> Worse still, our leads were overworked and lacked the power to create change. Any team needs expert leadership to thrive, and expert leaders need support from the people they report to so they can do what’s necessary. Our leadership did not have that support. The V8 team as a whole had the misfortune of reporting to the leader of the Chrome organization, a careless man who continues to have one of the worst approval ratings in the entire company. In my career I’ve seen managers cry multiple times, and this is one of the places that happened. A manager should never have to ask whether they’re a coward, but that happened here.
I just spent four years at a company as a lead who uses an internal hierarchy that reinforces this. We hire non-technical managers or managers who did not reach Senior or Staff engineering ranks. Discussions with them are long and often feel like saying your ABC's backwards and forwards. Tech leads are leveled under managers and managers carry technical decision making authority proxied as business decision making. I started getting heart palpatations and my depression and cynicism was starting to reach levels that resembled what they were when I first got out of the Marines after less than a year off deployment.
Just leave. It's not worth spending time in a place where the company has such a disorganized idea of itself that it prioritizes the people who know how to make the cakes input below that of the people who push things from one column into the other. There are no amount of "hard conversations" you can have with folks like this. You speak two different languages from two different perspectives.
I just spent four years at a company as a lead who uses an internal hierarchy that reinforces this. We hire non-technical managers or managers who did not reach Senior or Staff engineering ranks. Discussions with them are long and often feel like saying your ABC's backwards and forwards. Tech leads are leveled under managers and managers carry technical decision making authority proxied as business decision making. I started getting heart palpatations and my depression and cynicism was starting to reach levels that resembled what they were when I first got out of the Marines after less than a year off deployment.
Just leave. It's not worth spending time in a place where the company has such a disorganized idea of itself that it prioritizes the people who know how to make the cakes input below that of the people who push things from one column into the other. There are no amount of "hard conversations" you can have with folks like this. You speak two different languages from two different perspectives.