How can one maintain motivation and focus in a small team environment where politics and bias are prevalent?
The company faces significant challenges regarding quality and leadership, which permeate across various areas. For more detailed insights, please refer to this review.
When the engineering manager lacks genuine skills and prioritizes people management over upskilling, promotions often favor those who conform and agree rather than those with genuine merit. I have encountered disparities in privileges, such as certain engineers receiving extended remote work due to vague health reasons while others face scrutiny for slower feature delivery without proper performance evaluations.
My current resolve to stay stems primarily from the promise of an upcoming appraisal, although the specifics remain uncertain. However, the lack of clear project direction for the next six months is making me consider leaving.
Despite this, I plan to stay for the next year, which is till April 25' - focusing on preparing post-appraisal for interview and system design. My strategy involves dedicating the last three months solely to working on the "the feature that can make me visible," and put bare minimum efforts, aligning my efforts with long-term goals in big tech opportunities.
Discussion
(2 comments)- 016 days agoTech Lead/Manager at Meta, Pinterest, Kosei
A year is a long time to stay in a bad environment. I like this advice from Garry Tan:
At every job you should either learn or earn. Either is fine. Both is best. But if it's neither, quit.
If sounds like the politics and incompetence of your manager make it harder for you to get a strong rating, and therefore your compensation is not increasing. Are you very happy with your compensation now?
So I'd think about how much learning potential you have, either in terms of the tech, or if there are senior+ engineers around you that you can learn from.
Could you test the waters on another job sooner? If you find that many companies are willing to interview you, you can be confident that you can land a strong offer within 3-4 months.
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16 days agoTech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero3.1 on Glassdoor is pretty bad - Are you sure you can't leave earlier? Anyways, whenever you do decide to leave, I hope this helps: [Course] Nail Your Promotion As A Software Engineer
If you are going to stay, you should try "playing the politics" as best you can, without doing anything grimy or unethical of course. Yes, most engineering managers are bad, but I have rarely met anybody 100% evil. Like with any human, try to understand what they value and look for something in there that matches your values. Then deliver on that. Here's a good thread covering communication tactics for that: "How to have more impactful/deeper Taro 1:1 member match convos?"
