Photo by Nubelson Fernandes on Unsplash
I knew a developer from a large local company. He was great at his job enjoying writing codes, building web applications, and troubleshooting issues.
More than five years into his first job, his career was not moving in the direction he had hoped. He left the company in search of a better prospect. After a couple of disappointments, he returned to his first company. With hope. The team he was to join was his past neighbors, and he would be a product manager — something he considered an upgrade over a developer position.
Or so he thought. He left less than 2 years later abandoning his product manager aspiration and going back to writing codes.
Even though he knew the people he worked with, the circumstances were different now. The company unveiled a new branding, hired a new CIO, and partnered with a big IT consulting company. New management preferred outsourcing and off-the-shelf products, even the ones that were core to their business. They embarked on a multi-year hundreds-of-millions-dollars program to replace their core systems with commercial software. At the same time, they followed their partner’s advice and adopted a different approach to IT management. Overnight, people in the old IT department became product managers, project managers, service managers, and release managers. They were hardworking, committed, and capable people, but they were unprepared in their new roles to handle the complexity and directionless the new organizational structure and outsourcing relationship turned out to be.
Many IT services were outsourced to the partner who then further subcontracted them to other companies. Whatever rate the company paid the partner, the sub-providers received less. Even less so were the people who worked for them. While management boasted of transformation, partnership, productivity, agile, etc…, the reality was very much different. Ground people, both staff and contractors, were confused, squeezed, understaffed and overworked.
Having recovered from the 2008 financial crisis, businesses thrived with growth and innovative ideas. Change requests and strategic projects were plenty for our developer-turn-product manager. He met with users interviewing them, brainstorming with them, problem-solving with them, and for them… He picked up new soft skills, learned new domains, met new people, exposed to new perspectives.
However, things often went haywire when it came to IT processes and delivery. It was mandated top-down that the outcome of collecting business requirements, clarifying business objectives, understanding the business context, and designing actual changes to existing systems must be brief, around 1 or 2 pages long. Often and understandably, the inexperienced, poor English, underpaid, understaffed, and overworked outsourced contractors were not able to grasp what needed to be done, despite quoting high numbers of man-days for each change — to make up for their low man-rate. There were repeated clarifications, frequent redo, misassumptions, missed features, plenty of defects, and consequently plenty of production incidents.
The situation was the same for pretty much all his peers. It was stressful for everyone involved. Ignorant was the management in response to pleas to fix the situation: “They [outsourced vendor] are supposed to…”. It was their findings, conclusion, and solution to most incidents and escalations related to the disastrous reality.
His dream of a developer-to-product-manager upgrade shattered. He eventually “reverted” back to being a developer.
This narrative of our developer-turned-product manager illuminates the unpredictable nature of career shifts and the profound impact of organizational changes. The story illustrates the detrimental effects of poor culture and insufficient support structures, emphasizing the critical need for organizations to navigate change and manage outsourcing relationships with a keen understanding of their workforce’s dynamics and well-being.
Career shifts are unpredictable, especially in tech!
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