Reorg

Big reorganization at work today. I lost about a third of the people on my team, and gained twice as many. I lost a few tasks that I hate doing, and gained being on call for 2:00am deployments.

I'm not sure how I feel about everything. I worry a bit that the team is now is too big, or that the late night phone calls will burn me out. The changes are smart from a sense of what my team does, it is just tough with the people involved.

The team I had was pretty magical. I've been on a lot of different teams over the years. I don't know if I've been looking at this with rose colored glasses because I'm in charge, but it has felt like there was something special about the team.

I joined the team as the product owner 4 years ago, and inherited a team full of high paid contractors with about 6 months left on their contract. With a few weeks left, another team full of junior developers got merged in.

The first year was chaotic. Many of the folks were recent college grads, or fresh out of coding boot camps. They knew Java development, and we were building continuous integration pipelines that built applications and deployed them to Kubernetes. There were a lot of days teaching things like Docker, Kubernetes, Ansible, Terraform, and even basic Linux server administration. Then a lot of late nights trying to get the things done that I didn't have the opportunity to during the day.

It's weird, I never wanted to be in a management like position, and only took the job because someone I knew at a previous job helped me get the position. He had tried to make me a manager at the previous job, and swore up and down this wasn't a management position. And yes, I'm technically not these people's managers... I just help hire them, help decide what they do all day, run interference for them so they can do their work, and write their reviews that their actual managers submit.

The thing is, these people made me love what I do. Seeing them grow not only into senior developers, but leaders in their own right has honestly been one of the highlights of my working career. One of the guys who joined as an intern in the final days with the consultants is now leading a sister team. Another person who started as an intern left after a little over a year to take a senior position as a startup. He reached out not too long ago and had incredibly kind words about everything he learned on the team.

But the other thing, with the exception of those two, we haven't had anyone else leave in over 3 years. We've had 4 more interns progress to junior developers to mentoring a next set of interns. It has just felt special. There were no personality clashes, everyone liked working with each other and would help each other out. Sprint retros were just big kudos fests with everyone calling each other out for all the awesome things they were doing.

Not everything was perfect. We owned too many different technologies, and were pulled in too many directions. Some of this was my inability to set enough boundaries around the team, and something I'm struggling to improve every day. But I do think that is part of what helped create so many leaders. I couldn't keep up with all the different directions we were pulled, so by necessity, I had to delegate. I couldn't know everything about all the different technologies we owned, so I deferred to the people that grew into the experts in each one.

If anything, I felt a bit redundant this past year. Everyone got so good at driving their area, that I just let them decide what came next, and I just spent my time doing the paperwork and getting the other things out of the way so they could keep building awesome things. Some days this made me feel useless. Some days this is exactly what I needed with all the other chaos in my life.

Now a portion of my team is moving to a different team, and I'm getting quite a bit from 2 other teams. It will be an interesting balancing act to get everyone working together. I'll have to rely on the people coming over to be experts in their areas while I come up to speed on what they do.

It's exciting and worrying at the same time. I'm happy about the new opportunities, and sad that the team I've built over the past few years is being broken up. I had hoped that writing things down here would help me understand how I feel, and I'm still as mixed on things as when I started.

For a lot of folks though, today was their first reorganization. For me, in my career, I've lost count. I spent a lot of time today chatting with folks I'm keeping, chatting with folks I'm losing and just reassuring them through the process. I feel like I should have been further prepared for this, but we didn't have a ton of preparation time.

Just need to make the best of it and go forward the best I can, and hope I can recreate some of the same magic with the new team.

-af

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