by RogueDash1
In August of 2018, I was promoted to chief software architect of one of my company’s major programs. It was part of a billion-dollar military contract to develop critical missile technology. This was supposed to be a career maker for me, a chance to prove myself to the local directors and senior engineers. However, in January of 2021, I was demoted to senior developer of the company’s umpteenth attempt to create reusable missile software components. What went wrong?
The answer, in part, touches on the socio-sexual hierarchy (SSH) and on taking the ticket. In regards to the SSH, I am a Delta with a couple of Gamma tendencies, namely, conflict avoidance and a desire to always be seen as right. But a chief architect is best suited to a Bravo or Alpha. My job wasn’t merely to design the software, but to also direct a team of developers to implement the design. There was a mismatch between my new position and my ranking in the SSH.
My first major mistake was spending too much time developing and not enough time designing. Developing was no longer my job but I refused to give it up. Partly I just love writing code. But I also thought I was good enough to design it in my head and develop it faster and better myself instead of writing out all the details and giving it to another engineer to go code and test. That wasn’t true and I was too long in recognizing it and even longer in acting on it. The latent gamma-cy in that attitude is death for a leader.
My second major mistake was not explaining my designs well enough. I did not like explaining things to my team and I never documented my designs in sufficient detail. This is a straight leadership failure. My job was to lead my team in implementing software, and most of the time I resented them asking me what to do. This in particular highlights the problem of putting a Delta in a leadership position. I want to be given a task to go do, not be the one creating tasks and assigning them to people. This is something I still haven’t overcome.
My third problem comes around to taking the ticket. Or rather, not taking the ticket, which is why I don’t call it a mistake. The company expects its managers to put in considerable accounts of overtime. My team was required to work 60+ hours a week, and my immediate boss was working 90+ hours a week, which I was implicitly expected to match. Plus, I was supposed to be doing an extra 20 hours a week supporting other programs that needed architects. Throw in the commute and that’s 100% of my waking hours. No time for my wife and kids, no time for friends, no working out, no hobbies, no rest. I simply didn’t work that much. I rarely went over 50 hours a week.
My failures as a leader were personal failures. But I think the company would have forgiven them. Mediocre leadership is acceptable to them in their engineers. But not putting the program first above all else, that couldn’t stand. I think the first few managers up the chain merely thought it was good business to replace me with someone who would work twice as much as me. But we know, and someone or something high up in the company knows, that getting employees to ignore all that they love for the beast system is selling your soul.
Sacrificing health and family for a bit of wealth and the respect of Satan’s military industrial complex hurts your soul. That’s obvious. But now I think promoting engineers ill-suited for leadership into management is just another ticket, just another way to subtly hurt people. There are many ways to trick a person into selling his soul, and the modern system likes to pile them one atop the other. How many traps do we avoid only to fall into ones we missed?
I’m not sure that conflict avoidance on its own is a Gamma trait. I can see conflict avoidance in person + wall of text keyboard warrior together as a tell.
Also.. keep the Deltas happy, folks!
“But now I think promoting engineers ill-suited for leadership into management is just another ticket, just another way to subtly hurt people.”
It’s less personal than that. A lot less.
Mostly it’s a way to hurt organizations. They do it in sales too. Take your best sales guy, make him a sales manager. You get a crappy manager AND lose your best sales guy. Such a deal! It may not even be SSH. Your best sales guys often get a rush from selling, so you take that away.
Not everyone adapts. Incidentally, this hurts some people.
Task performance and management are two different things. Organizations without the ability to determine in advance who is good for management throw people in the meat grinder, and see who adapts and survives. All organizations are imperfect here, though some are better than others. The ones who are better at it will be far better managed, because most won’t even correct their mistakes.
Nobody’s offering you a ticket. They aren’t thinking about you that much.
Tickets are self-offering in a sense. When the corporate culture requires something soul-sucking of you, no individual has to offer anything. It is implicit.
That’s also a management failure set: (1) wrong pick for the job; (2) they’re working a too-flat management structure; (3) failure to plan for failure and problems; (4) “Arbeit Macht frei” – no it don’t.
1st and 2nd level supervisors didn’t recognize this, counsel you, or rearrange jobs. Their failures led to this. If they’re working 90 hour weeks, they’re doing two jobs – pick one; their boss’ fault. They don’t sound productive, or smart enough to get a functional skeleton in place first for possible overlapping tasks.
I left a PM office (staff duty) for reasons like that. The Deputy PM was counseled by three PMs, then finally rotated to a harmless assignment.
Third PM read the files, figured out he was the cause of all the staff issues, dissension, and departures. Problem solved. Guy was Gamma with a Delta streak, unable to cope with multi-track projects or missed deadlines in R&D. Nice in small doses, aggravating after a long one.
I don’t think the ticket has to be personal. Trading your soul for a management position because that’s just how the corporate ladder works is still trading your soul.
As, Silent Draco said, this sounds like higher level management failure on steroids. You should have had a first or second level supervisor discussing expectations with you, then following up with how you are meeting those expectations and giving you feedback, perhaps even giving you some recommendations on how to do that. The people responsible for the system engineering aspects of the program should have seen the weak spots in the structure and advised and advocated for changes (more manning, reduction in duties, swap in personnel, etc), especially if this program had seen repeated failures to successfully complete. A lessons learned program should have been in place after Failure #2 to advise subsequent teams on failure points and areas of success, allowing for problem avoidance and a means of collecting best practice potentials, as well as throw yellow and red flags if you show signs of replicating past failure results.
You may be fighting against other issues out of your control, as this company looks to be maximizing profits at the cost of necessary labor, meaning that they don’t care if they burn out a significant number of employees in the process of reaching the end state goal. The company will dispose of the ruined ones and hire others at a lower entry level salary. The executive staff has likely lost sight of the company’s original goals and substituted a profit motive for each of the founding core values. While this isn’t necessarily an SSH issue, I’d bet that there are plenty of Gammas with Harvard MBAs in the upper structures of the company, generating some metastasizing cancer cells.
I don’t think the management structure was too flat so much as everything was wildly understaffed for the job we were doing. Everyone except me was working in the 70+ hours a week range. Burnout was a major problem. The R&D software team had near 100% turnover each year (I was leading the production team). And the company couldn’t or wouldn’t hire people fast enough. The company had underbid and won several enormous contracts and didn’t have the staff for even one of them, much less all of them.
Failure 3 up there made me laugh. It’s literally against corporate policy to plan for failure and I got reprimanded a couple times for trying. In the end my manager and I just padded the schedule a bit for expected failures.
You might find this particular talk about being an architect very helpful.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3LtQWxhqjqI