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Fixing damage to my department due to nepotistic exec

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2024-10-22 18:30:03

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I'm working with a team of software and devops engineers, and the team has recently been shuffled due to layoffs. Our technical lead, "Alice" (not her real name, of course), who works a lot of overtime and helps over 10 teams in our department, was recently screwed over by some exec, who basically credited the exec's cousin, "Jeb", with the success for Alice's work, and gave Jeb bonuses and stock commensurate with the quality of his "work". Jeb has never touched the projects Alice leads, so, this just looks awful to everyone, especially when some random unqualified, connected guy gets credit for a hard working woman's work. The work also literally saves our department $3M/year, so this hurts Alice's career too. Tech leads were ordered not to talk about this, and that just spread it through the whole department like wildfire, and impacted morale as well.

Alice has since dropped all of her "extra" work (inventing new solutions, helping multiple teams), and we're hurting. We're already short-staffed, and this just hits us harder. To remedy this, we hired nearly 2 dozen contractors, trained them, and tasked them with handling the work Alice used to do, but they are struggling to do a fraction of the work she used to handle. To make a point, Alice steps in for 1 hour, and does the work of the entire week's worth of the 20 junior contractors.

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