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Demotivation due to multiple re-orgs and change of domain

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Senior Software Engineer [L5] at LinkedIn5 months ago

When I say re-org, I mean product we are working on changes, but people more or less remain the same.

I have primarily worked in the consumer space for most of my career and I was re-orged 9 months back, still working in the consumer space. This was first re-org of my life, and it came up with lots of uncertainties and new partner teams.

Now again, I (along with few more people) have been re-orgd to enterprise product. For 2 months, we'll help another team in one project. After that we'll get a proper product to work upon.

I have the following doubts and need help with:

  1. Moving from consumer to enterprise at the first glance doesn't seem interesting. I am not sure how will it go with time but if anyone had this experience in their career, please consider sharing.
  2. Any advice to cope up with the demotivation due to continuous re-orgs?
  3. I was a UI developer and now I am focusing majorly on API. Tbh, my tasks are pretty easy but I am taking time to grasp how everything works end-to-end. Until we get to the final product we will be working upon, I don't think I will have solid points to show in performance review since I am mostly focusing on execution. The team owning the project had already disambiguated the main chunks of the project.

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Discussion

(4 comments)
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    Tech Lead @ Robinhood, Meta, Course Hero
    5 months ago

    Sorry to hear about the re-org: Bad re-orgs are very common at Big Tech companies like LinkedIn as the incentives are misaligned. IC engineers generally don't want re-orgs as the stability is so important (especially for senior -> staff), but execs often get rewarded for them as it shows that they're thinking about "long-term vision" and overall org "synergy".

    Moving from consumer to enterprise at the first glance doesn't seem interesting. I am not sure how will it go with time but if anyone had this experience in their career, please consider sharing.

    So it's not exactly the same, but I went from a purely consumer facing product (Facebook Portal, which is now dead) to something that was a mix of both (Instagram Ads). At ads, the businesses buying the ads were the most important entity.

    I actually found working on something more business facing to be quite enlightening due to the higher stakes. When you're at the scale of Instagram or LinkedIn, you can sort of ignore consumer issues that affect 100,000+ users (100k users is less than 0.1% of the Instagram userbase). However, you can't do that with enterprise clients. This forces you to get better at quality control, oncall health, detailed analytics, and a bunch more fundamental skills that are vital for a great tech career (especially when pushing for Staff).

    Any advice to cope up with the demotivation due to continuous re-orgs?

    My main advice is to view it as an opportunity to learn more and make more friends. If you have never worked on enterprise before and give it a serious shot, you will grow into a much more valuable engineer. However, I totally understand that personal preferences can be hard to overcome. I personally love working on consumer apps.

    Until we get to the final product we will be working upon, I don't think I will have solid points to show in performance review since I am mostly focusing on execution. The team owning the project had already disambiguated the main chunks of the project.

    My main advice is to be proactive and look for scope (maybe create some of your own). If your tasks are pretty easy, I assume you have some free time. I recommend going to the new leads you'll be working with and asking what they have on their backlog. This helps build up the relationship (you are effectively offering free labor), and you can go treasure hunting for some meatier tasks.

    Best of luck!

    • 1
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      Senior Software Engineer [L5] [OP]
      LinkedIn
      5 months ago

      Thanks Alex, this is helpful.

  • 1
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    Eng @ Taro
    5 months ago

    Moving from consumer to enterprise at the first glance doesn't seem interesting. I am not sure how will it go with time but if anyone had this experience in their career, please consider sharing.

    I have moved from working on a consumer cloud sharing app to working on ads. At the beginning, I had similar feelings to you. I "knew" consumer apps because I use them every day. But, I don't know anything about enterprise products.

    You start to change your thinking to: given this space that I know nothing about, how can I provide the most value to users, and you start to think of it as a set of challenges of learning about a new domain. Even if you're not personally excited about the enterprise product, your audience is still users. They are users that are just working right now. You can make it easier for other people to get their jobs done more effectively.

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      Senior Software Engineer [L5] [OP]
      LinkedIn
      5 months ago

      Thanks Charlie, this is a great insight.