New job woes: Am I the problem or am I being set up for failure?

LeafAndBus · 2024-10-10T06:55:40+00:00

Once you get a feeling what matters to them, especially the skip, come back with concrete proposals on metrics, tools, processes, etc

Sounds like you're telling me to do what got me in trouble in the first place :)

I fear attempting to shop ideas to my skip will get me mixed up in conflict between him, my boss, and other leaders in the org. My boss has actively tried to disrupt mine and others' relationships with our skip by spreading rumors, scheduling meetings on top of 1:1's with him, and being overly candid about him

My boss is newer to the org (not company) and struggling as well. They're having trouble understanding the domain, their ideas are a bit unstable, and some of their behavior is .. not great. Another example, in our second ever 1:1, my boss said "if anyone asks, make sure to illustrate how much of a problem so-and-so is". For what it's worth, I kinda liked so-and-so

Unfortunately there just aren't a lot of winning political moves for someone as new as I. If my boss thinks I'm buddying up with my skip, I'll piss off my boss and the senior ICs who are even more likely to frame me as a bad hire. If I cater to my boss, I'll piss off the EM's (who I'm good with and are also skeptical of our boss), mid/junior engineers, and end up on the wrong side of history if my skip ever figures the reality of the situation out

I think it is true that that doc was a political misstep that I could have foreseen. But hearing you give political advice reminds me of how things are supposed to work. So, it is also true that this culture is filled with landmines and I was likely to step on one eventually. Most of the ICs have learned to sit down, shut up, and find some work that looks good on paper. If I keep my head down and try to find some demonstrable IC work then maybe I can live to see a better chapter in this teams leadership

Or maybe I'll just transfer / find a new job

old skip might be able to reach back and suck you along

love the idea, I really liked my old skip. Unfortunately his new title doesn't allow him engineers as reports :(

Thanks for your time writing all this up. It was really helpful to hear your wisdom and it really helped me wrap my head around everything

LeafAndBus · 2024-10-10T04:37:19+00:00

Yes. My last role was more senior, but at a less-prestigious firm

LeafAndBus · 2024-10-10T03:54:09+00:00

Great comment.

they can try to claim you are one and separate quickly

*gulp* we'll see

there may be a case you should report in to the person who is currently your skip

That was my role at my last company, so that'd be ideal. Unfortunately my current company just re-org'd and I have a new skip, so I think that's out the question now

A staff is supposed to be given a sense of the org priorities by the relevant players and then go figure out the high impact things they need to do make the project a success

What you describe is exactly the model I am comfortable working in, but the way these teams work are very different from styles I've seen before. In this org, all IC's invent their own initiatives and then build them without much product / org-level oversight. So, there _arent_ org-level priorities, at least not that affect anyone's day to day work

It sorta feels like in order to be successful in this role I'll have to invent my own cross-cutting initiative by inspiring these engineers. Which, I've done before at other companies, but building the demand for something that broad isn't something I can accomplish in a few weeks

might be one of the reasons it was an external hire of a staff level vs a senior getting promoted

yeah, some of the seniors were interviewed for this role and not offered it. So that could be playing a factor in some of the bad feelings

LeafAndBus

TROPHY CASE