this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
31 points (100.0% liked)

Experienced Devs

3979 readers
1 users here now

A community for discussion amongst professional software developers.

Posts should be relevant to those well into their careers.

For those looking to break into the industry, are hustling for their first job, or have just started their career and are looking for advice, check out:

founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
 

Prologue: Long time Reddit subscriber, this Lemmy thing seems neat. I will probably ditch Reddit completely. Hi everyone!

tldr; joined new team two performance review cycles ago. Reorg before I joined, now have inexperienced manager who is different than hiring manager. Things went downhill after a while, probably due to personal issues, now my job is at risk. Another reorg with new manager happening soon, trying to save myself from layoff until then and trying to save my rep. Wondering how to do this best.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] valence_engineer 2 points 1 year ago

Potentially if the project isn't being known about for you then it's also probably not know about for your manager so you both look like you didn't achieve much. Given the economic climate they're probably worried about a layoff as well and having a report that isn't making them look good isn't optimal. In most companies the perception of what you do matters significantly more than what you actually do and it's even more the case for managers.

One final comment is that you probably need to build up trust with your manager. They probably don't trust you and you probably don't trust them on a personal level. In theory that's part of their job but they're the ones in power so in the end it benefits you more. One advice I heard which does in fact come off as ass kissing but is probably very beneficial in reality is to acknowledge in 1-on-1s to them the good things they did. "Hey manager, I really appreciate you giving such a thorough review of the project" or "Hey manager, thank you for pushing back so strongly on that request." Short and specific then move on.