Clean out your gear

I was informed this week that my job title would be disappearing at Microsoft and that I should be looking for another job. I don’t want to get into the legality of it because I don’t think HR would allow these guys to do something so questionable that they create legal risk for the company.

I will have worked for Microsoft for 18 years in October. It has been a good job. It has paid me well, allowing me to provide for my family and myself.

It has not always been a joy. For most of my time there, I have worked with smart people and average management. There have been exceptions. Some of my direct managers have understood and valued “leadership” but this is the most glaring weakness in the poor managers. Perhaps because I think of myself as “blue collar,” I have a dim view of management. I think my view of management has more to do with working at start-ups and small companies where decisions have a clear and direct effect on everyone.

The big take-away is the more personal idea that I might be unemployed soon. So many of my work friends have been in this position or worse that I can’t really complain about that. It is a fact of life in this industry lately. I don’t fully understand it because there are so many articles about how the tech field is booming and they cannot fill the roles. Studying tech is as much of a sure thing now as it ever was.

Industries change. Knowledge becomes obsolete. That’s all rational.

What pisses me off is the callous way this has been handled. I’m angry because I work with quality folks who were doing their job. They had little to nothing to do with the management changes that are leading to re-organizing the team. Our role is Content Engineer. You can think of this as the people behind the scenes who make a web site work. Or anything that goes across the net to you. If you have get “help” in a product, a content engineer created it. The old names were “builder” or “production”.

For a long time I was a writer who worked with a builder in production to get my stuff published. I think that clarifies things. I have been a content engineer for two years and I have loved it.

Now that all content is delivered over the internet, the role requires a fair amount of new learning. Almost everyone in my team is a versatile programmer who works in scripting or the web world. You need to know back-end stuff like SQL and front-end stuff like Bootstrap or JavaScript. Some of us, are more like project leads. Some are more technical. Usually two people are paired up to design and then build whatever is needed.

The company is saying nope. Don’t need that. Don’t want that. They want to push the PM role into a bona fide PM organization. And the technical role into a bona fide software development organization. This will not work. It has been tried at least two different times in my years and it has failed and results in a bad experience for the content developers (who used to be called “writers” and “editors”).

I don’t know why it fails. It makes sense to try it. It just hasn’t worked. It turns out that the domain knowledge is more important than any manager thinks. But that’s an example of failure. That’s an example of management not really trying to understand the problem. They come in with a pre-determined way to fix things. My current skip level boss is a guy who does not have original thoughts. He applies practices that he learns about or says yes to. And that makes me angry.

I don’t feel that I should have a guaranteed paycheck. I don’t think that management should be perfect. But I do think it is a reasonable expectation to apply critical thinking and maybe ask a few questions before launching into a 2 year odyssey of misery. How do you think the people who stick around will feel about it? Even in the service of self-interest, it is a better idea to be a bit more circumspect about applying a new fad system to a largely functioning organization that is now bereft of domain knowledge and distrustful of the bosses.

Plus, by the by, if you do the research and discover that your bosses want you to implement something that you feel will not work, maybe it a reasonable thing to expect you to say no. Maybe someone in your position with your level of experience should have also developed that skill.

I am saying this: do your homework and do the right thing; and when you don’t agree with your bosses, find a way to say no or compromise. Otherwise, I’m left to think you are dumb, uninformed and lacking a backbone.

How should I feel about this? Because what I feel is anger.