A few days ago, I spoke to a friend from a company I worked for previously. He told me a bunch of people in his area had been fired. I thought It was the usual restructuring, but I was in for a funny surprise.
As it turns out, this company has a couple of rules (I’m lying; it has a LOT of rules, but these are the ones that are relevant for this story).
- There can’t be more than one senior engineer in a team
- For a manager to become a senior manager, they need to manage no less than 5 teams
However, there’s an unwritten rule which really sets this whole thing turning: if, for some reason, a team should find themselves with 2 senior engineers, a new team can be pulled magically out of thin air to host one of the engineers.
So my friend’s manager pulled a 4D chess, galaxy brain move and promoted a bunch of mid-level engineers to senior, creating as many new teams as they needed to be recognized as a bona fide Senior Manager®.
And so, when their bosses found out, they were promoted to customer, along with some of the engineers, as I hear.
Incentives really spice things up, don’t they?