Change is life, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy
February 13, 2009
Change came to Caltech two weeks ago, and I’m still reeling from it.
Change is life, but that doesn’t mean it’s easy
I haven’t been writing recently, except for posting a few article summaries from articles I read in my IS366C class at CGU. There’s a reason for that, and that reason is that my life has become rather complex over the last three weeks. Beyond the usual infant induced familiy sicknesses, I mean.
Change comes to Caltech
As I said in my “About” page, I work at the California Institute of Technology as the manager of an IT team. Caltech has, like many, many institutions around the country and the world, been acutely affected by the recent troubles in our world economy. Although Caltech is funded by its large endowment, and although that endowment has been well run over the last several years such that the downturn in the economy affected us less than it did some other institutions, we were affected nonetheless. The hammer fell a little less than two weeks ago, and more than one hundred people were laid off Caltech-wide. I had to lay off one of my five employees, and my group was re-organized.
That was the first time I’ve ever had to fire anyone. It was hard, and I worried about it for months beforehand. We in management had known for months that something was coming, but we didn’t know what, and we started making sets of plans. Me laying off one of my employees was always one of those plans for some unavoidable economic reasons.
After losing one person, I no longer had enough people to cover our responsibilities and servers and services, so my director decided that two of my people would be merged into another manager’s team. I would retain my programmers, and become a development organization, where I had previously been a mixed systems administration/development organization. Merging my two systems administrators into my fellow manager’s team makes a lot of sense in the long term, because that team is large, pure systems administration team, and thus they could bring more people and deeper skillsets onto my systems and projects. And the CIO thinks my new development team will be of great strategic importance to the IT organizaion, and to Caltech. So that’s all good.
Those that are left
But once the lay offs and the re-organizations were past, I thought that my stress and anxiety would be over, but it wasn’t. The two people that I lost were extremely anxious about the change and I gave them a lot of attention and time in order to calm them down over the following week. I think I was able to do so. I had already lived with the idea of the re-organization for a long time, and had gotten used to it, but of course, they hadn’t. I hadn’t taken that into consideration. I’d assumed that they would immediately see this as the good long term thing for them that I did. I was wrong.
I knew that it would be stressful for my fellow manager to take on all my 100+ systems, and most of my projects and most of my team’s responsibilities, in addition to having to manage two more people. Again I didn’t anticipate the stress this would place on his staff, who are not, for the most part, used to dealing with the enterprise level systems and services that my team dealt with and the expectations that come with them. His team has become more anxious as time has passed, and so has he. I am anxious for him and about him. It doesn’t help that this has been a rough month for him and for our parent organization, with several large scale near catastrophes that put everyone on edge.
When you hear about companies having huge layoffs, you don’t think about what happens to the people left behind. Certainly the people laid off are the most affected, especially in this economy. But those left behind reel and struggle to fill the gaps left by them. Thus my director and I will be making very sure that my fellow manager and his team (including my two old people) are very, very well supported, emotionally as well as technically. I’ll be transitioning things slowly from over to him over the next three to six months or so while also somehow trying to kickstart my new development team into life and prosperity.
