I am normally a helpful person who dives in to help, but when it comes from above that I’ll be switching teams with no warning, it robs me of my autonomy, my investment in my team and product, and makes me feel like even more of a cog. Yes, it’s good to broaden my experience, and maybe if it was handled better it would have felt better. But my job isn’t just coding, it’s social skills and research and all of that. Especially in the remote environment, it’s hard. So this does feel bad.
Our product team failed to pull together a clear path forward, so I understand why this is being done, but it is still alienating. Is this a normal thing to expect in future roles?
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I think it can be normal but without warning is rude.
Thinking of instances where I’ve seen it happen:
- they did a big reorg to avoid layoffs. Good sign it’s time to start looking. The company didn’t exactly pull itself back after that.
- company got acquired and incompetent management at the new parent company thought we had more people than we needed. Another red flag, since they made decisions without consulting the individuals affected, and against the recommendations of middle management who knew the context.
- an underperforming junior dev who showed potential but had clearly burned out and also had some interpersonal problems with specific people. They wanted to give him a clean start and a second chance. Given the job market at the time, it was a good deal in some ways, but it’s the same kind of red flag as being put on a pip. Better to find some place new to get a real clean start if you can.
Anyhow, tldr, it’s never been a good thing in my experience. wouldn’t hurt to start looking for other options.
I don’t know anything about your job or the company your working at, but just reassigning you to another team without any previous conversation or asking you how you would feel about that shows a really bad management. A no go if you ask me.
To me, it doesn’t sound like a “no go”. To me, it sounds like “consider to go [elsewhere]”.
It really depends on the company. I’m in upper management and have had to move ICs within org and across org to account for ET level strategic changes. It doesn’t happen often at my company, but it’s never easy for the folks who end up getting shuffled; when reorging, you really want to move teams, not people. You can tell a lot about your leadership on whether or not they acknowledge the impact on people’s lives; high EQ is incredibly important for long term happiness of your teams and that starts with empathizing with your teams when decisions are made.
It sounds like your product team had mission/roadmap issues. You can absolutely expect teams that are unable to find consensus in a direction within team or with senior leadership to be put on a clock before they’re material impacted. Similarly if they are unable to produce value with their roadmap. You will be on teams like this in the future as well.
All this is to say that it should be a rare occurrence in general, but often enough in your career you’ll get familiar with the process. I have noticed companies which are struggling are more prone to the shuffle.
I do want to say this change, while disruptive, can present new opportunities. You’ve already called out the importance of the role extending beyond coding which is wonderful to embrace. It’s relatively easy to work with long established colleagues and typically miles harder to build a rapport from scratch with a new team. Getting good at meshing/norming with new people is a critical skill for everyone to develop and will pay dividends at many junctions in your career. Similarly, exposure to new ideas and thinking can help break up echo chambers which all of us seem to run into at one point or another. If nothing else, you’ll learn a lot about how orgs influence outcomes and how investments are made (whether you agree with their decision making or not.)
Good luck!
I’ve been coding for money for some 18 years. It’s not unheard of to switch from one team to another or one product to another. Are you a contractor (i.e. self-employed independent contractor / consultant)? If so, you can definitely speak about autonomy and you can walk away from it if you don’t like it. If you are an employee, there is no real autonomy whatsoever. HR departments of some companies might want you to believe that you are somewhat valuable for them, in reality, you are an expense - a resource. In any larger company, you are a cog in the wheel. They want you in another team? There might not be much you can do about it.
I don’t really understand what your role really is. Social skills, research? Are you a manager? Are you a researcher? What does “all of that” mean?
In my current job it’s very typical, but that’s because we do contract work and shift devs around where the money is. It’s disruptive and we try not to, but sometimes it can’t be avoided.
At my previous dev job it happened very infrequently, usually only when there was an organizational change.
