It’s a special “where are you now?” season at Ask a Manager, featuring updates from people who had their letters answered in the past. Here are four updates from past letter-writers.
1. My coworker mansplains via ChatGPT
Ultimately, for several reasons, I left the role. Though perhaps in hindsight, this should have been a signal that they weren’t the right fit.
The ChatGPT guy did get more obnoxious, at one point even suggesting we rewrite our entire codebase in another programming language using ChatGPT. This guy didn’t know how to write code at all and just assumed it would go fine. We’d literally be on Zoom together and I’d ask him something and watch him type it into ChatGPT. He just seemed to stop thinking for himself as time wore on.
Beyond that, there was some ugly corporate restructuring where I was given a title demotion and extra work but no extra pay, and the small amount of travel I had agreed to ended up being a large amount of travel. Corporate growing pains kind of stuff — it was a very small company that was trying to sort itself out and I just was caught in the middle.
So I left, and took a role more in line with my experience for a lot more money. Last I checked, they were hiring my replacement under the old title but less pay, and I wish them luck with that!
The new job unfortunately just handed us an AI usage mandate I’m not happy about and I think the vibe coding here is a bit off the charts too. But at least I feel like my experience and input and questions are valued and answered appropriately.
I don’t know if this will be a long-term role but it makes a difference to at least feel respected. I keep my tech skills sharp with projects outside my job, and I wait eagerly for the days where we can be more normal about LLM usage rather than shoving it in everything.
2. Protecting interns from office drama
Thanks so much for answering my question earlier this year and to the people who commented on it!
I had the conversation with both interns; both took it well and were grateful, but I also think they (thankfully) were too inexperienced to grasp the full extent of the situation. No luck with Collins, though; in a related situation, she said she’d be grateful if I could be the one to talk to Trinity, and I was able to steer her in the right direction by framing the change of behavior I needed as “please help me in this very tricky client situation by doing ABC.”
Robby and Langdon were fired a few weeks after I posted. There was more drama with clients, Robby was maneuvering hard against Collins in that time, but what ultimately did him in was that he had also made a number of decisions that didn’t make any sense on the business side. I have since found out that Robby managed to alienate pretty much every senior woman in the office by being condescending, mansplaining, and disrespectful to women specifically. Langdon was a goner when our CEO reached out to senior leadership of the client of a very big project and they gave very bad feedback. I did share my concerns about Robby with our CEO as well — more about the business side of things — when the conversation naturally came up after Robby managed to completely exasperate our generally very patient and even-keeled CMO.
I wish everything was hunky-dory and that we all rode off into the sunset but, probably to the surprise of no one, it was not so. I had high hopes for the new department head since I used to have a good relationship with her and she is very competent. But instead, Trinity took over Langdon’s big project, has become her new right-hand person, gained several direct reports reassigned from myself and others, and continues to gossip — sometimes in a pretty nasty way. In fairness, I was asked if I wanted the big project, but I was already working weekends so I was relieved when I didn’t. What I didn’t count on was that declining automatically resulted in “Well, she isn’t that busy so she can take on this other thing” and “Trinity now walks on water, we all must protect Trinity at all costs” — when I was still carrying a higher workload than her.
The new department head has completely sidelined me, so long story short, I’m job searching but also think my job might be on the line given the dearth of new projects in the pipeline. I would get a pretty hefty severance, so I’m trying to stay calm. On the bright side, I did manage to get Whitaker hired permanently (although he now reports to Trinity), and I’ve done pretty well detaching from the bigger leadership concerns and just focusing on my work and deliverables.
3. I keep getting pulled into work that’s not my job
I’m the technical writer from 2021 who kept getting assigned project management tasks on Project Coffeepot, with a project lead who dumped all of his overdue tasks on me. As I mentioned in the comments, I did have to stick it out during Covid. Work slowed immensely, so I just let things ride and completed whatever task came my way.
Post-pandemic, the project lead brought in an entire team — eight people — to do what I was doing. (I’m not exaggerating the number, though the increase was in part because the project lead was an empire builder who planned to take over the department.) I was perfectly happy to turn over the management tasks, but then he gave them my technical documents as well. At that point, I was truly fed up. So I said, “Fine,” went to my manager, and said, “I need a new project.” I’m part of a technical support pool and we get assigned to different projects, and luckily a new effort was starting and I got in on the ground floor.
It’s been wonderful. I am doing technical writing — software requirements, software test docs, all kinds of things — with no project management, and getting plenty of recognition for the quality of my work. The team is great and I’ve been able to learn and grow my skills. I enjoy work every day.
As for Project Coffeepot: two years later, the project lead came to me and stated that the new team had screwed up immensely and asked me to fix it. They were behind on all of the deliverables. I took immense pleasure in stating that I was tied up on my new project and wasn’t available to help.
The project lead eventually transferred to another program — his empire never came to be. The new lead came in and within six months had erased the document backlog, got Project Coffeepot back on schedule, and it’s now nearing completion.
4. Potential employer wants me to disclose medical conditions, including migraines, depression, eczema, and more
I ended up politely withdrawing my candidacy the day you posted my letter. In addition to the health questionnaire, they wanted me to provide a recent blood workup for immunology that I would have had to organize and pay for myself. Normally I might have been fine with that, but this was all before receiving a formal job offer, for essentially an entry-level role that paid less than I wanted. It didn’t seem worth the hassle.
The hospital’s parent company ended up going into administration/receivership just a couple of months later. Apparently they’re $1.6 billion in debt and still looking for a buyer. Probably dodged a bullet.
