody likes it - but it's important.

All managers see is that the work is getting done and no one is rocking the boat, they have zero incentive to look under the covers and see what’s really happening, then one day their unknown crucial engineer walks and they wonder why none of the self-promoting rockstars can do the bread-and-butter work, and what exactly those guys have been doing all this time.

> Your friend’s mistake is that he is too professional, doing the work that needs doing and pays everyone else’s salaries, while other more selfish people prioritise getting some more buzzwords on their CV.

Seconded - I've had this experience myself. I tried to be the "grownup in the room", ensuring that boring-but-important aspects of software development got taken care of. This was also my first experience on a "self-organizing" team.

The end result was that coworkers just kept doing whatever parts of the work they found personally gratifying, and at annual-review time their list of accomplishments was a lot glitzier than mine.

I continue to struggle with the anger and resentment I feel for how that all went down, and it's hard to objectively assess what I could/should have done differently without having behaved in the same (IMO) unprofessional manner as my then-teammates.

How I was brought up, your wants and needs are utterly irrelevant to the company, and voicing personal preferences of any kind would have negative career consequences.

How would you recommend communicating these things to your manager without breaking this rule?

Spend the extra free time job hunting to find a place where you’ll be valued.

Have you had a conversation with your manager about this? If so, how did it go?

The engineering manager has been on leave while all this has been happening. I'll be bringing up my concerns when he's back next week. I'm sure he'll be quite understanding. He did reply to one email to point out that there isn't a lot he can do because the new PM reports directly to the CEO, not to him.

Basically the engineers will have multiple bosses. The engineering manager for technical direction and the project managers for task priorities and day to day management.

I think there is still a role for me to play as a senior engineer to mentor and assist the other engineers on their projects but it's harder for me to do this when I'm out of the loop.

> Basically the engineers will have multiple bosses.

That's a huge red flag. Unless you have hope of that getting fixed, I'd start looking around.

Well, how did you end up "acting as the local manager?" Were you formally assigned to a named job role? Or were you a dev who stepped up to take on management duties? It sounds (mainly because of the word "acting" with all its connotations of being temporary and ad-hoc) like the latter. (Already I'm doing guesswork and reading tea leaves, just like you seem to be in your post. Can anybody talk to each other over there, or no?)

Anyway, maybe in the eyes of management you were handling two jobs, which maybe they appreciated, but as soon as they were able to rectify this, they helped you out by hiring someone to do the managing so you wouldn't have to. If they had the wrong idea about you (i.e. you prefer managing and now want to keep doing that) then you probably need to express your interest in management and advocate for why/how the company would benefit by your doing it.

But yeah in general people have the right to a clear job description that everyone agrees on, and to be able to review various duties as they apply to that, and accept or reject them, and to modify the job description if and when applicable.

Originally both the engineering manager and project manager were based in our office. The engineering manager moved to the overseas office a few years ago. This year the project manager moved to the same overseas office. I was asked to step up and supervise the other engineers.

I'm not a proper PM, just the senior dev who keeps an eye on the others to make sure they aren't falling down any rabbit holes.

I would much rather be a developer than a manager but I guess I thought I could still be involved in all projects from a technical standpoint.

Seems like a sound idea and I don't see any obvious reason why you couldn't do that. Especially if the PMs have a less technical background, as they often do. What you're talking about is sort of like a technical advisory or senior dev role and seems like a good thing for a company to have.

Politically it would probably be good to get each PM's buy-in and agreement about it, just from a standpoint of protecting their precious egos and avoiding a pissing match. Even though they seem to be the ones stepping on your toes a bit.

How does this work from the other side? are there people discussing they should collectively exclude someone? what are the conversations that are taking place. I have never been on the other side, so would like to see a perspective from there.

It's often a matter of convenience. Dealing with overseas people is hard especially if there is a time difference. They probably don't explicitly decide to exclude someone but instead it's too much work to include the person.

I turned up one morning to find two of my coworkers in a project meeting conference call with the PM. Later in my weekly "all projects" call with the PM I asked why I wasn't invited. She told me it wasn't my project. She also doesn't think it's necessary for me to continue attending the weekly "all projects" meetings where we discuss progress and priorities on all the engineering projects company wide (across 3 sites).

I guess you really are being excluded!

It’s a good idea to start looking for a new gig, you never know, but better be proactive.

Having lived through that, it matches my experience. It's one of the reasons that I now fully buy into the recommendation of not being the only remote worker on a team.

One needs a truly exceptional team and manager to avoid being miserable in that situation.

Do you want to continue being a manager? Do you want to continue to be a developer? Both? Are you unhappy because you feel rejected or unappreciated? Or do you really miss the work?

They could assume that you want to be a developer and not a manager. They may be intentionally sidelining you, and think that they're doing you a favor. The only way you can fix that is with communication.

Or, they may currently need you as a developer more than they need you as a manager. If it's temporary, you can choose to ride it out, making it clear to them that you want back into management when possible.

TL;DR: You have to talk to them to find out what they're thinking, and why they're doing what they're doing. Don't guess. Ask.

Is that you, Milton?

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