Well, today was my last day at this job. Can’t say I’m going to miss what has probably been one of the worse professional experiences of my career.
Congrats, condolences, or the appropriate mix thereof, on your departure from the job. Please share any details you feel up to providing. Now, take care of yourself and, whatever is coming next, give yourself a moment to relax.
What ended up happening? I’m glad you’re free of the place.
Got fired. Not really a surprise as it seemed to not be a good fit from day 1. But I couldn’t tell you specifically why they chose today instead of last week or last month or whenever.
Pretty much exactly as I predicted in the OP.
I don’t know. I’ve been doing this work for a long time, but maybe I just don’t get it. I tell you one thing I can’t reconcile is how the company ended up on all these “best places to work” lists while seeing all these people working 18 hour days and having to deal with all this fucked bullshit. Maybe it is a great place to work if you work in sales or building the product or any one of the bullshit executive positions they created or are otherwise removed from the day to day delivery
Glad to be rid of this nonsense.
I just toasted you (from a 537xx zip code, appropriately). Glad you’re out of there.
I could have written your OP, though I suffered longer.
Handy hint: You now have PTSD. Maybe a little and you’re coping and it’s no big deal, maybe more than a little and you need to talk to someone. Either way, it’ll take some time til you can sleep well and not think about That Place.
But I do know the sky will be a little brighter tomorrow, so take a walk. People will nod hello, birds will welcome you to the park. Ooh, there might even be dogs to pet! Life will be better… partly because there are so many companies out there that know what they’re doing. C’mon, wouldn’t almost anywhere be better?
But in the meantime, get outside.
I’m sorry to hear that, but I know how it goes. You were better than that place and I don’t say that just because we’re SDMB friends. From your OP it had all the hallmarks of a place that hires the people they need but don’t at all want. It reminds me of someone at one of my former jobs, the really toxic one that I complained here about several times. Our software had a really dated, crappy UI on old technology and they wanted to update it all. They hired a new UI/UX manager and this guy had a PHD in his field, authored many whitepapers, and genuinely knew his shit. They humored him for a while as he implemented user workshops and built a package of user personas and started updating the software. Then he disappeared. When I quit about a year later, a coworker/friend invited me to lunch and included him and a couple other people, and that’s how I heard his story.
At some point the person he reported to (which was the toxic director that was at the root of all our troubles) had stopped forwarding his recommendations up to the CEO and when he realized it he met with the CEO to find out what was going on. The director did NOT like that and also met with the CEO separately and got him in his corner. They told him to just go home for a while (i.e. days). Then they terminated him.
As to the “best places to work” lists… you’re right, those are entirely political. I worked for one (not the same job) and found the same thing. Somehow they get people from the golden departments like HR or Sales to do the surveys and squash surveys from anybody who might give less glowing responses. Or another tactic I’ve seen is that they have new employees fill out the surveys within 6 months of hire, e.g. they get them during the “honeymoon” period when the feedback is most likely to be cheerful and enthusiastic.
This is my first time reading this thread but I’m really morbidly curious about what this environment is like. If you were to just say “I don’t think I need to be in this meeting so I’m going to skip it” what would the response be? Or if you say “well this person wants to add this feature which will take X weeks to develop, and this person wants this which will take Y weeks so we either need to decide which is more important or I’m going to decide to focus on the X week project first and delay the other one.”
What happens is I’m told that we move at 100mph and I need to deliver both Project X and Project Y and that we are tight on resources so we can’t delay either of them because it will impact other projects. Unfortunately the client for Project X doesn’t know what they want us to build so we need to pause for several months while they develop the requirements. So I work on Project Y which I’m told is 2-3 weeks to build part of an application for a larger project. As we work on gathering requirements for that, we start getting sucked into running the rest of the greater Project Y. Except apparently no one ever gathered requirements for the rest of Project Y, so now I have to deal with the head of our business unit who runs Project Y promising everything the client asks for. In the meantime, the sales rep for Project X promises we will help support some side Project X.a (using budget from Project X)
Soon Project X starts up again and we see the new requirements. Except they are much larger than initially scoped in the budget (25% we burned through already) and the final end date hasn’t changed.
Of course, the whole time I keep getting stuff sprung on me at the last minute because I’m new to the company and have to learn how we deliver projects as I go.
It seems this way throughout the company. I was talking to another project manager and his project can’t end because the SOW is so vague the client just keeps asking for more stuff.
All this stuff happens at these sort of technology consulting firms everywhere on some level. But it just seemed so much worse at this company,
I don’t know if I’m “better than this place”. Plenty of assholes manage to keep their jobs longer than 6 months even if they hate them. In fact my whole career seems like a string of these sort of frustrating project manager-y type jobs that usually don’t last more than 9 to 18 months. I don’t think I’m terrible at doing this kind of work. But there is definitely something I seem to be missing.
That does sound like a nightmare.
I’ve been on the engineer side when the scope massively changed and the deadline didn’t change at all and I always wondered what the hell the managers were thinking. Although (at least as far as I know) in that case it wasn’t even like the customers asked for more. It also didn’t help that a week ago my manager had reassured me that there was no way it could happen a week before it happened.
I’ve been following this thread even though (because?) it is totally outside my own work experience.
What I do see though, is that the customers are the ones causing a lot of the problems because they aren’t clear what they want in the first instance and keep changing the parameters as the project develops.
I have been on the fringe of an organisation commissioning a major IT project and many hours were spent trying to set the requirements before bids were requested. The problem was that, rather like commissioning a home extension, the builder always comes up with improvements and any change to the original contract means more cost.
I was once peripherally involved in commissioning a new hospital and it soon became obvious that the original design was outdated. In spite of that, no changes were made, and as soon as the building was handed over, another contractor moved in to tear walls down and rework the wiring and plumbing etc.
In this particular case, I don’t blame the customer. I blame the company I worked at for selling the client almost $500k of software development without a clear idea of what we would be developing. The customer never knows what they want. All they know they have been entering data into the same old systems the same old ways for 20 years. They don’t know what the new systems should do or look like. And the company I worked for doesn’t have business analysts or SMEs to advise them on “best practices” for building this stuff. They need to hire Accenture or Deloitte Consulting or some other firm that does process reengineering. That’s a project in and of itself.
Really, the whole way my company did professional services was stupid and seemed to fly in the face of anything any other company would have done to build something like this. They have an interesting product for rapidly building simple business apps. But they run on this fiction that the platform is so simple, anyone can learn in in a few weeks and build anything with it.
Well, if it’s so simple anyone can learn it, why are we unable to staff any of our projects, even with the help of outside consulting firms?
And if you can build anything with it, why does nearly every application we build require our UX/UI team to build custom code?
It sounds like somewhere I worked. I lasted 10+ years, but it was awful. I dream about it almost every night. I suspect PTSD is a strong possibility. We used to joke (not funny really) that working there was like the Hunger Games. We re-organized every 6 months or so. We had so many new CEOs that we all lost track but every new CEO wanted to change everything. We routinely took on new customers, and started building products before we had requirements and often before we even had a contract signed.
I’m gonna stop now. Let’s just say that I hear ya.
On a different note, have you thought about contracting? I think it might be more structured and it would give you a sense for the company before seeking a job.
I’m not really interested in contracting. I’m really looking more for a long term job.
I really liked the last job I had before this, working for a cloud software provider. I thought they treated their people really well. I was managing like 6 projects at the same time and it was relatively easy. But it was really more program managing a portfolio of clients. Not being the scrum master for a custom application development where I have to negotiate every fucking button and drop down box.
I also liked supporting a product, rather than just doing pure “consulting”. The job before the job before last I spent 4 years at a boutique (small) management consulting firm. I liked the work but it always kind of felt like we were just trying to invent shit to consult for. That’s sort of “process reengineering / strategy” consulting I used to do at Deloitte 20 years ago. I don’t think that model of sending a bunch of really smart generalists into a business to do a MBA school report really works any more. It’s all sort of turned into systems integrations.
Anyhow, at 48 years old with a string of impressive sounding but ultimately “random” corporate management / IT consulting jobs, I’m really kind of looking to work at the company I want to work at for the next 5,10,20 years. Not what some start up thinks they will be in 5 years or take a contracting job that “might hire in 18 months” or whatever.
That’s reasonable. I wish I had better help to offer. I’d get you some solid intros at my last company, but I’ve already described it. If you’re interested anyway, please let me know.
The awful PTSD Hunger Games place with constant reorgs? I appreciate the offer, but that is literally the exact opposite of the sort of place I need to be working at.
I’m not really worried about finding a job. I always seem to manage that. What I really need is to find a job where I’m still going to be there several years afterwards.
I figured you wouldn’t be interested, which is very sensible on your part. Keep us posted. I can cheer from the sidelines. 
I’m just seeing this thread. Dude, I’m sorry that place didn’t work out.
One of the reasons I picked my current company (in 2018) is because it’s a really big defense contractor. There are some downsides to working at a massive company, but one upside is that if you’re competent and can network you often have options – in terms of both locations and job types. A year after I joined I finally admitted to myself that I wasn’t in the right career (which I’d been in for nearly a decade at that point): luckily, I was able to do exactly as I’d hoped and I found a new job within the company. I’m actually in the process of changing my focus yet again, as I slowly pivot to project/program management. PMs are a dime a dozen, but this contract still has 3 years on its POP and I figure that’s enough time to both learn some stuff and figure out if I’m any good at it. And if we don’t win our recompete in 2024, one way or another I hope to land in yet another spot within the company. I turn 50 this year…I’m not saying I’ll retire from this place, but I sure don’t mind the idea of doing so.
Interesting. I’m actually trying to pivot away from program/project management. Not that there’s anything wrong with it I suppose. But I’ve been doing it for a long time and I never really wanted to become pigeon-holed as a “all purpose PM”.
I had an interview with Microsoft earlier this week. That went well. They thought I would be a better fit for a more “project managery” type job than the one I interviewed with, but that’s fine I guess. Ideally I’d like to be one of these guys who works for a big company and changes to a different role every few years.
I’ve done that, and I’ve been very happy with how that’s worked out. Not every position has been great, but both of the last two have been, and some of the others were, too.
There’s a certain overhead to working for a large company, but it’s been worth it to me.