What Happened

In the last 10 years at this company, I've held four different titles, worked for seven different managers in five different office buildings in three different states (I've moved around a lot). I started at the entry level and rather quickly moved up to management. Either somebody noticed an aptitude on my part, or they were simply desperate for managers. I got in during the early days, and therefore I have had the opportunity to hand-pick a number of the people on my team. Many of them are all still with me.

My company does... well, a number of things, really. I'll spare you the boring details. We're primarily a company that deals with data. And me and my team... what do we do? We're database administrators. That data has to go somewhere, and we have large banks of databases to hold it. We don't know much about the data, where it comes from, what it is, where it goes. We just keep it safe and secure. We have about 20 terabytes of data to watch over. (That's the equivalent of 2200 DVD's, 30,000 CD's, or about 14 billion floppy diskettes, for those of you old enough to remember what those are.)

When I started, I was one of the few database administrators in the company (our databases were much smaller then), but the company was growing and the amount of data stored was growing. As a result, my team grew as well. About two years after I started, I was promoted to the manager of a small team in Kansas. About two years after that I was prompted again to the head of the North American team. I had about ten people in my staff at that point, most of whom I hired myself.

At the same time as we were looking over the databases in the U.S., there was a similar team looking over the databases in the U.K. Together, we looked over (just about) all of the data in the company.

The European team was led by a guy we'll call Il Duce (not to be too subtle) who had the same number of people working for him, but for some reason he was less effective. His team was only able to manage about half the load as my team.

Oh, I have my theories as to why, and a lot of them have to do with my assessment that I'm just better at what I do. But if I were to really break it down, I'd have to say that the base cause is that we have two very different sets of priorities.

For my part, I focused on my team. I felt they worked very hard to serve a sometimes ungrateful company. My company does not produce anything other than data. Therefore, as the database administrators, our jobs are paramount to its success. Unfortunately, we get blamed for all manner of sins that have nothing to do with us simply because most people often don't understand what we do or how we do it (yes, database administration is something of a black art in the IT community). When things go wrong, we are expected to jump in and fix problems that we didn't cause (late at night, on weekends, over holidays, basically anytime problems can and will arise). It can be frustrating at least and demoralizing at worst. So I do whatever I can to keep my team happy. My philosophy as a team manager is this: "Take care of the team, and the team will take care of you." This philosophy has served me well over the years. Mostly.

In my tenure as the head of the North American team, I had a remarkably low turn-over: I only lost one employee in 4 years (which, in the IT industry, even in the post-2001 tech market crash, is something to be proud of). And my team supported about 2/3rds of the company's data.

By contrast, Il Duce focused on the customer. His philosophy is this: "Keep the customer happy, and they'll take care of you." Of course, our "customers" (mind you) are all internal: data managers, application developers, sales staff, technicians, etc. I'm not talking about my company's actual external customers. (We in IT aren't allowed to interact with them, wisely enough.) Although we're all on the same team, these "customers" are the very people who make our jobs difficult, who complain loudly and angrily when things go wrong, who waste time pointing fingers instead of trying to resolve issues, who scramble to cover their collective asses so when the proverbial shit hits the fan none of it lands on them. These are the people Il Duce takes care of. He does whatever he can to make sure they are happy so they won't complain about him. Which means that over the years, my team has gotten more ill-deserved complaints than his. Fair enough.

However, his team suffers for it. When push comes to shove, he'll turn on them if it means keeping the customer happy. He doesn't look out for his employee's best interests, and as a result he has had a lot of turn-over. Also, with the same number of employees, he only supported about third of the company's data, half of what we supported.

Then, in July of 2005 (two and a half years ago) I found out that the two teams were going to merge together, and that Il Duce was being promoted to the Director of the global team. Instead of being peers, I would be reporting to him.

I was concerned. We did not see eye-to-eye on how our teams should be run, I knew that already. I'd been watching him for several years. Since our two teams did the same thing, there were many occasions for us to work together and I had many chances to see his philosophy in action. Until then I happily agreed to disagree with him and do things my own way. Now that we had merged and were effectively put under his direction, I had to ask myself if this was something I could live with.

Better yet, was I ready to leave the company? I'd worked there for over seven years at that point. That's a good long time. Nothing wrong with venturing out and finding a new job. But at the same time, I'd developed a lot of good relationships, too. I'd hired a lot of good people that I didn't want to leave behind, especially not under a new boss who would not value them the way I did.

Ultimately, I decided to stay. Common sense won over and told me to stick it out and see how things went. I could always decide to leave later, but I could not decide later on to come back if I left now. I hoped that Il Duce and I could compromise and find some middle ground between our two management styles. I was willing to try to meet him half way as long as it didn't ever mean betraying my own team.

The question was: would he meet me?