Recently I had a chance to catch up with an ex college who has left the workplace a few months early than me, he was very quiet in last a few months before he left, so I didn’t really know what happened, after this catch up I had the understanding now why he left and why this workplace is becoming kind of weird.
Before talking to him, I had already felt something wrong in the workplace, for example the tech leader sometimes made a tech decision without any communication to any one, for example he has decided to use DotNet for a new project and all engineers got a question marks on their face.
After talking to him, he felt the weirdness the same as me, we concluded that he was not qualified as his position, this may sound a bit subjective, but trust me you may agree with me when you experience the same.
A bit of background
This company started about in about 2017, it is focusing AI products, I joined there in 2019, I have found the work sometimes a bit stressful but overall it is not a bad workplace, and this was my original thoughts about the company. It was acquired by a US company in end of 2020. Everything was not perfect but most of time it is OK, we had nice people and work together well. Things changed in last 3 to 4 years, there were 3 or 4 rounds of redundancy and the workplace became different.
- Managers were fired first which make all work progress afterwards super hard.
- Tech Leaders left, but there is no promotion for existing engineers or new hiring for the replacement.
- Each rounds of people’s leaving, there were no knowledge transfer.
- There was no retrospective or no feedback.
- People may argue in the meeting and conflicts may never be resolved, but keeping silent.
- What were promised by previous managers did not count after firing the managers.
I don’t know what do you feel about it, but you may simply conclude that this workplace may not work efficiently.
What my previous colleague mentioned
- Besides what were mentioned above, he saw the same thoughts about the leader’s tech decision making.
- The leader has no vision and plan even his position is high, but prefer micro management on small things, which makes him feel not trusted .
- The leader complained to him saying he has no people management skill, however just complain but didn’t give any guidance.
What make a person capable for the position?
IMO,
You don’t need to be the top one but you need to have enough relative skills or open to feedback from people who have a different view or better on it.
Our previous leader seems like having no management or leading experience, and he rejected people’s feedback. Sometimes I feel I am fool as well, that I couldn’t tell this early.
From this previous colleague, he suspect that the leader intentionally do in this way to slow the work pace and increase the toxic level in workplace, to his own benefits.
This could be true, or not, this is I am not sure, but it could explain what happened well in some way.
Summary
This is a lesson to me to not being like that, no matter which position I am in.