Resignation Issues

The story of my resignation is a long one, but I’ll see if I can cover enough of it here.

Justice Delayed is Justice Denied

For the longest time, our company had been hemorrhaging employees with a steady stream of resignations. Part of it has to do with our devs just being too young to know how good they got it with us, at least in terms of the freedoms they enjoy and the technologies we allow them to play with. We give everyone unrestricted internet access, flexible hours, and the latest and greatest tech we can apply on our projects. We even encourage them to research on the latest tech regardless whether or not it would be immediately applicable to our projects, and we have them do a quick presentation about it in our regular dev meetings and bi-weekly tech sessions. But in the end, people still left because of the better pay they find elsewhere.

Salary adjustments came very infrequently — sometimes people would go for two years or more without any increase at all. And when there are increases, the increase usually were still quite small. I know salaries and pay grades are a sensitive issue, and companies each have their own standards, but the fact that people kept leaving for at least two years now, should mean that whatever we were giving our guys, it was below industry standard.

On the other hand, as a manager, of course I understood that the company can’t just pull money out of thin air and give everyone raises. It just makes sense that for the company to be able to provide this for its employees, the company must have sufficient profits first. I kept telling this to our devs, and mind you, I’m the one technical manager they all like, because I always tell it like it is. Upper management, on the other hand, only kept reinforcing the perception that management is just full of bullsh*t, by always promising stuff during our general assembly meetings and yet seemingly reneging on those promises repeatedly as the months wore on. The worst time came when the company had to lay off several sysads because there simply wasn’t enough billable work to go around — while only the previous year, we said we were taking measures against the worldwide economic recession so that we wouldn’t need to lay off anyone.

It was a sad state of affairs. The devs were good people, not just skilled at what they did but also great to get along with as well. But then so was my boss, the VP for Operations, as well as some other managers too. Everybody meant well, but the economics of it all just didn’t add up enough to support the increases.

Then came this really ginormous project with a very large telco. It was so huge that when we closed the deal and kicked it off last February 2010, we were in great shape to already hit our financial targets for the entire year. Now before all this happened, management already said that if we hit our targets in the first quarter, everyone would be given increases. And it looked like we were going to hit those targets afterall.

I was the Tech Manager in that project, and I saw it as my chance to prove to the devs, to the ranks, that all their perceptions about management not caring about the little people was wrong. And so I dove into the project and gave it everything I got, and then some. I would have resigned already before this, but when this chance came along, I decided against it, just to prove everyone wrong — that management are basically good people and would deliver on their promises if they could. We would hit our target for the entire year in the first quarter, with change to spare, and everyone would get their increases by April.

Everything was going so smoothly. Come Feb, I knew that our VP, our CEO, and our GM had signed off on the adjustments already. All of us managers painstakingly did performance evaluations and found ways to justify increases for everyone (well, except for a two or three non-performers).

Then something happened. When March came around, Chairman vetoed everything. She had everyone re-evaluated. When we stood our ground and still justified everybody’s performance evals, she thought that the company should follow the same compensation model as one of the other large telcos. Rather than give out adjustments this April, we would just provide bonuses in the form of extra 14th, 15th, or even 16th months pay, depending on the company’s income during the year. It makes sense, really — bonuses would be tied directly with company performance as a whole. Except for the timing.

The timing SUCKS.

What was really painful was that I’d convinced two senior devs from leaving us last February, on the promise of a very real possibility of an increase by April. I’d convinced them to forgo better opportunities elsewhere, on a promise that never happened. Even if the new compensation scheme were to take effect sometime this year (it hasn’t yet, and it’s July already!), it would not be retroactive. How lame is that!

I had nothing to stand on anymore. I had no ammunition to defend our management anymore. I can’t argue against anyone anymore — our management were assholes afterall.

Cleaning Up After Other People’s Mistakes

This really big project I just mentioned? Until recently, its been nothing but one new crisis every single day. The kicker? I’d set some drop-dead deadlines for our dependencies to be provided by the client, but our brilliant CEO (who brokered the deal and is effectively the account manager) seemed to be more concerned with looking good and kept moving the drop-dead deadlines back. Mind you, the deadline for our deliverables was tied directly to the physical grand opening of a large store, so our project had an immovable deadline. Therefore it was essential that we got everything we needed — all our dependencies: access to dev or staging environements for the legacy systems we needed to integrate to, the data models of all these legacy systems, the file formats for data dumps, etc, etc, ad infinitum — by the drop-dead deadline I’d specified. But the CEO just whizzes by and moves my drop-dead dates to accommodate the client, all just to look good.

The result? In order to meet our immovable deadline, we had to do lots of overtime. Sometimes our devs would go on a 36-hour shift! How sick is that? They started feeling like slaves. People were getting sick. What’s more, people started making mistakes. We even worked on weekends. This went on for four weeks, and we compressed 4 to 6 month’s worth of dev work into just one calendar month!

So we went and delivered. Store got launched, systems ran, everyone was happy. Except us, the dev team, along with the qa and ba teams.

So Finally, I Resigned

I only waited for the project’s June 30 deliverables to be met. Apart from wanting to prove to the rank-and-file guys that not all of management were asswipes, I wanted to prove myself to our company’s upper management that I can play their showbiz-look-good-to-the-client game, and yet still kick ass as a Tech Manager and deliver the technical goods. Now that that’s done, I got no more reason to stay.

Hopefully, the pain of my departure will shock upper management enough for them to come to their senses and take care of whatever resources they have left.

Lazy Weekend with Lance

We hadn’t planned it, but yesterday after work, we picked up Lance from Cubao and brought him home with us. Usually, every Friday, I drop off Riannon at Cubao on the way to work, then just pick her up on the way home. This time around, Lance came home with us! It wasn’t planned at all — our plan was to get him when I get a long weekend or break, like the 2-week break I’m going to have this August. But the little 4-yr old insisted he come with us! We hadn’t had any quality time for so long already and we missed each other so much — and he just really wanted to come along yesterday!

This weekend is turning out to be a stark contrast to the hellish weekend overtime binge we did on our project for four whole weeks straight a month or so ago. And it just feels awesome! 🙂

Resignation Filed!

Nothing like a resignation to start a new blog! Or is that other way around? Nothing like starting a new blog with a post about a resignation? Whatever!

So yeah, I filed my resignation this week — last Thursday, in fact. Everybody generally took it well, though you could tell their world just got shaken. I mean, having the Tech Manager leave a company’s biggest cash-cow project would rock any startup like ours. Especially just after two major releases and another on the way by next month! My boss the VP accepted my resignation and we had a one-on-one as if we were peers, rather than boss-subordinate, and he respected my reasons for leaving and was supportive of my decision. The CEO and de facto account manager for the project tried to talk me out of it, as expected. He even implied that he would give me a “Technical Director” promotion! Gosh its good to feel wanted! But… uhmmm, no thanks! My partner PM was more visibly shocked, however. Still, she’d known my issues all this time anyway, so she eventually came around.

What I need to do now is to tell the rest of team. I keep imagining I would give some really inspiring speech in front of the troops. But that would be even more effective if I could convince our VP to put this senior dev who’d been long overdue a promotion, into the Technical Manager post for our project to replace me. He already has the leadership clout to draw all the devs to  him automagically, so everyone can immediately concentrate on the work at hand, rather than focus on adapting to some other new personality coming into the team.

So where am I moving to? Well, all I can say is, it won’t be a manager post anymore, rather it will be a purely technical position. I’d been hired as an expert invididual contributor, a technical architect at a leading multinational software company. But first! — I’ll be getting a two-week vacation from my last day of my old job to the first day of my new one. Can’t wait! 🙂