Saying No To Promotions Away From Tech?

lunchlady55 writes "I have been happily working for my current employer for five years. After moving up the ranks within my department from Intern to Technical Lead, a new manager essentially told me that I have to move into a different role, oriented toward 'administrative duties and management.' We are a 24x7 shop, and will now be required to work five 8-hour days rather than four 10-hour days and be on call during the other two days of the week. Every week. Including holidays. My question is: have any Slashdotters been forced into a non-technical role, and how did it work out? Has anyone said 'No thanks' to this kind of promotion and managed to keep their jobs?"

Comments

Re:You can't say NO

[tarius8105]

Some companies are doing this because they are either planning to do additional offshoring or outsourcing.

Here's what you have to consider

[mzito]

Is...is this something that's good for your career? Is it a promotion? Is it a lateral move?

If it's a promotion you didn't ask for, and you turn it down for very clear reasons, AND you're doing a good job at your current role, there's a good chance you'll be fine. After all a valuable employee at Position X who turns down a promotion to X+1, is still valuable at X. However, it is likely that future promotions will be unavailable to you, at least for a while, as you'll be perceived as "happy where you are"

On the other hand, if you're being moved laterally to a non-technical position, there's a decent chance they say something like, "Well, lunchlady55 is smart, and very organized, good manager, but not really hands-on technical enough for what we need. We don't want to lose lunchlady55, but we're suffering because of L55's technical weaknesses. Why don't we move L55 laterally to a project manager-type role where we can leverage his/her strengths and backfill the technical position with someone who's very technical but requires lots of oversight"

In that situation, they're actually being good managers, by recognizing that they have a valuable employee who is just in the wrong position, and trying to rectify the situation. On the gripping hand, they're being bad managers, because if this is the case, it should really be explained to you.

If the latter situation is the case, you put them in a much rougher position, because they like you, but you're not meeting their needs in one area or another. In this case, you may lose your job.

The best way to handle this is to have an open and frank conversation with your manager. Talk about what the organizational chart looks like. Who will you be reporting to? Is there a raise or other compensation for being on-call? Be frank - are there concerns about your current job performance that led to this lateral move? Are they eliminating your position and they're just trying to protect you personally?

Based on all this, you can make an informed decision about what the situation is. You may want to try to negotiate yourself a better deal. For example, you're on call for the weekends, but whenever you have to do off-hours work while on-call, you get 2x that amount of time off your regular day during the week. Or you get paid for on-call time. Don't try to negotiate this until you understand why this is happening.

Re:Negotiate

[idiotnot]

2003 wants it's business model back.

And apostrophes would like you to stop abusing them. /pedant

I went from Senior IT lead to IT manager and made less if you calculate in hours. I was pulling in 60 hour work weeks as top of the pile IT grunt, all that OT adds up fast. As manager I got a 25% increase and switched to Salaried Exempt. I now work 60 hour weeks and get LESS cash.

Again, that's a management/billing problem. If everyone is pulling hours like that, you're understaffed. Perhaps it might be appropriate if IT is a parasitic function for your company; I know I worked those kinds of hours in a former job, where IT/engineering were secondary functions. But if you're directly billing a client for work, there shouldn't be many uncompensated hours. If you're selling a product/service, there's a management problem if your revenue isn't matching what your true expenses are. Charge more, or find a different way of doing things. Too 2003?

Re:You can't say NO

[Alpha830RulZ]

It only took our company 6 months to figure this out, and they ended up hiring back 400+ people that they had RIF'd. It took Accenture only that long to blow up a 4 month work backlog into a 2 year backlog.