Ask HN: Promoted, but Career Path Derailed

To weight in with what most likely is an unpopular opinion here on HN - but you also have to consider your job satisfaction and stress factors before and after the potential move - sometimes it is best to shift orgs entirely and continue doing what you like doing rather than be forced to take on new challenges (that might or might not be intractable).

Agree with this. The big risk though is that you must continue to be seen the same way. Humans are highly prone to out-of-sight-out-of-mind, so you need to continually refresh their memory of you being that high performer. It's stupid and sucks, but unfortunately it's the way 95% of people are, and becoming a director doesn't change that underlying nature.

My advice:

1. Do try to report directly to the new director

2. Be honest and (mostly) open with them about your situation, and let them know that you are up for this challenge but that it won't be easy. Ask them for advice periodically with problems you run into (especially/mostly people problems unless they are very technical, which is rare at that level). Genuinely ask for advice though. Even if you don't take it, earnestly seek to understand what they would do and then use your own judgment about application.

3. Keep your eyes/ears open for new opportunities that might come up, but try to rate limit yourself because you don't want this to cause you to pull away from your new area or become a distraction. Also think about it as a "what could be next" not an opportunity to escape/eject early.

This is all true but even if you manage to become the "go to" person there is a potential trap. It's what I call the Promotion Ponzi. If you've been recognized as the "go to" guy you will be presented with new and bigger challenges at times. Make sure it always pays off in either money or (real) [1] responsibility, better both.

If it doesn't, run.

[1] Flashy titles and perks that cost the company next to nothing don't count. Best metric is the number of your reports.

"Sr. Director and given an opportunity to prove yourself"

from OP: "new team is known to be under-performing"

Uhh it sounds to me like the senior staff that the guy displaced OP with was the go-to guy and that OP has been given a shit sandwich. If OP wasn't specifically briefed by the sr director and TOLD "You're one of my go-to guys. I know this is a shit sandwich. Please help me fix it.", then this is basically constructive dismissal and they want you to just disappear.

On top of that, IME, go-to guys don't get sent to go fix stuff unless it's a clean sweep of the old "bad" team. They wouldn't send you in with known-low-performers, it's setting you up to fail.

Edit: Reading over other comments, I'm just in disbelief at how universally people are saying this is an opportunity. No, they cut off OP's support system, pushed them out of their top-spot, and off over to some team that leadership views as the trash pile. There's a difference between "this team is struggling and I'm bringing in support" and "damn, where do i put this guy. i'll just put them over here, with the rest of the fire."

This is fantastic advice. For senior engineers, its common for stock to be up to 1/3rd of compensatation. If the stock goes up by 6x - then you’ll be making 3x your original negotiated compensation. Being able to save multiple years worth of take-home salary every year is life changing.

After 4 years of this, you may not have your original career - but 8-15 years of pay saved provides lots of optionality.

^ This.

But to elaborate more, do you ever play a single player game like Skyrim, finish every quest, lead every guild?

Life is unfortunately not like that, you can't "win" every path. It's multiplayer, and everything comes with a tradeoff.

If you want to win at "career success", it's there, lots of people would love to be in your place. But people will sometimes tell you what to do.

If you want to win at "agency" it's also available, but you lose money and progress, take a big risk.

That's not really true. It sounds like the OP is in a big public tech company. In such a company there's usually a third option that preserves your salary and equity grants but also lets you do something else: transfer.

OP should look around for other roles and other directors within the company. There's a good chance that there's something available, particularly for a high performer with a dedicated track record. It does require leaving behind some of the skills and relationships that got him to this point, though.

this is literally the entire point of golden handcuffs.

But those are only as tight as he lets them be. He can choose to be happy with where he is, or make a change.

Yeah, the fact that they're at odds is what makes this a difficult situation.

Right now I'm leaning towards: this other domain is close enough to my old domain that given work's context in my overall life, the pay makes it worthwhile to compromise on my work goals, as long as I'm able to "leave the door open" to re-enter my old domain. That probably won't happen at this company until the other, more experienced engineer who took over my old domain leaves, and maybe not even then.

But the magnitude of the pay difference is great enough that a couple, few years of the dot product between what I'm doing and what I'd like to be doing in my career is ~0.8 rather than 1.0 is worth it in my life right now, given that I want to eventually buy a home in my high COL city.

I think having been in the situation where I felt I was basically in my dream-job and knew I was, makes it harder to have lost it, even though I am in a really good spot in my career overall.

You can't do both but they feed into the same "OKR" if you like:

A. Get rich (how rich? How likely?), so I can do what I like absolutely.

B. Do what I like now, so am guaranteed to have done what I like, but still be at the mercy of corporate/academic tides.

Both are fine choices. Need to do the decisioning to find out which has more "do what I like" ness to it.

Similarly, I think sometimes being displaced to somewhere less comfortable is a good thing in a career. I had this a couple of times, one turned out not ideally, but the other ones (which are smaller, but still tosses me from place to place) proved to be better in the long run.

I prefer to be a T shaped person, but having a broader top doesn't harm the process of going deep. In retrospective, I found that having a broader knowledge provided the paths and fuel to dig deeper the part I care about the most.

Re: (very?) large org.

I've never been in a company with more than 15 people, so I always find these nuanced complex political company issues to be fascinating. I don't think I'd have the mental bandwidth to deal with all of these issues. :-)

Counterpoint, if you want to stay in the company, asses the leader's (one that displace you) personality and track record. There's some leaders that will reassign your role to a totally different one on a whim, without considering your skill and experience. Worse, you may get accounted for when failed.

The best way to stay the longest in this kind of company is to perform the minimum required.

This is basically peter principle in the working

> One is that I really don't like being in charge of my own destiny with this kind of thing.

> I don't want my career and life to evolve by happenstance.

OP is looking for someone to benevolently direct their career path...

>Do you think this was good advice? You took their advice, even if it seemed a bitter pill at the time. They were most certainly part of the process for your promotion.

>It feels like this senior director is in your corner. I'd schedule a 1:1 with a simple agenda of "looking for advice".

And as you pointed out, they might actually have it! OP, consider these things. If you truly don't want happenstance OR yourself to direct your path, you're going to have to stick with a benevolent individual who will, so you should stick to this senior director like glue.

This is good advice. Also have similar conversations with the new director.

"I'm here to support you, and am committed to turning around this project. Long term, I would also like to return to working in X domain, so please keep me in mind when opportunities for that come up."

I've been the SD in circumstances like this. And I'll say this is good advice, but there's the potential for a subtle trap in it. Sounds like you're in a fairly political org. Not my favorite environment tbh, but if it's the game you're playing, don't go forth blindly.

(Note: I don't know genders of anybody here. I'm going to call OP "he" and the SD "she," because lots of they's and titles get confusing.)

The SD probably thinks this conversation is over. From her perspective: I told OP what to do (what was in his "best interest") and he did it. End of talk. I'm in an ultra-fast growing pressure cooker with 30 things on my plate to get right, and I work for people who don't hesitate to fire leaders. Now he wants to put time on my calendar to talk about it. This can go one of two ways.

Option A: OP doesn't like the way things went because he wants to spend time in the other domain. (which is what this is about.) On net, to the SD, this is just causing friction. Maybe she helps you out and puts you back in the old domain, at least after a while, and you owe her a favor. Maybe your performance is good, but not irreplaceable-good, and she gracefully handles the conversation, but she is annoyed. When your new director gets on, she tells them to look out for that one, he's high-maintenance. New director, you can decide whether or not he's worth the effort to keep happy, but please don't let him jump onto my calendar again without vetting what he's talking about. K thanks. (And yes, this is a real conversation that happens.)

i.e., it might get you what you want, but it also might backfire.

Option B: As a mid-to-senior manager in an org like that, your SD is always on the lookout for engineers who get "the way the world works."[1] You can go in framing the ask for advice differently: "I was on team A, I had to leave because of what happened on team A, now I'm on team B. Team B is fine but I don't see the headroom given the other players there. I'm happy to keep performing here, but what advice do you have for making a real difference in this circumstance, and are there upcoming challenges I should volunteer for?"

This may seem like a subtle distinction, but the framing is really important. In one of them, you come and say, "what's important to me is working on this domain, and that was taken away from me. Solve my problem for me." (To which the SD says, _damn, this guy can't wait 2 weeks for the new director to start_ ?) In the other, you send a different series of signals:

"I had a sweet gig where I loved the domain and was making progress as an expert/leader..." Ok, he's passionate. He cares.

"Nobody loves team disruption, but what happened happened and made sense. I'm not saying I necessarily want to go back." Grudges are for amateurs, this guy is future-focused. I can work with that.

"I took your advice, and thanks for taking the time to give it." He will engage hierarchy respectfully even if he doesn't love where it has landed him at the moment.

"But in the domain where I'm working now, you already have two leaders well-developed who are definitely the right people to lead it forward." He's a team player, not trying to knife anyone in the back. But he's also hungry and ambitious. Plus he's giving me a private and unsolicited (therefore probably honest) endorsement of other in-place players, which is a gift of high-value information.

"So with a lot of changes going on, new director onboarding, etc., I wanted to set a goal to make the biggest difference I can for our shared success. But you have better visibility than I do about how to actually stack tactics against that goal. What would you advise I volunteer for / do over the next 6 months? What should I tell this new director that I want?" He gets it. His goals are my goals. There's a clear reason he came to me rather than the new director, this is not a waste of my time. He's pragmatic and ambitious and technically excellent. I might not have anything shovel-ready for him this second, but I'll keep him in mind next time I need something knocked out of the park. And I think my 3 pm meeting tomorrow is about something like that.

[1] "The way the world works" in circumstances like this is more precisely, "the way to operate in this particular organization and leadership climate that will ruffle the fewest feathers while pleasing the right people."

Yeah, I did feel fortunately supported, though the political situation was rather more complex, and things outside both of our control played a role in this promotion.

I did express my interest in transitioning back in-person to a few important people, while asserting my commitment to getting the other team up and running, and my interest in my old domain is really well known, and strong enough that I do think it'll sustain itself even if I settle into this new position.

I'll also share a little of my brush with management... there's "easy mode manager" and "hard mode manager".

"Easy Mode" is when you're naturally promoted from IC to Manager in a problem domain you know, and already have the respect and admiration of your peers.

"Hard Mode" is when you're transitioned to manage a team where you don't know the problem domain, and don't already have a good working relationship with the people you'll be managing.

Much depend on your personality and support structure. If you're a "technical homebody" or don't have good support/rapport with the new director? This would be signals that this new role isn't the best fit for you.

Good point -- while now, since I'm new working on this team and having to re-establish myself, I feel a big loss in scope, influence, and visibility, I think over time I'll be working on more and more cross-cutting projects. I'm starting to see the seeds of that already.

Great advice -- I do have some lingering resentment, but it'll be really important not to have that surfaced to the new director.

Yeah seconding this. If you want to think about it in terms of your resume, putting a bullet point or two to tell the story of how your presence moved that team from not performing to performing well would be very beneficial. That's true even if they're not performing because of social problems, because you might be able to provide the team some alternatives to underperforming. Going above senior engineer is not always about solving the technical challenges, and frankly if you're a staff engineer I would expect you to be willing to dig in on social issues within the team or organization where they hinder your technical initiatives.

...reinvent the same thing every 10 years

I wouldn't be too upset by that. Enough people, including my Sr Director and other important people, know this, or would be able to easily infer this, and I think I'm in an org where fortunately people are mature enough to understand people have feelings about work. I don't foresee any work consequences from this, though I'd be a little embarrassed anyway.

I would hope any post like this has the insignificant details changed enough for the situation to be unrecognisable.