I mean, being misaligned with company leadership is a great way to loose your job. I worked at a medium sized company which is known for having a good culture. Everyone was kind & helpful, there was loads of autonomy, never any kind of layoffs.
At some point, a team I worked closely with got unexpectedly fired. The entire team, including manager, just gone one day. Not for financial reasons, but because they were “not performing well.” (There were multiple people on the team who had consistently good performance reviews.)
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why that happened. Obviously if that could happen to them (fired despite good feedback), it could happen to anyone.
As far as I could tell, it’s because the CEO or CTO didn’t think the type of work they were doing was worth doing, and also didn’t think they were making a difference.
It’s good to be a self-starter, to advocate for best practices, and to keep users in mind. But at the end of the day, if that doesn’t fit into what your bosses expect from you, you’re done.
That’s why it’s important to communicate with stakeholders. Your boss needs to understand why spending time on preventative maintenance pays dividends on the long run. You can’t spend 75% of your time on stuff that doesn't look productive (which is subjective) and also not be proactive in being on the same page as your stakeholders about what’s important. At some point, they’ll get confused about what you’re actually doing day to day, and your job’s on the line.
> As far as I could tell, it’s because the CEO or CTO didn’t think the type of work they were doing was worth doing, and also didn’t think they were making a difference.
So the CEO/CTO weren't able to express their concerns and priorities and instead just fired the whole team?
If, as you say, there were no financial reasons, then the team could've been re-purposed to do more meaningful (at least in CEO/CTO eyes) work.
You are coming from a rational position with the focus on optimization. Large organizations are not rational, and rarely optimal.
Executive backlogs are so deep that purposefully re-fitting whole team to another job will never end up on the top list. You might see sometimes organization will rehire a whole new team with exact same skillset, and set them to do similar tasks. It happens because execs know how to setup things from scratch quickly, but running a re-fit is a custom project that requires problem solving and large amount of exec drive, and exec resources are extremely scarce and expensive.
From the outside this will seem totally irrational and suboptimal, not to mention unfair. But that's how large orgs operate.
IME working as a team in large companies is dangerously entrepreneurial. What I mean is that there is loose guidance on what needs solving and then it's up to you to figure out how to solve using what you have. If you stray from the original problem too far, you'd better be good at explaining why. It's dangerous because there's a lot of autonomy with the illusion of security.
Keep the original problem in mind always. Keep your head up looking out for competitor teams who might be solving your problem. Know them, align with them.
If you show up on an exec budget spreadsheet and the exec can't defend your value, then you're toast (or transferred).
At some point, a team I worked closely with got unexpectedly fired. The entire team, including manager, just gone one day. Not for financial reasons, but because they were “not performing well.” (There were multiple people on the team who had consistently good performance reviews.)
I spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out why that happened. Obviously if that could happen to them (fired despite good feedback), it could happen to anyone.
As far as I could tell, it’s because the CEO or CTO didn’t think the type of work they were doing was worth doing, and also didn’t think they were making a difference.
It’s good to be a self-starter, to advocate for best practices, and to keep users in mind. But at the end of the day, if that doesn’t fit into what your bosses expect from you, you’re done.
That’s why it’s important to communicate with stakeholders. Your boss needs to understand why spending time on preventative maintenance pays dividends on the long run. You can’t spend 75% of your time on stuff that doesn't look productive (which is subjective) and also not be proactive in being on the same page as your stakeholders about what’s important. At some point, they’ll get confused about what you’re actually doing day to day, and your job’s on the line.