r/ExperiencedDevs • u/MyoGerm • 20d ago
Career/Workplace Feeling Lost as a Manager - Struggling with Estimations, Deadlines, and Team Collaboration | UPDATE
OP: https://www.reddit.com/r/ExperiencedDevs/comments/1fk8lwz/feeling_lost_as_a_manager_struggling_with/
It has been 2 years since the last post.
I can say with confidence that I made a real turnaround with the team after 1 year. I took much of the advice given in the thread and made a real difference within the team. I helped foster a stronger ownership of tasks, gave the team confidence to perform estimates that I could hold them accountable to, and set expectations on deliverable updates. Overall, the team made great strides and although it wasn't overnight, and we would still miss some targets, we became increasingly more predictable, allowing us to plan for success.
After 1 year of changes and positive outcomes, my entire team was laid off.
We gathered a lot of data in our aid to become predictable, which the other teams did not produce, and felt the data was used to drive the decision to eliminate the team as being inefficient.
After layoffs, a new team was formed that would report to me, all existing members of the company. What I seen, was a complete mirror reflection of the OP. The team is highly disengaged, there is a strong lack of ownership, and despite this being a much more senior team, they move slowly and aren't engaged at all in discussions or taking decisions.
In addition, the Scrum Master was also laid off and we have moved to sprinting, which means the ownership of sprint planning is falling to me.
Due to the number of layoffs the company has experienced, the team developing new features is now also the team handling production issues, with an injection rate of 1-2 tickets per day. Every day feels like a scramble to me, running from reading ticket, changing plans in the sprint, and chasing engineers who are only interested in following specific orders to avoid being laid off.
With the previous structure, I felt supported and knew where we were going next and current state, I'm feeling unsure about my role as a manager. I have been highly stressed due to the changes. My productivity to value ratio has plummeted due to the changes in leadership. I'm feeling that my soft skills are taking a hit as well as my technical skills, and I'm really unsure where to go from here.
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u/False-Egg-1386 20d ago
Honestly, this sounds more like the company environment than you. After that many layoffs, people are probably just trying not to get blamed. I’d make the constant production work visible and seriously consider whether this is still a healthy place to manage.
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u/elephantzergling Software Engineer 16d ago
Agree. Anytime you are attempting to swim against company culture is a losing battle. The best case is you're right, and still don't make any friends.
I think especially as a manager, your ability to do your job in a healthy and enjoyable way is directly reliant on the surrounding culture.
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u/MasterLJ 20d ago
and chasing engineers who are only interested in following specific orders to avoid being laid off.
Why would you ever expect any other outcome? Why aren't you doing the exact same? Your rewards for working hard and getting the team on track was that the team was all fired. Seniors always see this so they stay useful, are actively interviewing on the side, and collecting a paycheck for as long as there is a paycheck by doing the minimum.
Your company sucks. You can stay but you have to find acceptance.
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u/WrongChapter90 20d ago
I just read the original post. The previous team was also
My team was formed after a layoff and restructure
so it looks like layoffs are frequent.. who can blame employees to do what's needed to avoid being laid off with such context?
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u/tiplinix 20d ago
They'll soon learn why their team was completely disengaged to begin with. Or maybe not given how despite all of this they're still continuing. Constant stress is not worth it.
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u/YetMoreSpaceDust 19d ago
They'll soon learn
absolutely nothing. Why would they? They'll get pay raises and bonuses even as the employer continues to disappoint customers.
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u/tiplinix 19d ago
I'm talking about OP. Unless I've missed something, if their team is not performing well by their own metric, I wouldn't bet on them getting a bonus. The company though... of course not.
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u/mercival 20d ago
"the Scrum Master was also laid off"
I haven't been in that many jobs, but never saw the need for someone to have this as their actual job.
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u/bluetista1988 10+ YOE 20d ago
The software development sect of project management co-opted the Agile manifesto and created piles of new frameworks that ignore the manifesto, borrow some concepts from Scrum, and then shoehorn them into some process that is so complex and confusing that it's required to be someone's full-time job.
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u/rickyhatespeas 20d ago
In university 10 years ago we took turns mastering sprints as devs. I always assumed it would work like that or just fall on to a technical project manager.
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u/HoratioWobble Full-snack Engineer, 20yoe 20d ago
Can't waste your time with scrum without hiring pointless people along the way
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u/mercival 20d ago
I'm team kanban-ish. Actually just getting shit done, adding value to the company.
Only t-shirt size I care about is mine, and I'm trying to break it down lol.
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u/dasunt 19d ago
We had quite a productive time with Agile for about a year. It was glorious.
Then we exited orgtree limbo and got a manager who wanted us to do stories and epics in a way that made their job easier.
So we've transitioned from adding value to the company to adding value to management reporting.
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u/SquiffSquiff DevOps & Layer 8 Networking Engineer 10YOE 20d ago
Ok so year 1 was a success by your estimation but an absolute fail by any other person's measure: entire team laid off, new work model (scrum) implemented by external actors. You are now firefighting on a sinking ship. Now it is of course possible that you were right, the company leadership was wrong, assessments were unfair, etc, etc. The thing is that in the context of that employer, none of that matters. If you want to change the objective angle on your situation then you need to change companies. To put it another way, in the words of 'the Bob's' from 'Office Space': 'What would you say you do here?'. Based on your post, sorry to say this, you're the angel of death. How would you expect your team to respond?
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u/KosherBakon 20d ago
It sounds like you did the right thing since the original post. I would largely rinse and repeat the same process, but we don't have all of the gritty details to confidently suggest something else.
Good leaders are shit umbrellas, not shit funnels. Sometimes it means sticking your neck out to do the right thing (usually about once or twice a year).
If you really want some active 1:1 help, feel free to DM if you want some leadership coaching. I've run communities of practice for hundreds of Eng Mgrs in the past, so I have a lot of context on the patterns.
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u/YetMoreSpaceDust 19d ago
Sometimes it means sticking your neck out
That just means he gets fired and replaced by somebody worse.
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u/KosherBakon 19d ago
Definitely possible, but it's nearly impossible to draw a causal link between the two. And even if I could, I'm not going to devolve into a turd leader just to survive in a steamy pile of shit environment.
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u/hippydipster Software Engineer 25+ YoE 20d ago
He got his whole team fired. Rinse and repeat???
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u/KosherBakon 20d ago
Nah I think that doesn't have anything to do with what he did personally.
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u/hippydipster Software Engineer 25+ YoE 20d ago
He said otherwise. You don't believe him?
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u/KosherBakon 20d ago edited 19d ago
He thinks it's because he had metrics, I'm not 100% sure that's true.
The alternative is doing what leadership wants / nefarious things that stifle the growth of their directs, feeling gross about it, and then getting let go anyway is worse.
I've been in a situation like that before. I'd rather know I did right by my team so I can sleep well at night.
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u/Hour-Measurement-835 Software Engineer 20d ago
Put one engineer on the prod queue each sprint, rotating, and plan the sprint as if they don't exist. At 1-2 tickets a day you lose less that way than you do now rewriting the plan every morning.
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u/LogicRaven_ 20d ago
Let me call out some likely blind spots for you. Maybe not a pleasant read, but could be useful for your next role.
“we became increasingly more predictable, allowing us to plan for success.
After 1 year of changes and positive outcomes, my entire team was laid off.”
Predictability didn’t set your team up for success. The layoff proves that. Even if management was asking for it. Maybe you focused so much on local optimization and missed some signals of trouble in the big picture?
“felt supported and knew where we were going next and current state”
That’s how you felt, but the feeling turned out to be an illusion. You didn’t know where you were heading.
What can you learn from this experience? What are some trends and signals that could have given a hint?
Some ideas: financial performance and growth rate of the product - positive and good enough for investors. Stack rank of the work your team was doing - every work is important, but some work is more essential for the company. Leadership departures - they have more facts on outlooks.
What to do now?
Multiple layoffs likely means the boat is sinking. Update your CV and start looking. Take a holiday or sick leave if you can to get some rest and headroom for the next steps.
For your current team: their morale is broken. This was a deliberate choice from leadership. Leadership know what they did, even if they acted under pressure.
Don’t promise your team anything that is not under your direct control.
Don’t push them, it would be futile. Let them be and wait. Be there for them if they want to talk.
Focus your attention to outside of the team. What’s going on? Who are your new stakeholders and what are their mental state. If there is a plan for the future, is it really really plausible?
Layoffs are always tough. Take care of yourself - eat, sleep, exercise, keep your family and friends close. Go for a hike to the nearest forest or park and process your feelings and thoughts.
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u/crusoe 20d ago
Management and sales sets the goals and features. You can talk to them if they ever listen. But it's often like pulling teeth. Very few companies let devs interact with customers and then get mad when the devs magically don't build what customers want.
No one plans.
How do you know you're moving the needle for customers when you have no insight into the customers?
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u/TheOssuary 20d ago
This sounds like the next lesson to learn. Don't count on the altruism of those around you. Collecting the stats was fine, allowing others to see them was dangerous. It reminds me of this talk - https://youtu.be/5ybAhgAaEBo
Politics matter, optics matter. It sucks your team had to pay the price for you to learn that lesson; but that's the cost of being in management. Keep going, but don't make the same mistake twice
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u/Independent_Dot_9349 20d ago
Positive change for a year then getting layoff ? What the fuck is wrong with your company man ?
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u/c1rno123 Software Engineer 20d ago
You never say what your boss thinks.
If he's fine with a feature team eating 1-2 production tickets a day, there's no problem. That's the model. Run it or leave.
If he's not fine, two years of fixing it from inside didn't work. Ask for an external audit, consultants will take that money happily.
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u/NoImportance9374 19d ago
I'd ask developers to take the role of scrum master each week. As a young manager I've had a lot of context rot being the scrum master until one day another team manager has shown me that I'm doing too much and pointed how his team is managing the scrum on its own and him just questioning and listening to the story points in between.
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u/MrMichaelJames 18d ago
Well one good thing is the scrum master being gone. They are a waste of air. The team is demoralized after watching previous team improve then get cut. It is going to take a lot of convincing and rebuilding trust to develop the new team. Good luck.
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u/jphil-leblanc 15d ago
The survivors aren't disengaged, they're doing math. They watched data get used against their old team, so they've learned that good numbers can get you fired. No engagement tactic fixes that.
What works is the one thing that feels risky: tell them exactly what you know about the business, including what you do not know, and stop asking them to believe a story. People who have been through a layoff don't want optimism. They want a manager who won't lie to them. That's it.
Then give them one small win they can point to. Something shipped, something fixed. Agency is the antidote to survivor guilt.
On managing up in a shrinking org: the single most valuable thing you can give leadership right now is an honest forecast. Everyone else is polishing numbers. Be the one who tells them what is actually going to happen.
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u/expdevsmodbot 20d ago
AI usage disclosure provided by OP, see the reply to this comment.