As I mentioned earlier, I am going to be transferring to a different division on 7/1.  There is a little bit of a story behind it, but I have been thinking about how to tell it without identifying the company I work for.  While my company doesn’t discourage blogging, I think it best that I keep my blogging separate from the company.  Many of my opinions are too politically incorrect for the company’s corporate image.  If it ever comes out where I work, then I’ll just add a disclaimer, but I’ll burn that bridge when I cross it… 

I’ve worked for this company in one capacity or another for nearly 12 years.  For the last nine years I have been working for an organization in a particular division whose primary function is to do software development on a contract basis for both external and internal customers (although I’ve been working on internal projects the entire time).  I never signed on to work for this organization.  My job was transferred there when the project I was on at the time was moved into the organization as part of a company-wide effort to move all development efforts into this organization. 

To say that it was something of a culture shock would be an understatement.  We moved from direct management to matrix management and from a team environment into a project-based billable system.  Instead of having a manager who knew your work, you ended up with a manager you were lucky to hear from once a quarter (one guy I know only hears from his manager during the yearly evaluations).  My team’s first communication from our new manager was a notification that we weren’t meeting our “billable utilization” targets.  Our first response was of the “Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?!” variety, since we had no clue was he was talking about.

You see, this development organization (DO) requires that each employee bill a certain number of hours each year, which basically means that you have to make up for your vacation and holiday time.  Regardless of whether your project or tasks really require overtime, if you don’t bill a certain number of hours, you get dinged on your yearly evaluation.  This was a shock to us, since in our previous organization we were just concerned with meeting deadlines.  Sometimes this meant working 10-12 hours per day and other times you worked a standard day.  From what I could glean over the years (from various snippets of conversation), the DO’s business model requires this level of overtime to make up for lowballing the bill rate (and to support all the layers of management).

Over the past three years I’ve been working on various projects for the same internal customer, who has projects in two main areas: web and backend.  I’ve done projects for them in both areas and gotten to know them fairly well.  Lately they have grown increasingly dissatisfied with the DO because of the high level of bureaucracy and red tape required to engage us.  The DO has a reputation of being hard to work with (which I suspect is richly deserved).  Also, it was difficult for them to get “what if” questions answered for projects they might want to start but hadn’t formally begun.  In general, employees of the DO have a negative incentive structure to perform any work outside of their currently funded projects.  Any significant time spent on something that doesn’t have a project billing code means that the employee has to either find an existing project to bill against (a lie?) or make up the time on a billable project (lost time worked basically for free).

Lately,  the DO executives have been working hard to send most of the development overseas.  Those of us left here are doing design and project management work with most of the actual programming done by teams elsewhere.  Sometimes they’ll send some people here to learn about the project, but mostly the teams are in other countries.  At the same time this is going on, they’ve been making noises about signings and revenue being down.  So I suppose it wasn’t a big surprise that layoffs would be coming in the U.S.

I need to go back a little bit before I get into the layoff situation, though.  In early May a little birdie told me that there was a move afoot on the part of our customer to move the backend team out of the DO and into another organization.  I was glad to hear about this, but I took a wait-and-see attitude, since I knew it would take them a long time to get anything done (the wheels of bureaucracy move slowly in any big company).  In late May I heard that they were pretty serious and that the customer had given the DO a list of people it wanted to transfer.  This would turn out to be a dangerous thing for all of us…

On the morning of 5/31 I was sitting at my computer trying to get through my morning email when my teamlead sent me an IM saying that he’d just been given notice that he was on the layoff list and he had 30 days to find another job in the company or he was going to be let go.  Given that this guy is absolutely critical to the project, I immediately knew what was happening: the DO was jettisoning all of us who were on the transfer list.  Sure enough, within five minutes my manager IM’ed me to ask if I had time to talk. 

From experience, I’ve seen that the DO doesn’t like having business taken away, and will do things to sabotage any other business unit that tries to move development back in-house.  Of course, legal notification requirements and the need to get us out before end of 2Q likely influenced their decision, but the fact that it would severely impact the customer would likely just put icing on the cake from their perspective.

This event set off a set of panicked meetings on the part of my customer, who then had to accelerate the transfer negotations.  Even so, it took nearly three weeks for them to finalize the deal, and we didn’t get notice until last Friday that it was completed. 

It’s interesting, but I took the news of the prospective layoff pretty well.  I did some calculations and determined that with the severance package and some savings that I could get by (provided I didn’t splurge on anything) for a little more than a year while looking for another job.  I think this was motiviated by the fact that I was pretty burned-out working in the DO and I was really wanting to get out of it.  Whether this was accomplished by a transfer or by leaving the company didn’t really matter anymore.

I was even considering my options for getting into a new career.  Working for the DO really saps the life out of you.  Body shop development is really a game for naive new-hires.  It gets really old, really fast. 

I’m looking at the transfer as a chance to start over.  I can now concentrate on getting the job done, rather than how many hours are billed.  It should also mean less silly process nonsense.  Heck, I may even end up working more hours when all is said and done (don’t know yet, although all the people in my new organization seem pretty balanced and happy from what I’ve been able to glean from them).  But it doesn’t matter to me if the job is interesting and I can focus on it instead of process and hours.  It will also be good to have a direct manager who knows what I’m doing on the job.  It’s hard to describe the feeling, but it’s really like a great weight has been lifted.