I’ve been just getting by this entire time but I’m tired of just getting by when I see this **** failing. I am not a person who tolerates failure unless I know i did everything possible to prevent it. But my role from the beginning seems doomed to inescapable failure and I dont know what to do anymore and neither do the people i work for.

The stakes are low for me, i dont need this job and feel confident i could find another quickly. I feel i could just sack up and try to pull off something heroic. But i dont know if it’s possible anymore.

You probably can't salvage the company. You have no shot at salvaging it as a dev. You might have a snowball's chance at it by going in to management and fixing all the process and personnel issues.

Based on what I've gleaned from your posts I don't think your company will be successful even if you can turn all those things around. And honestly the value of you doing those things is way more money and equity than you could ever hope that they would give you

So my best advice is to move on. But if you can't and you want to have a chance at turning things around you need to forget about being an individual contributor.

Figure out what you want to do; dev or PM or both
Figure out if you can do it where you're at; ask the people who control your career
If you can't do it there why are you staying?

I needed glasses (at age ~30).

You should really ask yourself what you want to do and tell them that's what you want to do. Take control of your career and not let the managers do what they think is best for you. Because at the end of the day, it's only you who controls it.

It sounds like you hate the PM role and rather do engineering side of things. Tell them that. A good manager will want to make sure their good employees are happy so they can keep them there.

You have almost no chance of turning the company around regardless of what you do. Probably best to accept that. There are deep issues well above you (from my limited outside view).

So do whatever you want to do. If you want to improve your skills in either technical or non-technical roles I think you have opportunities here. But it might not be satisfying to you in the short term. In the medium/long term it could set you up well for success.

Although I think there’s a risk if you go the PM route that this position doesn’t look that good on your resume because of a lot of factors outside of your control. People will be wary to hire a PM without a strong track record of success (from business point of view) who then talks about all of the things that were out of their control that caused the failure. Even if that’s what legitimately happened.

Edit: I think a bunch of us have said this before, but worth repeating that it seems important to pick a role and define it. This mixed role is very hard to pull off (I’d say impossible) and there’s no way to even set clear expectations from your bosses about what is and isn’t your responsibility.

That’s what I’m worried about. Although, I think I could spin it. I am not really wanting to be a PM somewhere else.

So, is it not suicidal to recommend they replace me? i’m seriously considering doing it.

Another option is to just accept things are the way things are and continue to do both things poorly.

I’ve successfully changed my roles and asked for someone to be hired to replace me. It’s not suicidal but you need to be very sure of where you stand and your relationship with your boss.

But you really need to have a shared understanding of what the new role is you’re going to be doing and what the role that’s being hired is going to be doing. And I think you might need more trust/transparency with your boss than you have.

If they view your value mostly as a manager/PM and you’re telling them they should hire someone for that so you can do development, you need to be sure that they value you enough in that role.

You can also consider a transitional period. But again it needs to be super well defined and with a clear plan forward. It can’t just be like “I’ll keep doing what I’m doing until we hire role X” because there may never be incentive for them to do that.

Just maybe as an example. For me the change was that as soon as we agreed on making he change about half of my old duties went to other people and I took on half of my new duties at the same time. Those were very well defined. Then we had a clear hiring plan for finishing the transition. The hiring took a long time (expected) and at one point I explicitly said I couldn’t take on some of the new work we were planning until it happened.

Again though, this needs lots of trust and pretty clearly defined responsibilities.

I think I have pretty good trust and relationship with my boss. Maybe I talk to him 1 on 1 before the meeting. We have really candid convos about the state of things and about other people's performance and how to handle various things that I don't think he'd confide in any other team members.

This is along the lines of what I want to say -

"Let me preface this by saying I really want to be here and am not planning on going anywhere. However, I feel the role I am in is not providing the highest value to you guys. Most of my work hours in the last year have been relegated to engineering tasks. Lately, it has become hard to balance management + engineering. I think we need to make drastic changes and I am not sure I am the right one to do it. I also do not feel like I am developing my skills and progressing.

Perhaps a good path forward could be to hire a PM with some experience, relegate me to engineering/lead kind of roles like I have been doing, and I can help the new PM transition into a system that works for everyone."

I probably have a lot of leverage because this company literally cannot lose a single person more. We're that strapped.

seems like it would be more beneficial and pleasurable to put all that effort into starting something of your own.

First, don’t go start something on your own yet.

In terms of what you’re going to say I think it’s also worth being clear what you actually WANT to do. If it’s just about your value to the company they may just disagree with where you bring the most value and not realize what you’re actually saying.

Another thing that was helpful in my situation is that my new role was announced right away. So that’s another thing that can help. If you agree on a role make it effective and visible immediately in title, authority, and responsibility.

You can also do this in stages. Try to get roles defined and a sense of what they’re open to. Sometimes it can be easier to define a role and then pitch yourself (or others) for the roles.

By the way, my main advice is just to go find the role you want somewhere else and go get it. Even if that’s not what you want to hear.

I don’t think I want to start from square 1 somewhere else. How do I market myself as a developer right now? i’m not there yet. I want to get some more hands on here and leverage that somewhere else. It’d be way easier and less stressful to land a job here than elsewhere.

I could just blatantly lie about my title on my resume and list the things I’ve done, which would look more like a developer than a PM.

You’re an entry level dev with much more real world experience than your competition. You are more marketable now than when you got your current position. The PM stuff you’ve done shows adaptability and a get-****-done attitude that improves your desirability. Don’t look at the current role as a failure, look at it as a great opportunity that reinforced your desire to be a kick-ass developer.

My resume already looks so weird so why not, guess you’re right

Once again Sublime undo completely saves my ass. I did a major refactor and then realized I forgot to split off the old code into a dead branch so I'd always have it for comparison - and in this case doubly so because we may have to go back to the old method. I had already committed and pushed to the primary develop branch when I realized this.

So I got the brilliant idea to make a new clone of the repo, then create a branch for the old code, and then revert out the new changes - since I can never remember how to do that right and was too scared to operate on my normal local repo.

Well apparently reverting (or reversing or resetting or whatever I did) a commit in one branch reverts the commit everywhere. So when I pulled the primary develop branch into my main local repo, it reverted all the code I had spent a day working on. Which I didn't notice.

A week goes by and by some miracle I had never rebooted or closed Sublime. I was able to Ctrl-Z and get all the old code back then re-check it in. Argh.

I still don't really understand how git works at all. I just know how to do everything I need to do. Usually. Like I have no idea what HEAD means and I've given up trying to understand it.

im lost

if you have a feature branch with 100 commits and want to squash them to merge while keeping the feature branch history i guess you can just git checkout -b new_branch then you have a new branch to squash/merge/close and the old branch is still there.

Well that conversation kind of back fired on me.

I started out slow, saying that after the product manager left, I am a bit unclear on how to proceed, we had planned to do a lot of things to change the org a little bit and make things run smoother. Now I am at a loss of what direction to go and wanted to know their plan for my role and what I need to be doing. Laid out my concerns with how things have been going.

They said that they realize a project manager without a product manager is kind of a bad deal and a lot of what I've been struggling with is their fault. Ok. But their solution is to now give me a few of the Product manager's responsibilities.

I immediately pushed back and said ok well - if you want to give me more, I cannot juggle the engineering responsibilities you give me as well with even my current workload, and I have ownership of so many things now I feel I'll be constantly derailed and won't be able to do either job well.

At the same time, I told them I really do not want to lose the ability to do dev stuff because it's the thing I most enjoy. They basically told me they need me really bad as a PM and they also need me to continue doing dev stuff. Lol.

Then the CEO started with the "in a startup you have to be flexible" cliche and I almost wanted to say, "Why am I being asked to be more flexible than anyone else?"

We'll see how it goes. They're gonna start making me more customer facing and include me on all major communications and meetings now. I told them I wanted them in their next company wide meeting make my role VERY clear because there seems to be widespread confusion about it (rightfully). To some of my team I am just another dev. That has to change I told them.

FYI, moving closer to the customers is moving farther away from development...

Time toask for a BIG raise and a promotion jmakin

It completely backfired.

I got a raise without asking in January, maybe in June I should ask for one. It was a 20% raise and pretty generous but I'm still barely above median salary for my title (nationwide not for the area)

I don't care about history. Imagine you just accidentally checked in a bunch of changes to master instead of develop. How do you undo that and check them into develop instead?