[technofiend]

I was leading a team of thirty five people in the US and India and working weekends and holidays powering through a death march of one terrible release after another. I got a lot of accolades for work; called out at town halls and even a hand written letter from our CTO thanking me for everything I'd done.

Things were slowly improving as we collected metrics to improve poor code quality and shoddy releases that were killing us all. (This predates SRE/devops by a decade.) The AD teams had no choice but to add some quality control but still things weren't perfect.

At the end of our third year of this five year project the project manager who worked with me on one portion of what we did was promoted to executive director but I was not.

Within a few days of learning I was passed over for promotion I also accidentally discovered my grandfather had died of cancer. I didn't even know he was sick! No one in the family told me. I just found out about the funeral when someone asked me if I planned to attend.

While at the funeral I made plans to have dinner with my younger sister and to go to Las Vegas with my grandmother. Soon after my sister was dead, killed in the line of duty as a police officer. A month later my grandmother was dead from open heart surgery.

The whole time this was happening people were coming up to me at work asking how did that guy get promoted instead of you? How, indeed. The challenge for me was staying motivated and putting on a happy face for employees and not quitting. Frankly if I'd been able to I would have.

The part that makes me laugh now is at the time we still did exceeds, meets, needs improvement stack ranking. My boss told me if he had made me exceeds I would have gotten the promotion but he couldn't because of politics: the guy who sponsored the fellow who did get promoted managed to get my ranking knocked down so I wasn't competing with his fellow for ED. To top it off my mentor dropped me: he said if I was no longer an exceeds it was a waste of his time.

Despite falling into a black pit of depression I powered through the motions of being a people manager but frankly I couldn't take any part of managing careers of others any more when I knew the system was so broken and I had wasted years away from family and friends. My solution was to go back to being a hands on technical person: I transfered to our internal IT group and started over. I'm back to leading teams and getting kudos from the top of the house but still if I'm honest I feel like I failed my biggest challenge by choosing to just move on. On the other hand I'm certainly far happier and no longer ignoring family and friends to work 80-100 hour weeks. On balance that's probably for the best.

[camjohnson26]

The politics game is a stairway to nowhere. Good on you for getting out of it, even the ones at the top are always worried about losing it, it’s much wiser not to play at all.

[jariel]

"the guy who sponsored the fellow who did get promoted managed to get my ranking knocked down so I wasn't competing with his fellow for ED."

You're working at a toxic place and putting your own self worth up to them for measurement - this is not healthy.

People out of school until age 35 sometimes have a hard time truly separating their work from their professional identities, something we could all work on.

So sorry for your losses, I wish you well.

[technofiend]

Thank you.

[rattlehead101]

Thanks for sharing. Had a somewhat similar experience to yours that your comment took me back to.

I used to lead a global team of 80+ devs at a senior management level. I inherited my team which was an absolute train wreck with a poor track record of poor performance who delivered nothing causing much angst to the business. Over 3 years, rebuilt the entire team, let go of these who brought toxicity/incompetence, set strategy, tightened comms and developed leaders with clear lines of responsibility and accountability. Shipped one product after another. Put the team on the map internally and externally. Accolades from every part of the organization. Made my leaders look like world-beaters. I was known to be an authority on my subject area and the rising star. My reports looked up to me, I inspired my team buy being an empathetic leader and I was hailed as a change-agent. Frankly, I outdid myself and it was one of those times, we sometimes have in our careers where we fire on all cylinders without a single misstep.

Come time for promotion, I had a rude awakening when my boss got promoted thanks to my back-breaking work but I got passed over and to add to the insult my newly promoted boss decided to fill the vacancy by bringing in a transplant from another part of the company to add an new layer. The new guy was well known to be the biggest ass-kisser in the organization so a total smooth operator to his credit despite being clueless in the domain. My challenge was to continue leading my team with a straight face despite taking this gut punch every day when faced to my new reality. It was a depressing time when I was also dealing with a personal loss in my family. I had naively assumed my work did the talking and my personality, relationships and overall competence/qualifications would continue my ascent. Its hard articulating this but the amount of time my own achievements were reinforced by outcomes and my prior leadership made me feel I could do no wrong until this point.

My big mistake was that my ego fed a sense of entitlement that made the change harder to deal with. My reports were now well entrenched and confident as I had always wanted them to be with large teams. I sensed a feeling of disappointment from my own teams over my lack of elevation and the impact it would have on their careers. Over a period of time, I went from being the shining star to someone about whom everyone wondered as to what’s wrong. I felt vulnerable in taking decisions that I once took confidently and my confidence took a beating. I mentally beat myself up as well for not playing my political cards well as well as sometimes questioning my own abilities. Added to the daily ignominy of reporting to someone obviously not qualified, was every decision/outreaches/opportunities/credit that were usually mine in the past due to my domain expertise now being passed over to my new boss who would emphasize the same with a lack of class and competence. I also got a sense that the new guy resented my abilities and would now start having direct lines of communication with my reports sometimes even not giving me visibility. He just wanted to get rid of me since my presence probably constantly reminded him of his lack of involvement in this teams prior success. People who would consult me for critical decisions would tend to leave me out as I was not deemed that important considering I was no longer the main decision maker. There were so many incidents that I unfortunately still recall that happened over a 1 year period that I stayed on after this development.

For me though, that was a lesson in humility and my own vulnerabilities. My swagger is gone and I don’t things for granted as I once did. Thanks to my own qualifications and experience, I had several external opportunities the beckoned that I could execute on and did do so. However, that feeling of being totally ripped off, a sense of anguish at losing something I built, sadness at dealing with a team that you built and loved that turned on you still remains and part of me is still bitter. I still love leading teams and getting the best out of people but the politics is toxic and can seriously damage your physical and mental well-being. I know why some of the best leaders I know remain relegated to lower levels of their organizations and I respect them even more knowing the balancing act they deal with. I don’t get too attached to teams, products, jobs anymore and am prepare to lose it overnight and rebuild. I continue leading large teams but I could still get a job as an individual contributor and be happy with it if it ever came to that.

[technofiend]

Thank you for sharing that.