Signs You May Have Outgrown Your Team

We’re all growing up but not always at the same rate. At some point we have to move on, even if its just an internal move. Here are the signs I look for when considering whether its time to find something new.

• Frustrated every day and going home sad, being close to tears, bringing frustrations home.
• Feeling tired all the time or becoming tired early in the day.
• Wasting hours writing unsent emails, rehearsing conversations and pitches for ideas and then giving up and not sending them.
• Wasting a lot of cognitive cycles wondering what’s “wrong” with your job, the way the team works, the way the corporation is structured and other things that are hard to change or completely outside of your control.
• Continually predicting what will go badly but always being ignored.
• Suggesting ideas that are proven and fairly well established in high performing companies but not being taken seriously or being refuted.
• Not being “allowed” to work on the stuff you “know” to be a priority or a root solution.
• Producing high-quality low-defect work, evangelising and teaching others but after months, you’re still the only person working in this way.

I’m quite anti the “patient change agent” idea. I think its unrealistic and it pressurises developers to suffer longer than they should trying to be the perfect colleague, holding a bad bet when they could be doing better and growing elsewhere.

For me at least, that path has been frustrating, has never got the critical mass/groundswell needed and very often, since the company is dysfunctional in the first place, the effort went unrecognised anyway.

It’s not your fault. It’s not your fault…