War of Attrition

January is always an “interesting” month at work. Usually this is the month when the results of the corporate-wide Fall Planning exercises, conducted by the Movers and Shakers at the end of the previous year, actually trickle down to the worker bees – the people that are most affected.

Fall Planning determines the budget allocated to each product team for the following year. Products that are kicking butt financially or products in new emerging markets get more money.  Struggling products get less money or sometimes get eliminated, with the developers moved to other projects (or worse). For all practical purposes, the amount of the budget equates roughly to the number of developers and testers.

In our particular product’s case, we have sort have been treading water over the last couple of years. Our headcount has been basically flat with mixed business results – and there have been discussions about merging our product with another.

January is also the month when yearly performance appraisals are given and, over the last several years, the month when, unfortunately, the latest round of layoffs are announced. These are called Resource Actions. All of these factors, aggregated, make for a bit of uncertainty during the month. Usually, by the middle of February, the churn has settled down.

On the second Monday in January, there was a hastily called All-Hands Meeting at 1:00 for all the folks in my Second-Line Area. The meeting invite wasn’t sent out until Monday AM and the boss made a point of checking with all the troops to make sure they would be attending (either in person or via teleconference). So something was going down.

Sure enough, the Third Line Manager announced that our Product Team would be permanently losing 7 folks, who would be moved to three other product teams in our product portfolio. Before this move, our total headcount (Managers, Product Managers, Developers, Testers, Technical Writers) was about 35. So we are talking about losing one-fifth of our team. The good news is that nobody lost their jobs and our management team assured us that our project plans and business commitments for 2011 were necessarily being re-evaluated in light of this news.

Each product team is a fairly close self-contained unit and, since our product was first formed in  2005, it sucks to see people that you have worked with for awhile move on (or, more accurately, be moved on). I had worked pretty closely with almost all of them:

• Roseanne had been our Chief Programmer for The Release That Would Never End, which stretched from May, 2008 to November, 2009. Chief Programmer is sort of the technical lead for a release.
• Ann Marie, like me, was one of the first to join the product when it was formed in 2005.
• Andrea was one of our Test Leads and had been on our team since 2007.
• Ryon and Adriana were junior engineers when they joined our Install Team in the summer of 2005.
• Devayani was a Tester who I had worked pretty closely last year with my new department as she was the primary tester for the new functions we built for our last release.
• Sam was another old timer that was interesting to work with – let’s leave it at that – I have some posts in draft mode about working with Sam over the last couple of years. I might have to dust those off now.

For those of us that are still standing, there are changes (mostly additions) to responsibilities as all the developers that are departing had their areas of expertise that need to have new owners. Customers still need to be supported. New functions still need to be designed, coded, and tested. Bugs still need to be fixed. Releases still need to ship. There is no shortage of work – that is a good thing.