IT/Software career thread: Invert binary trees for dollars.

Hmmm, actually it appears my direct manager is also leaving and me leaving came as such a surprise he didn't want to announce until I was gone.

LOL.

TJT said:

In the office this last week. CIO tells me to my face I can come back anytime.

I don't really know how to interpret that. Is he just being nice? Is he being serious? Would I get the much higher market rate if I did return? He isn't one to just say bullshit so I think he's serious but I've never had that kind of interaction at a job.

Also I found out that 40% of Jira tickets for our org were either created by me or assigned to me. The TJT sized hole is going to be quite big indeed.

Click to expand...

We have those where I work, we call them boomerangs. As ShakyJake mentioned, sometimes there is a definite "grass is greener" effect. In my company's case, it is often they go to chase startup money/stock and it doesn't pan out.

My company though... it's facing a situation now where they did a re-org. It combined two groups of people doing different jobs into one large pool because we desperately needed more people doing one of those jobs. (One was the more "salesy" pre-sales technical , and the other was a much deeper "systems architect" style position who came in to help with deep and heavy technical lifting for large deals). As a result they now have a large team full of people and none are happy. I joke about how there is a spectrum we all exist on. Some of us are on the "PT Barnum" side, the natural showmen/evangelists, and other are on the Nikola Tesla side , i.e. the deep geniuses who might not really dig the constant human interaction. As you might imagine, both are needed roles in a technology sales org, and neither would really enjoy being the other. Then add onto this they rebuilt the comp plan into one where everybody in the group is essentially taking a 10% pay cut because the OTI (On Target Incentive) is functionally unobtainable now.

There is obvious consternation about it. People in other parts of the company openly empathize, etc... Our managers are in the "We feel your pain, we've asked them for fixes in a few ways, and "they" won't..." Mostly because the top of the company is in a huge "Everything must cut costs" mode, and the SVP over our group sold himself into the job by selling this new model as the "way of the future" and is committed to it. The best the managers are saying now is "Wait, and maybe we'll get this correct next FY", which is what they were telling us at this point last year. (This model is in year 2)

It's hitting the boiling point somewhat now. Since December we have been losing about 1 really top tier talent per week. (These are guys I know as they are guys I went to when I hit an area where I had to "go find a deeper expert") A few are finding other roles in the org, most are leaving, most of those to our competitors. We're at the point now where they're a stream of "Hey, can I find one of you who can jump on this deal?" only to find out it's because one or more of the people who had been handling the deal left. And when we ask what is being done, what is being planned, or even for someone with the agency to take action to admit and own the problem we just get silence. Which I suppose at this point is their answer.

Sucks as I'm in my mid 50's and I was holding forth dreams of this being the last stop for me before I enter my "Go live in a bog and when a new chosen one arrives they will get a vision to seek you out to complete their training" phase of my life. But at least I figure I have the steam in my belly for one more real go somewhere. Now just to find it because I'm also finding out ageism is a thing and many smaller compelling companies don't want to hire someone in their 50's.

Like I said. I genuinely enjoyed working there. They just historically pay below market rate and the market rate for data platform engineering exploded in the past 5 years. It significantly eclipses app dev now and is simply far too much money for me to ignore. As I was moonlighting for 5 years pay was not really a concern as I had double income streams anyway.

If they were willing to pony up for the market rate of staff SWE, data platform or something similar then I would probably happily come back. I don't think that happens anytime soon though. They are also going through a re-org and it doesn't look good. The company is trying to sell and had some potential buyers back out in 2025. The solution to that is to reposition everything about the company to make it easier to sell.

Pretty sure that team I was on is going to be forced into the GTM organization as the other data org already was.