Update

LOL it’s been awhile.

So my escape from Smooth, Dumb, and Nasty was a huge success. The new group was awesome, and I really enjoyed working with the new manager tremendously. For the first time in a long time in my career, I really got to spread my wings and soar. I did some great work — very valuable to the organization, and personally rewarding, too.

In the year and a half I worked for that team:

• I got a promotion.
• I got an off-cycle pay raise (that never happens)
• I got a performance evaluation of “1″ (that is never supposed to happen)
• The success of one of my projects was reported all the way up to the CEO
• I got 3 Inventors Awards — which is a little reward you get when the company files a patent on one of your ideas.

However, shortly after that, we got a new CTO, and he proceeded to destroy the organization. All the smart, good VPs got out. Most of the good managers left. A couple of great managers who were holding out were eventually laid off.

Fortunately, one of the good directors survived, and eventually moved up to take the VP spot.

My manager, the one I enjoyed working with so much, was laid off. They brilliant upper management merged our team with another, that wasn’t really vaguely related to ours, and moved over a raging narcissist as our manager. It was really awful.

Based on the momentum and credibility I’d built up, I lasted a few months. But the noise and insanity was just too much. So I got the hell off that team.

That manager was eventually shoved out the door for being noisy and incompetent. They haven’t replaced him yet; that team doesn’t have a manger today.

I moved onto a team managed by a guy who I’d considered a friend for a few years. But it turns out he was a seething narcissist, control freak, and asshole bureaucrat. Ack! I will call him PuffyBureaucratWannabe. Wanna was a step up from the raging narcissist I left, but only because Wanna was so self-centered, he’d basically vanish for weeks at a time to go to technical conferences and engage in self-promotion. Then he’d come back, F* everything up, and leave again.

I finally got bored with that position. I didn’t like the noise and buzzwords, and it was really clear that I wasn’t going to get any recognition for any of the work I was doing. So I jumped off that team after a year.

I landed on the team of a nice woman who was well regarded in this shop. I was really excited to get off the boring, buzzword-driven team. But my first day of the team, she told me she was leaving in two weeks to go work for another department of the company — in New York.

Crap.

That wouldn’t be so bad, except in the interim, Smooth (of Smooth, Dumb, and Nasty fame) had moved up to the Director position. Which I actually thought was OK, because moving him up the chart and letting him single-mindedly drive a department seemed OK to me. But with my new manager gone, he has to step in and act as my new group’s manager. Ack!

Dumb got shuffled off to the support team, once people started to recognize how really dumb he was. And Nasty got promoted too, but got pushed into a individual contributor role with no people reporting to her. So she can make occasional contributions without hindering and choking off any specific team.

Fortunately, Smooth really busy, so doesn’t have a lot of time to dedicate to managing us. And he hasn’t been as bad lately as before — maybe having broader responsibilities gives him more to worry about. He’s also had to undergo a necessary conversion, where he can’t afford to be as petty and vindictive toward individual smart people, just because it’s in the best interests of the department to have a lot of smart people on board.

But he is vindictive enough that he blocked my first attempt to move back to this department. My second attempt was successful, so I made it to this team. But he wasn’t happy about it.

The very best news is that asshole, blowhard CTO who caused the huge mess that destroyed the team I liked — is leaving. Under pressure from corporate, no doubt, he has put in his resignation, and today is his last day! Hooray! Maybe now we can re-instill a sense of sanity, and have Engineering get back to work.

Now, the big guy, who I will call DullAngryBlowhard, or Blow for short, brought a lot of his sucky colleagues on board in important positions. And in the three years he was here, he promoted a lot of pinheads. And he created a couple of new departments — including the unbelievably awful Architecture department we have. These departments were basically crafted in such a way to destroy Engineering. So there is still a sort of poisonous miasma that permeates the halls.

Blow tried to destroy Engineering, although I’m unsure if it was deliberate, capricious, or just out of incompetence. But even though he is gone tomorrow, the mechanisms he established to do that will have to collapse and go away as well.

So, for example, that means our incompetent architecture team is going to have to implode and vanish before Engineering can thrive. But they are huge impediments to actually delivering any value, so that’s just a matter of time.

So right now it’s a strange world I’m in. No leadership at the top, which is hugely better than the angry, stupid management before. An architecture team that is desperate to validate itself by destroying Engineering in order to make itself look good. A level of middle managers who are stupid, manipulative, and angry. A tone of nasty bureaucracy where delivering functionality is the lowest recognized form of work.

We’ll see. There is a team forming from a different development department that I might jump onto, if for no other reason than it’s going to be hard for me to get an adequate pay raise at the end of the year, given the politics of Smooth, and the lingering dysfunction left by Blow.