The company has recently hired an additional project manager overseas who has already started excluding me from project meetings. Another project manager has been hired to work in the local office and is starting next week.
I get the feeling I’m now meant to be sitting in the corner with my headphones on.
This is a big red flag. There may be innocent reasons (e.g., new PM wants to hold meetings at times convenient to him and his team and feels guilty inviting you to meetings at 2AM your time), but it is more often a prep for pushing old PM out the door.
You have two options: change things at your old company, or move. In first option, I would try to get a candid face to face time with one of the senior leadership folks. Ask about their plans. Say that your old project does not need two PMs and ask if he can suggest other PM opportunities. This only works if you are appreciated at your current company, but if you are the company will likely work hard to accommodate your wishes -- good PMs are rare.
I was livid. “We have a new guy... who doesn’t understand the product or our customers or our process... and I am supposed to answer to HIM now‽”
Some advice I wish I could go back 10 years and give myself:
1. “Own what you own” which is a variation of “choose which hill to die on”. If you feel like something is “yours” you will resent people coming in and fucking it up. If you conceptualize something as “theirs” you can feel good doing your best to make it better. Being a humble servant can feel bad, but it feels better than being fired for having angry outbursts (trust me on this one).
2. Understand your feelings well enough to talk about them. That might involve talk therapy. Modern CBT is really great.
3. Remember that anything you love can break your heart. And that is OK. Better than not loving what you do. Maybe it is time for the relationship to end? Maybe you can salvage it?
4. Think and talk in terms of both work/life balance and work-life balance. If having a diverse set of things to do at work is important to you (it is to me, but not everyone) tell the company this. Some people love to be heads down coders in one layer. Other people need to work across more layers. Some people like to do PM or architecture work in addition to coding. Your managers won’t know what you need if you don’t tell them, and you can’t tell them if you don’t understand it yourself. (See #2).
Good luck! You are not in this alone!
My boss has always been happy with my performance as an engineer. He likes people to take ownership of their projects and always thanks me whenever I step outside of my direct area of responsibility to solve problems that would otherwise fester if left alone.
The main problems at work can really be boiled down to a lack of communication and collaboration between employees. Engineers and managers alike. I'm hopeful that the new PM will be able to help improve things where the other managers have failed.
As for me, I'm hopeful that I can communicate my desire to continue to have a role in technical leadership.
I would love to know, in hindsight: why did the company decide to replace you on something that you loved doing? Was this a case of under performance and the new person effectively performed much better than you, or something else?
I have been victim of being replaced on something that I loved doing and I was very passionate about (a couple times over my career), and to this day (years later) I still think I was hands down much better than the person I was replaced with at that task, under every aspect: pure delivery performance, communication, sticking to improvements that provided value, maniacal customer support when bugs arose. In other words, I deeply and truly cared, too much actually and fell under the trap you described as “own what you own” (it was a feature I actually patented while working under the company). For the other person, that piece was just “meh, another thing I have to work on and maintain”, which ended up being my attitude when I was moved to something else.
I’ve tried repeatedly to assess the situation from an objective point of view to see if my line of thinking missed some aspects which might have caused my removal, but I just couldn’t find any bias in my reasoning if not of clueless upper management.
A metaphor I use with management to prevent this from happening again is “I eat my broccoli so I get to eat my ice cream. Hiring someone to eat ice cream for me so I can focus on just broccoli might make intuitive sense to you, but will have a detrimental effect on me”
There are many companies hiring PMs and to be honest, it is hard to find good ones, passionate about their job and that were previously coders or know well about tech, as not many developers enjoy that route(they would rather become tech leads or something else).
The grass is greener on your side as you might think.
1) Communication is key, a lot of times management don't realize you hold resentment and a simple conversation could really clear things up. Make your wants known, don't expect them to just be presented to you.
2) Take the time to shine. Push yourself to impress those in charge. Demonstrating value is always a good way to get more responsibility.
3) Try not to take it personally but instead ask yourself are some valid reasons why they have made such a decision. Also try and ask yourself what you could do to help the new hire. It isn't their fault and would probably love the assistance.
In the case of my friend, although he is a fantastic worker, he struggles at times to vocalize his contempt. Instead he will brood. Do not do this. People can't read minds and at the end of the day it is managements job to do what they think is best for the company as a whole. Good luck, hope all ends up alright!
Your friend’s mistake is that he is too professional, doing the work that needs doing and pays everyone else’s salaries, while other more selfish people prioritise getting some more buzzwords on their CV. I have fallen victim to this mentality myself. It may be too late if he has been typecast, he’ll need to reboot by going somewhere else. But it’s a sad state of affairs that being conscientious is a career killer.
Seconded - I've had this experience myself. I tried to be the "grownup in the room", ensuring that boring-but-important aspects of software development got taken care of. This was also my first experience on a "self-organizing" team.
The end result was that coworkers just kept doing whatever parts of the work they found personally gratifying, and at annual-review time their list of accomplishments was a lot glitzier than mine.
I continue to struggle with the anger and resentment I feel for how that all went down, and it's hard to objectively assess what I could/should have done differently without having behaved in the same (IMO) unprofessional manner as my then-teammates.
How would you recommend communicating these things to your manager without breaking this rule?
Basically the engineers will have multiple bosses. The engineering manager for technical direction and the project managers for task priorities and day to day management.
I think there is still a role for me to play as a senior engineer to mentor and assist the other engineers on their projects but it's harder for me to do this when I'm out of the loop.
That's a huge red flag. Unless you have hope of that getting fixed, I'd start looking around.
Anyway, maybe in the eyes of management you were handling two jobs, which maybe they appreciated, but as soon as they were able to rectify this, they helped you out by hiring someone to do the managing so you wouldn't have to. If they had the wrong idea about you (i.e. you prefer managing and now want to keep doing that) then you probably need to express your interest in management and advocate for why/how the company would benefit by your doing it.
But yeah in general people have the right to a clear job description that everyone agrees on, and to be able to review various duties as they apply to that, and accept or reject them, and to modify the job description if and when applicable.
I'm not a proper PM, just the senior dev who keeps an eye on the others to make sure they aren't falling down any rabbit holes.
I would much rather be a developer than a manager but I guess I thought I could still be involved in all projects from a technical standpoint.
Politically it would probably be good to get each PM's buy-in and agreement about it, just from a standpoint of protecting their precious egos and avoiding a pissing match. Even though they seem to be the ones stepping on your toes a bit.
One needs a truly exceptional team and manager to avoid being miserable in that situation.
They could assume that you want to be a developer and not a manager. They may be intentionally sidelining you, and think that they're doing you a favor. The only way you can fix that is with communication.
Or, they may currently need you as a developer more than they need you as a manager. If it's temporary, you can choose to ride it out, making it clear to them that you want back into management when possible.
TL;DR: You have to talk to them to find out what they're thinking, and why they're doing what they're doing. Don't guess. Ask.
