Due to my inability to ignore bad processes and my wanting to get paid more, over the last couple years I've been moving from a 100% design role to a part-design, part staffing manager. I now assign fellow designers in my engineering sub-department to the projects our company is hired for. I have very little input in what projects we take on, but from my position I can read their budgets and expected hours for various client submissions, I then take this info and try to balance the work between my coworkers. In the past 6 months we've been completely overwhelmed with work, too many hours of work to do for our team. Thankfully, our project managers and clients have had project deadlines slip but the projections always show a ton of work upcoming and many coworkers are working unpaid overtime. I've been advocating for hiring more designers, and in the last month have become very explicit in voicing this need, but, I think, worry about economic recession has kept management from posting a job opportunity online.
Does anyone have an idea or opinion that can help me? Am I selling out by leaving my design only role?
I am considering looking for a new job, I'm very in demand as there are few electrical engineers in my field. I'm also considering applying to grad schools in Europe, cheaper and more relevant to my specific goals, but my undergrad GPA was pretty bad. I worry that I'm running from my life though, and I could have an opportunity here to positively change my firm's culture?
The bosses aren't hiring more people because every person they don't hire pads their paychecks and performance metrics. They have the understanding that you are still delivering, so they don't need to hire anyone else. Also unpaid overtime is a symptom of following their bullshit. Unless you are in a personally precarious position, I think it's any leftist manager's duty to ensure the people you manage get their overtime, take their vacation, and so on.
If you want that hire, you're going to need to let things start breaking rather than leaning in your employees and defrauding them of their wages. And you're going to need to play a ton more office politics, which at the end of the day is really just making the higher ups like you and think you know what you're doing. This means taking credit for a bunch of stuff, hyping up your team, and never being self-deprecating.
Yes, I agree. While I don't directly manage anyone, I've been telling my coworkers to stop working overtime. They haven't been listening. It's hard in engineering to form any solidarity as the individualist culture is strong.
Ah, I figured you could assign work in your position. It sounds kinda like you don't actually have that power if folks can just ignore your request to not work OT. I assume there's another manager to whom they report and that's who they want to please?
I have a weird role, I assign the work, but I don't manage the work, I'm not a supervisor. So I'm basically just making sure that me and my coworkers are all equally loaded with work to do.
And yeah, each project has its own manager that is pushing the designers to get work done. The way I approach my projects is that if I'm asked to do more work than I can do in a regular-time week I push back immediately and avoid having to work overtime. The other designers tend to react with putting their heads down and sacrificing their personal time... for nothing! Ideological programming...
Ah yeah that's pretty odd. What is your take on why those managers aren't assigning the work given that they can more or less dictate individuals taking on OT? Plausible deniability? It seems like a bad situation that you might be aware of this issue and others don't want to know/don't want to hear it, but you also can't fix it.
The manager who did this task before I did is nearing retirement and doesn't have the computer skills to keep an excel sheet of the all the projects updated regularly. Also I approached my firm with an outside job offer which they matched on pay and benefits, but with the expectation that I take on the assignment work with an associated title change.
It's not nefarious, it's more instituonal malaisw. Most firms in my industry, other than the very largest, are run by aging boomers with no plans to retire and no investment in younger generations of workers through their careers. As they now reach the end of their careers, I'm part of a generation of young engineers who are taking over these middle management roles with a very outdated template to improve upon.
I've automated most of the assignment work in the past year.