When I worked at a big tech company many years ago, my particular sub-team got an award specifically for teamwork. It came with a little statue with our name on it and our team name. In that exact same meeting in which they presented us the awards, they announced a reorg and presented the new org chart. In that org chart literally every single one of us were split up and sent to a different sub-team. It was beyond ridiculous and was the most direct, in the face Dilbert moment I've ever experienced personally. How do you recognize and award a team specifically for teamwork, and decide that the immediate "solution" to that is to split them all up? That was definitely the beginning of the end for me. And I let their golden handcuffs keep me there way longer than I should have before I peaced out for my own sanity.

The issue with leadership meeting 12% and not 30% is that their strategy and decision did not work, but they get a free pass while the people that did execute are fired. The workers do not have control of the failed strategy, and have may even tried to get leadership to listen to them

The fallacy on all this is that "leadership" has it all "figured out" ie that such and such move makes sense since they have perfect information. In my experience that's often not the case. Everyone is in their own way flailing. Management not excluded.

Excellent video.. please have more senior VP's and directors to shed some light on behind the scenes. Great job 👏

If there was a way to give a thousand 👍 I would. Most informative & actionable 8m55s this year. Over a nugget a minute of gems

0:51

The comment on resources flowing to rising manager and vice versa is spot on. I've seen it many times - truth.

"spending more time with family" also very often means the person viewed their work as an uphill battle and chose happiness over trying to fix a broken and dysfunctional company where they were unfortunately the smartest person in the room.

Very insightful video! Warrants more views for sure in this climate of reorg-layoffs.

Nice interview. Real talk

Awesome information sharing and it never hurts if more people in business with career ambitions listen to this even though they may already understand the internal org 'metabolic dynamics'. Not saying this is a good way to manage a large business in the tech world, but it sounds like an honest explanation. What would be even more interesting is some discussion on what you need to watch out for in large US Corps (before you get stuck in a death march) such as teams with the same manager who has literally been in the same job (with a few title changes) for 10 plus years.

Really awesome & to the point video; no bs, love it.

5:58

Yep, management had a reason, but look at all the companies that died because management did not understand their business and focused on short term profit instead of long term viability. Boeing is a recent example where they sold off part of their core business to create Spirit Aero systems. That’s going well. They destroyed their safety culture to push the development of the max 9, that went well. They also moved their management away from the factory further isolating from their core business. Sure management makes changes for a reason, but often management lives in its own bubble not understanding the full ramifications of its changes. Communication is critical and if things happen for no apparent reason it’s rather clear that communication between workers and management has failed in both directions. Really successful leaders walk to “factory floor” and talk to workers on a regular basis. It’s management 101 yet so many CEOs don’t do that. Too busy, too important!

“The right business outcome” never means the long term benefit of the employee or even the company. It, increasingly, means the quarterly earnings result. They treat people like consumables. Company loyalty is expected to flow only one way, fanatically towards the company. But what do we know? All these masters of the universe who hold the capital and power to destroy your life on a whim without even knowing your name, who you cannot elect, or even criticize surely know better. They must, because we have made them gods of our society.

Great Q&A

Why do reorgs happen? Sometimes it is just because a manager wants to be seen to be doing something. For example, if the previous manager was moved because the org was under-performing and the new manager judges that the performance has bottomed, then they will do a re-org so that they have something to point to to say that the increase in performance was due to them. It would have recovered if they did nothing, but that is not so easy to talk about or put on a written performance review.

48 Laws Of Power! -- Devs are fighting the power structure of corporate desires. A good example is how Sundar Pichai (CEO, GOOGLE) rose to power as a technical person by understanding the politics of the business. - AND played the politics game against Marissa Mayer to be the CEO of Google.

Well, if your manager has changed some mature companies have this policy of excluding you from the ratings. It is called too new to rate something that goes both ways in the employee-supervisor relationship. Frankly it is a simple problem to solve but the amount of money the tech folks get paid vs. mature companies is sometimes lopsided which makes it hard not to get a ranking curve in. So, in reality that everyone must get rated. I almost joined Google and also Amazon but the interviewers were so torrid I backed not having a good feeling. That great gut feeling has served me well in my career.

In smaller companies generally you get to know why something is happening and who is responsible for the same while on the other side the large organisations have to save their face and they can never reveal the true reasoning behind any decision they are are taking. Yes they are also at fault most of the times since they are NOT GOD but humans, but they cant accept it.