W2 Regime Change: How to Not Build your Career on Sand
How to not let new management tank your career
On August 30, 2021, there were US flags flying in Kabul, Afghanistan.
The next day there wasn’t.
Could the locals the next day continue to act the same way under the Taliban as they had under the Americans? Some tried at great cost. Everyone else adapted.
When the regime changes, you need to be ready to adapt. The ground has shifted under your feet.
A fragile tree is one that snaps when the wind suddenly changes direction.
Your job is to become anti-fragile, able to keep that W2 paycheck flowing as you build wifi-money and plan your escape, regardless of what is happening around you.
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New leadership always makes a splash
When new leadership is hired, especially at higher levels of management, and for sure the C-suite, they want to make a splash.
They have to make a splash.
They’ve been hired to make a change.
They’ve pitched a roadmap, a mandate, and cashed a fat signing bonus.
And come hell or high water, they are going to crack some skulls and get it done.
So, as soon as you get the email that a new CTO, director, or org leader has been hired, your ears should perk up. They’re almost never coming to simply just stick with the status quo.
They’ll be bringing their own ego, opinions, and be pushing for big changes so they can do well on their performance review, even if by changing the rules from under the rest of you you might fail your next one.
And remember, much of this will all go unspoken, in whisper campaigns and accidental admissions from your manager of what happened in the EMs only meeting. Your job is to keep your ear to the ground and skate to where the puck is going to be.
Otherwise you’ll be stuck in line waiting for the last chopper out of Vietnam.
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Bonjour code monkeys...
A particularly notorious example that comes to mind was from a few years back.
The previous CTO had just spent 2 years merging tech teams across the business units, and pushed for huge migrations to unify the tech stack, despite a decade of mostly siloed development. He was soft spoken and did generally have a hard time driving the fast change that the board was counting on, even after two rounds of major layoffs.
So he was canned, and a French, long time Google exec was hired to take over as CTO.
Not even weeks after his announcement, rumors had already started to start that entire roadmaps were being torn up. Migrations to unify the tech stack? Waste of time.
One by one, senior engineering leaders reporting to him began to disappear. Some without even a goodbye note in Slack. Even some of their teams got shuffled away as projects got cancelled.
