Being traded.
This morning, Jenny and I were mourning the loss of Mike Fucito and Lamar Neagle in a trade to the Montreal Impact for Eddie Johnson. Jenny loved Fucito (she'd yell, "That's my boy!" any time he touched the pitch) and Neagle was one of the few Sounders to score a hat trick at home. They were also great members of the Seattle community. The trade unexpectedly touched a nerve in me personally and I wondered, "Do software engineers get traded?"
I immediately thought of the developers at startup companies that get acquired. Their leadership decides to sell out and suddenly everyone (or maybe not everyone) works for a new company. Maybe the new parent company is local but maybe it is not. Maybe you have to move or quit. Maybe it’s a great opportunity or maybe it isn’t.
Then I thought about about the small teams in Microsoft that get merged into a larger group. Maybe their effective management (2 levels up) stays the same or maybe they have a new lead immediately. Maybe the project goes unchanged or maybe the goals change.
Which brought me back to considering why Fucito’s and Neagle’s trade bugged me so much today. You see the 2 layers of management immediately above me bailed (for a variety of reasons) in pretty short order. That sort of rapid upper + middle management change never happened to me before. The end result is that the new management knows very little about me and what I do. My previous managers left some nice words but I’m essentially starting over, much like Mikey and Lamar will be doing in Montreal next week.
Have you ever been traded? How did it make you feel?