| March 2006 |
| By Wes Simonds |
Meet Mr. Brown. He’s a dissatisfied Director of IT at a technology-centric Fortune 500 corporation.
I’m sorry to report that Mr. Brown has seen better days, professionally speaking.
“They’re flying my job straight into a mountain,” he told me in a recent interview. “And nothing I can do will stop them.”
The sad part is that he used to love his job -- and his company too. Coming up through the ranks, Mr. Brown found his tech skills highly valued by his managers and highly relevant to his work. Now he’s not so sure.
Today -- from his position in the high-upper-middle-class of the company hierarchy -- he reports to operations executives with a long previous background in marketing or sales. Their professional lives revolve around concepts like overcoming the competition's installed base and managing mindshare and optimizing the flow of user experience on the site.
They are not, to put it kindly, technical people. They do not generally know, nor do they care, what the difference is between a router and a switch... between assembly language and Ruby... between engineers who run datacenters and engineers who run choo-choo trains.
Mr. Brown now reports to these execs all the same.
There are, as he sees it, a number of appalling consequences to this situation. Here are the top two:
- Almost half his team has a higher salary than he does. This comes as a result of executive-driven initiatives to hire talent in unusual, overhyped technical areas. Because the areas are unusual, the talent pool is small and expensive. And because the areas are overhyped, the talent is sometimes not very useful.
- Executive goals are not governed by, or in some cases even related to, technical reality. They can’t be, because the executives have no formal education or paid experience in creating or supporting technology. Thus, Mr. Brown is often responsible for implementing problematic ideas in problematic timeframes with hilarious budgets.
What might you do, if you were Mr. Brown?
It won’t surprise you to hear he’s decided to interview at other companies.
In one promising case, an offer has now been rendered, and Mr. Brown faces a new dilemma as he comes to grips with the implications.
“Despite everything, I don’t really want to leave this place,” he said. “I like the people here and I’m very familiar with our business model and corporate culture. I really don’t want to have to go somewhere else and learn all that all over again. So... I’m toying with the idea of using my job offer as leverage... to try to implement change.”
One can follow this logic readily enough. If his company knows he’s unhappy enough to leave, they might be more prepared to listen seriously to his objections.
After all, he has more than a decade’s experience and he has a much stronger command of their technical infrastructure than anyone above him in the company hierarchy except the CTO, who has much bigger fish to fry and no time at all for such work. Replacing Mr. Brown would be a tedious challenge.
“Surely,” reasons Mr. Brown, “they’d rather change than give me up.”
Well, let me suggest that while it ought to work that way, it quite often doesn’t. Mr. Brown is succumbing to an optimism which may be logical but which is also, in most cases, unjustified.
My recommendation to him was simple: If you're unhappy, try to work collaboratively with your management, through calm and tactful diplomacy, to achieve your goals. If diplomacy fails conclusively, by all means interview.
Finally, if you get an offer, don't try to use it as leverage. Such an approach could easily be construed as manipulative armtwisting and ultimately damage your career progress.
To illustrate this point, consider Mr. White, who had virtually the same job and the same concerns as Mr. Brown. He interviewed, and when offered a new opportunity, he chose to use it as leverage to achieve his ends.
In the short run, this panned out quite well for Mr. White. He asked for and got an improved compensation package, a new job title, and best of all, greater authority in hiring and managing his talent. So far, so good.
However, the COO to whom he reported was unhappy with the sense that Mr. White was a company malcontent and immediately began searching for his replacement.
Less than six months later, Mr. White discovered one morning that his passwords no longer worked, and two hours after that -- on the heels of seven years of service working at least fifty hours per week -- he was out of work altogether.
The moral of Mr. White’s story seems fairly clear: When confronted with a job offer, you should confine yourself to saying yes or saying no.
Wes Simonds is a veteran freelance journalist and marketing copywriter specializing in the tech sector.
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