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Earlier this month, the young Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom called me with some big news. She works at a company that creates advanced technology for warehouse logistics and for the last five or more years she and a group of her colleagues have been stationed at one of her employer’s customers to help make sure that the robots behave and the goods flow as planned. Recently, it became known that her employer and the customer have come to an agreement: The young Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom and her team will transfer into the employment of the customer and continue to keep the warehouse running, but now as employees of the customer. Changes like these are of course nerve wracking because of the impact they have on compensation, benefits, but also on work and career opportunities. Time to call dad.
Fortunately for the young Mrs. Wednesday Wisdom, dad has dealt with this before! In the last fifteen years alone, I have been at five employers, in three teams that got disbanded (twice of these at one employer), and got laid off once. I have reported to seventeen managers and sat at sixteen different desks. I programmed in seven programming languages (C++, Python, Go, Hack, Rust, Java, and shell script), used four videoconferencing solutions (Google Hangouts, Zoom, Chime, and Teams), three calendaring solutions, and three word processors (Docs, Quip, Microsoft Word). My source code now sits in four different version control systems, three of which are internal-use only (Google, Meta, Amazon,) and the rest lives in various private GitHub repositories. With this rate of change it is no surprise that even close friends and family cannot keep up with where I am and what I am doing there, and so they regularly ask me: “Where are you these days and what are you doing there?”
In our industry, this rate of change is by no means an exception. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tells me the median tenure of my demographic is 9.6 years, which I managed to exceed only once in my career, which is from 2006-2018 when I was at Google in Zürich and Cambridge MA. But even during that somewhat long (ish) stint, I reported to eight different managers and worked on six different teams, while programming in six programming languages: C++, Java, Sawzall (don’t ask), Python, Go, and of course: Shell script.
This all goes to show that to survive in the modern (tech) economy, you need to be flexible. Very flexible. It used to be that you would be in a team for years and then work on many different projects; these days, even if you manage to work on a project from start to finish, you often do so while shifting desks, managers, and not infrequently also project direction, before the project is concluded. Sometimes you move into new teams where you can continue with your work, sometimes you move into teams where your project gets unceremoniously canned, with its artifacts sent to the Museum of Professional Disappointment, where they will probably be added to the vaults in the basement for lack of enough wallspace to display in the regular collection.
As I have written about before, my first reorg was a massively impactful event; one which had me worrying about Everything(™) and being heavily involved, if not practically, then at least emotionally. I was worried about my new manager, the work I was going to do, and what my old manager (whom I loved) was going to do. From that experience, I learned not to do that again as it usually comes to nothing. If you are a regular individual contributor, you have approximately zero impact on these processes and by the time you learn about an upcoming change, most everything has already been decided.
As an individual operating in a large and complicated market you are vulnerable to all sorts of changes. The company strategically decides to get out of the XYZ business. New leadership comes in and they need to do Something(™). Managers leave, creating a need for a reorg to divide the work among the remainers. Promising projects suddenly become less promising as they fail to deliver. Teams “need” to be consolidated across fewer geographic locations. Prospect X wants to become a big customer of ours, as long as we are also going to become a big customer of theirs. And then there is of course good old fashioned cost cutting. Suddenly, and without much notice, you can get swept up in these changes. What to do?
Over time, I have reoriented myself to see every big change as an opportunity. When the deck is reshuffled that thoroughly, we are probably going to play an entirely new game, with new rules, and with new winners and new losers. There is no point in mourning the old game, as it is gone and will never come around again. Your best course of action is obviously to focus entirely on the new game, to figure out the new rules, and maybe even help writing these new rules. You will be in a new team/org that you don’t know. So, take the initiative to get to know that new environment. Figure out the new org chart, learn who is who in there, and maybe set up some 1:1s with your new colleagues to introduce yourself and get to know them. What’s going on there? How can you be successful in that new org? Are there any gaps that you are uniquely qualified to fill? Is there anything from your old world that you can bring along that might be helpful? Is there anything that you need to change about yourself or your way of working to become a better fit? Who are going to be your new allies?
There is no point in trying to cling to the old org, the old team, or the old projects. That doesn’t necessarily mean that you need to go along in the direction that the organization wants you to go into. If there is change happening, now is the right time to, well, change. If you are so inclined, look around for other options too. If you were already contemplating moving into a new direction, the universe just gave you a perfect moment to consider that in all seriousness. Sometimes there are no options, sometimes there are many options, but by all means, look around. If you want to, that is.
The one skill you need to make the best of these sorts of changes, on top of all of your technical knowledge and experience, is adaptability; the ability to adjust to changing circumstances and make the best of them. Adaptability is the new safety net: The skill of turning uncertainty into opportunity. In an industry defined by disruption, the only constant you can trust is your own capacity to evolve.
