All,

I think this is worth a note as its the most common conversation I’m having with senior staff as we move out of the pandemic dynamic. Many senior people do not want to go back to (tough) pre-pandemic roles. In some cases the team has stepped in to fulfil their day to day role, in others, some smart young coder has written an app to eliminate the role altogether. The wheel of technology innovation rolls forward relentlessly, doesn’t care about pandemics, and is ambivalent to you or I.

Most people know the old coders’ adage: automate yourself out of a job so you can move onto the next thing.

My brother was a perfect example back in the day. He started in a cable company doing excel reporting as a Cambridge (almost) grad drop out. Within a month he’d automated the process so he could do his entire weekly stack in 30 mins a week. He then automated the work of everyone else in his team. The rest of them dossed about, he taught himself Java and jumped to a software company a year later, before going on to retire (mostly) before he hit 40.

The other road a lot of people take is to find someone else to do their work for them. This is a different thing. The person builds their career by getting stuck in and solving some particular problem for the company. They do it really well and progress rapidly from a grad salary (say £20k) and over 5-10 year progress to a MD, VP, CXO type role, on many multiples of that, maybe with equity, etc. Eventually they hand that work over to someone else, often that grad on £20k, and often that change from hands on is precipitated by a life event, time out due to illness, illness in the family, bereavement, maternity leave, paternity leave, coaching the kids Gaelic team, get a new boyfriend or girlfriend who doesn’t like the long hours, you name it. The new grad or team of grads often do the job much better because they start off where the other person finished, very often things have gotten a bit stale in the last few yers of the previous era, or new hot technologies (e.g. PowerPI) have popped up. Maybe even some hot-shot grad uses PowerBI automate what you’ve been doing for a decade so it take 10 minutes a month.

Effectively the manager in this scenario is getting paid a lot of money and gets a lot of gravitas for no contribution.. in fact the company is also paying the other person (or people) on top for doing their job.

The first and headline objective in tech corporate restructuring is to find the 80 percenters (i.e. the 20% of people who do 80% of the work) and make sure they’re well looked after. That’s well known.

The even more important (and often unspoken) objective in smart corporate restructuring it to find all the expensive orphaned managers and make sure they go in the first round of redundancies. Aside from economics, having all the orphaned seniors swanning around creating mischief (idle hands and all that) so tends to be a big drag on team morale.

Back in the day I presented Duncan Niederauer with a plan to fix NYSE Euronext’s competitive woes by cutting out three layers of middle management across the firm. My observation was that all they did was have meetings, meanwhile the people actually doing the work at the coal face were often world class. Not only that, but the company ran just fine day to day while all the managers were having meetings and offsites. In some cases one tenured SVP cost the company the equivalent of the 20-30 people at the coal face deep in their team. He had come to the same conclusion but said he couldn’t get board level support to do something quite so drastic. He did give me air cover to test my thesis on the European technology organisation.

Four years later The Ice acquired NYSE Euronext and the first move the sector legendary restructurer Jeff Sprecher made was to fire all the middle managers…

The next question then; what is my advice to managers who wake up one day and find out that someone else is doing their job, or even worse (depending on your perspective) that person has just automated the role out of existence?

My standard advice is always to start by doubling down on client facing contribution, we have an ever increasing need for quality executive sponsors, senior staff who can step in to give exec level input where accounts are in diffs, etc. Even the smartest kid straight out of college can’t be an executive or C-Level sponsor for enterprise clients. Caveat, you need to actually add value and move the needle in the account.

As I’ve said in a few town halls recently, the pie is growing exponentially and there is more than enough for everyone. Our biggest challenge right now is getting senior talent engaging with clients at anything like the level we did five years ago.

Similarly, my general advice to anyone who built their career in client facing work is to keep client facing work a key part of the their role however senior they get. First of all it’s a unique skill set that’s hard to replicate. Second, which I’ll cover in a moment, the bar is very high indeed when moving to be a top generic “manager” or “engineer” after a client facing career.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t do it, some of the greatest engineers of all time (e.g. Ron Verstappen at Wombat) spent the first 15 years of their careers in client facing roles before cutting a line of code.. I’m just saying the bar is very high. You need a plan to deliver serious impact, generally leveraging your client facing experience to drive product and service direction based on unique perspective gained in the field. Doing so probably means getting out to see clients once a month even after your move to engineering to stay fresh and get iterative feedback. Also, you’re right back at square one so need to have a monster impact in the first 12-18 months.

Part of the reason the bar is so high is that great engineers, especially automators are rare, as are great managers in tech period. Many people don’t even realise there is such a thing let alone that they’re not it.

In a gross oversimplification, for a high tech firm, the great technologist will be able to point to a list of high impact automations in the last 3 months, 6 months, year, 3 years, etc. Always moving the foundation higher. These automations will either materially improve the product/client experience, or dramatically impact productivity across the team. A great manager will be able to point to a long list of people she’s recruited, developed, and moved on to other parts of the company (the team builder), or the group of top automators she’s been pointing at game changing areas of the business (the tech visionary).

If you don’t think you’re any of those people, nurturing high quality client relationships is the way to go. Just don’t get sucked into first line.

If all else fails help the sales team land a few whales. When in doubt generate some alpha. Maybe even move to sales yourself, generally the most profitable route and can be a lot of fun too.

Cheers,
Danny
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