Managers, managers, managers

Today was my last day at work. I work as a short term contractor, although sometimes it's not short term. I onced worked a rolling 6 month contract for 4 years. It paid for my house and wedding, those were the days. Often I am happy to accept extensions. But sometimes I don't. When I don't it's always been down to the same cause. Managers or mismanagement.

This was particularly prevalent in my last role. I worked on a delivery team of 8. Which is quite a big team. You would imagine maybe there was 4 devs, 2 qa, and 2 manager types. Well that was not the case. I was the sole developer, and worked with one qa. Leaving 6 "managers", I put manager in quotation marks as their title may not have been "manager". Actually, here is the breakdown:

• Product Manager (Seemed to be in charge)
• Product Owner (Disciple of Product Manager)
• Project Manager (Basically a scrum master)
• Business Analyst (Not sure, wrote jira stoies)
• Tech Team Lead (Semi technical, didn't really contribute)
• QA Team Lead (Joined meetings, didn't contribute)

The product in question was a website prompt that would interupt a user on an "email us" form and suggest a link from a list of frequently asked questions. It used AI, magic AI, buzzword of the minute AI. Basically I took the query and used natural language processing to find if one of the list of FAQs matched the query. No big deal, delivered in a week sort of feature. DELIVERED IN A WEEK SORT OF FEATURE. Well no. The project is in it's second year.

It's not in it's second year because it isn't live. It is, it's delivered. But the managers are still managing. They are looking for ways to improve it's performance. To find out more key metrics. To get more funding (3.75 million a year!), so they can continue the project. Despite the feature long being delivered. And, to be fair, the business are delighted. They have delivered an AI product. wow. They are ahead of the curve when it comes to tech, they are basically bleeding edge. I kid you not, they even got an award, at an award ceremony. Attended by people how were not even involved in the project. They got to dress up fancy and go on stage to accept some crystal ware.

So why did I decide to leave such a successful team? well because my soul was destroyed. The reality is, it's a small feature of a website. It took me a few days to implement, and I've been in meetings about it ever since. Meetings that go nowhere, because there are two many managers. And when there is more than one manager, and layers of management above them, no decision can ever be made. Teams just exist in a state of perpetual wheel spinning. Lot's of meetings, no outcomes. Lot's of being busy but not achieving anything. Honestly my head is wrecked. But I had to stay to earn money to provide for my family. I did offer my help to other teams, but a manager told me that it would make the delivery team I was supposed to be on look bad. As it might seem they didn't have enough work for me… they didn't!

The funny thing is, today is my last day. And there is no replacement. So the team will now consist of 6 managers, and a qa. So not only did I feel redundant, I was redundant.

I'm now going to take some time off, and work on some products of my own. I'm going to give myself 6 months at least. This will help me build up my confidence to re-enter the workplace, get rid of the cyncism that has built up, and develop my skills again. I've been working non stop for 15 years. So it's a well earned break. It comes at a good time. We've just finished building our house, and my wife is due to deliver our second child in December. I am a happy man.