The week after NerdHaven's layoffs, Dragonman met me in the hallway.
"I've got some bad news for you."
Here we go.
He tells me that I'll have to organize next year's charity run. The one Runner had been organizing over the past two years.
I'm relieved, and say so. "I can only handle so much bad news at a time. Doing next year's run? Yeah, I can deal with that."
Dragonman plows ahead with the rest of their news, "-because I've put in my notice. My last day is the 17th."
Dammit, dammit, dammit.
Dragonman is the team lead of the Dragon team. Dragon is kickass in all sorts of ways - more so because they have a great leader.
Dragonman is one of those types of people who transform a workplace. They are extremely competent, whip-smart, and have a great sense of humor. Like Portal, Dragonman excels at cutting through the interpersonal and business bullsh!t to solve problems and get sh!t done.
After recovering from the gutshot, I wish Dragonman well. They are sure to do great wherever they go. They say the recent layoffs had nothing to do with their departure, they were looking for work closer to home - and found something that is practically down the road from their house. Even if the layoffs were a factor in their departure, Dragonman is too much of a pro to pour gas on the fire on the way out.
I will miss them.
NerdHaven will miss them. Nobody is irreplaceable, but trying to list the things Dragonman did for NerdHaven (and did well) is pretty mind boggling. Dragon works on a system that is mission critical for a huge portion of the business... it just...
Ugh.
* * *
The next day, I'm in our UX meeting, reflecting on how there used to be seven of us and a director. Now there are three FTEs and a contractor. No UX Director anymore, we report to Product Actual.
Product Actual calls into our meeting from their home office in a neighboring state. Which makes every meeting a virtual conference scramble. This week, Product Actual starts out with some news of the realm: Remote is leaving NerdHaven.
I've said before, Remote is not my favorite person in the company. They are professional, cordial, but I have zero rapport with them and any strategic discussions I've had with them have made it very clear that we are on very different pages.
Remote is openly skeptical of agile methodology. Which is fine, there are lots of shortcomings to being agile - but Remote's solutions to agile's shortcomings terrify me. Remote seems to want us to slouch back to waterfall in all but name. I could be wrong about that, and given their departure, it seems pointless one way or the other.
Remote was the person who called Runner into the room to sack them. Not that they had a choice, but a part of my brain won't let that factoid fade.
And now they are going. Rumor has it they are getting a good VP slot at some company in their state.
Anytime execs leave the building, the brain starts imagining reasons why this is so. Did they jump? or were they pushed? The answers to these are not idle gossip. If they jumped, the logical follow up is: Do they see something that should motivate me to jump? If they were pushed, were they pushed for a reason that is headed my way?
And there is no good way to get that follow up intel. Sprint is better plugged in than I am, and the rumor mills (post meeting) suggest that Remote and Olympus did not see eye to eye.
You don't cross Olympus. Period. Full stop.
Remote was Product Actual's boss, and are not being replaced. In effect, Product Actual is going to cover Remote's role as well. Which means my boss is a bigger deal on paper. In a more practical sense, it's likely Remote's position vanishes in a puff of smoke and our boss now reports directly to Olympus.
Sands are shifting, but it's not clear what is truly going on.
* * *
It's last week and I'm on LinkedIn, changing my password in response to yet another OMG breach notice in the press. Honestly, I use it so infrequently, I end up changing my password most times I visit - because I've forgotten what I used last time.
Anyway, once I'm in and making sure I can access LinkedIn via my phone, I get a screen with "You may also know..."
And at the top of the list is Lash.
Lash is one of those people who work in support - I almost never work with them directly, but I see them in the breakroom all the time. They are a laugh, and are good enough to at least smile at my jokes.
I'm surprised I hadn't connected with them on LinkedIn before, and then I notice that their listing at NerdHaven has an end date.
Wh...?
I look at their profile. They're gone. They got laid off on the same day as Runner.
Somehow this is the point where I get really sad. The boss was asking how I was doing, and I've been slogging along, trying to get sh!t done so I don't have to think about it.
Lash got laid off and I didn't even notice. That's just sickening. We were not friends, and barely associates - but they were good people. And they've been gone for weeks.
I remember sitting there at my desk like a zombie for like 10 minutes. My desk - in what we used to call the UX fun house. Now there are three empty desks and me.
* * *
I put in my request to move back into the team room with BigDog's crew. There was absolutely no point in sitting on my own anymore. Runner and I had left BigDog's room to get away from Noddy. Noddy was long gone (oh wait, I have an update on that. I'll come back to it), and Dash had bailed out as soon as they realized that they weren't in the same room as their devs.
Dash just does stuff - packed up their machine and just did it. Me? I asked for permission to move and filed the paperwork.
Dash is their own animal these days. They've been pulled into a massive project for a huge client that absolutely must land. They work on their own or with Devil - but the rest of UX (such as it is) almost never sees them. In the current environment, this can't help but cause tension. Which is unfair to Dash, they are a pro - but they are less inclined to push into collaboration with the team - they just want to get things done.
Which is admirable, but when a host of design decisions are being made by one person on their own - the rest of the design team wonders why those choices are in the fast lane to prod, while everyone else's have to run the gauntlet.
And I'm not griping about Dash - I'm griping about divided processes leading to a divided team. One of the chief attractions of my job was collaborative design. Working with smart people makes you better at what you do. Sitting alone at a desk getting swamped by problems is a slow road to ruin.
* * *
All of what you've read is over a month old. Dragonman left in May. Things have gone downhill from there.
Last month saw the departures of Pirate and Shake - two incredible developers that seemed more than foundational to the company.
I'm completely unable to express how great Pirate was - so I'm going to give up. Two key features that we've promised to deliver rest on bedrock code written by Pirate. I doubt anyone understood the problems Pirate solved - and to the poor dev who gets asked to follow up on their work....
...Good Effing Luck.
* * *
*needle scratching sound*
(Ugh, the dog is going insane. I'll write more in a bit, but suffice it to say, these past two weeks have not improved things.)
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