I (27 M) have worked at a smallish but well known tech company for the past 2 years. Despite being at a lower level position (not a manager), I had been tasked with a massive project that was essentially redesigning our entire product data infrastructure.
After 18 months of grinding my a** off, sourcing and signing deals with multiple data providers, mapping product data to millions of items at thousands of digital storefronts, effectively saving millions in monthly data processing costs, and unlocking our advertising business my leadership realized the project’s value and staffed my entire team on the workstream. I previously worked with engineers, data scientists, other cross functional partners on my own so it has been really nice to have help. I’ll add I also got to hire and train contractors to service the more gritty work needed. Every day my teammates, contractor team, and other coworkers across the organization regardless of title look to me for leadership and creative problem solving. Our CEO even mentioned my project on an investor and all hands call a month ago.
Naturally I told my boss that her notion that I was not ready for a manager position made little sense to me, and today she decided that I was “unmanageable” and will be moved to a different team.
For context she started 9 months ago during a big hiring rush and I personally feel like she has no idea what she is doing. Her ideas are consistently out of touch with the reality of our data infrastructure, she fails to retain key pieces of information, has no functioning working relationship with our external or cross functional partners, fosters no camaraderie or culture on our team, has never built a process document, query, python script, etc, and seriously misallocates resources to the tune of millions of dollars a month.
I am just absolutely heartbroken. I had to live and breathe this work so it really feels like a bad breakup. I tried to express this to her boss but he took it as me having an ego problem! I have literally been doing both of their job for 2 years making them look extremely good to higher ups! Now the team is in chaos trying to figure out what they’ll do when I officially roll off and I feel terrible for how much work it’s going to create for them. I have close friendships with most all of them so that strings extra..
Oh and here’s the kicker…my boss took the week off and is making me onboard my 35 year old manager replacement! She gave no direction on the transition/ onboarding, and clearly recognizes I’m doing the work of a manager. If I performed at her level of work quality I doubt I would have lasted past 90 days, but because she’s like 15 years older than me none of that matters???
Anyways now I know how not to manage my team. If I’m “unmanageable” its probably because I’m smarter than you and you feel threatened, sorry not sorry. It’s actually mind numbing how poor of a decision this all is and I’m just so so sad so thanks for reading.