2022 in Review

Looking back at my monthly notes for 2022, I’m surprised by how terrible I felt most of the year because of work stress. I had joined a new team because I liked the manager, Alice, but she left after two months. Then I was moved under a new manager Bob, who was alright. Then I and another engineer were (forcefully) moved under Carol, whose team was only half-populated because she had several people leave recently. We both protested this transfer because we both had strongly-negative past experiences working with Carol, and not surprisingly, we both left her team in less than a year. Carol’s team is now even smaller and more junior than it was a year ago; she is destroying both individuals and the team. After my enjoyable honeymoon period on the new team, management went downhill and stress escalated until I was coping by strictly vegetating after work with movies, anime, and junk food.

<rant>

Just the other day, more than a month after transferring away from Carol, she triggered a day-long burst of familiar anger and stress by questioning the quality of my work, ostensibly to prepare for the annual performance review. She asked obvious questions like “Why didn’t you complete ABC assignment 5 months ago?” or “What happened in XYZ project?” These questions are obvious because we discussed them multiple times in the past and she has a good memory. Her objective here was purely criticism and I found this offensive both because we had agreed on my course of work and because she was reneging by re-questioning things months later. I take pride in doing good work and felt I had gone above-and-beyond by completing my last assignment – which took several things lining up fortuitously and a clean, unorthodox approach – before I transferred teams. Instead of acknowledging my work and how I held up my end of the deal, she instead asked “Why didn’t you finish the integration tests?” Moreover, these questions were unnecessary in the first place because Carol is not even doing my performance review this year and is only providing summary feedback to my current manager.

Carol is the physical embodiment of the two Amazon Leadership Principles Deliver Results and Insist on the Highest Standards. When she assigns you a task, she expects you to complete it and write the required unit/functional/integration tests – no exceptions. Examples of things that don’t matter:

• Previous agreements to have someone else complete the work. She ignores any arrangements and will ask you for status updates anyway.
• Making progress. Regardless of what you say, she will ping once or twice a day asking “What are the blockers?” until it’s done.
• Being sick. I got the flu and thought I was doing her a favor by powering through to complete a time-sensitive task. Didn’t matter. She called me to remind me how important the task was and then covered her ass by advising me to take a sick day.
• New health conditions. A developer started developing health conditions. He was able to continue his pace of work, but the stress and constant call-outs for lack of steady progress must have been very stressful. He left the company to get away from Carol.
• Pre-existing health conditions. A developer started falling behind because of a health condition. He was constantly working overtime and obviously trying his best. When he informed Carol that he was taking medical leave, she put him on a Performance Improvement Plan that same day.
• Sprint planning. Carol believes in developer responsibility, doesn’t care what you have in your sprint, and will ask for task updates regardless of what the team agreed upon in the planning exercises – rendering them a waste of everyone’s time. Even if you are on-call and supposed to be relieved of developer duties, Carol will ask for updates.
• Timelines. A major project was far behind schedule from the moment it started and obviously wouldn’t be completed on time. About two months out, we started asking her about deadline extensions, but she refused citing her confidence that “we would work smart and figure things out.” Obviously things did not magically fall into place and the project was massively behind schedule, even more than initially estimated because she implicitly encouraged us to take shortcuts by, ironically, only caring about timelines and questioning the value of design and planning. On a separate occasion, she guilt-tripped me about needing to report a project delay when she set an overly-aggressive timeline without consulting me. Regardless, project success, failure, and timelines are a manager’s responsibility and it is unfair to lay that on an engineer.
• Developer flow and prioritization. She messages engineers as soon as ideas form in her mind. Instead of prioritizing tasks and leaving people alone to complete them, she shirks her manager duties by overloading engineers with work and then laying the burden of prioritization on them.
• Developer time. Unsatisfied with everyone’s speed of execution, she will contact multiple people for the same issue, and then sometimes even go do it herself. This causes duplicate work and sacrifices the team’s time in favor of Carol’s.

</rant>

Though I had some brief, nice times during my PTO (3-week stay in England, wedding in California, moved into a nice apartment in NYC), 2022 was a bad year because of dominating work stress. Luckily(?), I’m familiar with this situation, was able to recognize this, and was fortunate enough to be able to switch teams. I also recognized my health was in decline and starting prioritizing health. Despite many failed attempts in the past, I’ve somehow been able to maintain a daily exercise routine. My priority in 2023 will be to maintain and increase my physical health.

Some things I did in 2022