Episode 538: toxic manager or low impact project and over-staffed?

In this episode, Dave and Jamison answer these questions:

1. Thank you for this podcast it’s the only tech podcast I listen to these days, I think it’s more relevant than ever, and it has definitely helped me in my career.

   I am a Staff Software Engineer in a multi-national software company based in Germany (Where I’m also based). I have been working on a very important project that’s pretty visible and has the potential to make a ton of money, I have been very happy working on it.

   Recently however, I got into a politically weird situation, a recent restructuring moved this project under a new manager. I don’t really get a long with the new manager. This person is known for being toxic, a colleague heard him recently say that everyone working with him is stupid, but when talking to him I don’t exactly remember him saying anything bright tbh.

   In my initial conversations with him, he told me that I don’t have a chance for any career progress working in his team, and that I wouldn’t have much freedom either, he would like to be the final word on pretty much anything.

   So I decided to speak to his supervisor, who directly ignored my complains and offered me to move to a different team. I accepted the change since for me working with a bad manager is the worst thing that can happen. The new manager is good, but the product is quite niche and rarely get’s mentioned anywhere, and it has a very few customers

   I’m concerned about where my career is heading, since what I’m working on seems quite unimportant, I’m afraid the company could decide to drop this product at any point and fire the team (that can also happen in Germany these days btw, it just costs them a bit more severance)

   what would you do in my situation? would you try to seek a different opportunity internally, externally or just wait? Thank you in advance!

2. Infinite listener, zero time caller.

   A year ago, I got promoted to staff engineer in our 25-person startup where I’ve been for 7 years. One month later, a re-org happened and my team dwindled to just me and one other person, reporting directly to the founder - who also went full Founder Mode and now run our tiny team pretty top-down.

   The rest of the broader engineering org is focused on machine learning and data scientist thingies I don’t really understand or feel like I can contribute to.

   I’m struggling to do actual staff-level work and I’m starting to wonder if pushing for that fancy title was even a good idea, especially if I cannot show up at a new place and tell them “I am worthy of many moneys because I did X, Y, Z”.

   Help, should I quit and go elsewhere - and if yes, can I even aim for a staff-level role or do I have to go lower and take the (substantial in my area) pay cut? 🥲

   Ooooor, would it hurt to stick around longer and see if things change? At least until my small kids are less small, and I have more time to read books about what a staff engineer is supposed to do so I can pretend in an interview that I do those things.

   Love for the soft skillet nation and thanks for all the laughs over the years <3