Working abroad: Problems with manager/team.

Copper23

Hi all,
This will probably turn out to be a rant but maybe someone can offer good advice.

I took a job a year ago with a multi-national, it was a graduate program with the option of moving abroad. I wanted to try my hand in London for a long time but with the collapse of all the banks and so on it was very hard. This job offered me to go to Boston so I took it. I came at the end of last summer.

We had to interview during the year at home with various positions. It turned out mine was not in Boston, mine was about an hour away but the company put me up in Boston like everyone else.
A few others were the same but most can work at home or in Boston several days a week.
We were also told that the company is good for letting people work from home and so on and most people had booked time home for christmas.

When I arrived it was apparent soon enough there was no flexibility, I do a 2-3 hour round trip a day, 5 days a week. I was not allowed to travel home at xmas as my holidays were limited and the company would not allow me work remotely, I was told it is "not the done thing here"... I was the only one of 15 not allowed spend time with my family.

I came with the hopes or advancing my career and sometimes you have to take there hits so I put my head down.

However I feel I am not fitting in. I am doing my best and feel I'm working very hard, however my manager just seems to have no time for me. She rarely listens to me, seems to feel I am well below the standard of what I am actually qualified and skilled to do and does not trust me with any important work.
She talks down to me a lot. Just this week, 3 times I came back from important meetings to see snide emails telling me to please join the meetings. Infact I was the 1st in the room for all meetings while she was calling from home. This is all fine but when managers are copied on the emails it reflects very badly.

2 weeks ago I solved an important problem in the group. However as I was busy working on other things I spoke with her to tell her where the problem lied and wht needed to be done to fix it. Later I get an email from another team member, there was an entire trail of emails where she sent to the team saying how she had found the solution and basically claiming credit for it and left me off the trail so I wouldnt know. I know it was my mistake for verbalising it and not writing the mail myself but as I was very busy on other items I thought showing my manager I could help them solve the problem would reflect well.... obviously not.

I also ahve a problem where I work on a certain part of our project which other components rely on. I was given the title "lead developer" however another developer also works on it intermittently, he constantly makes changes which are serious but never lets me know and it causes me a lot of problems figuring out when I see things changed or broken and can't figure it out not knowing someone else has worked on the code base.

People on our team track defects in an online tool we have and its almost as if, if someone sneezes they open a defect on my component. Managers look at the reports and I get a hammering on the number of defects opened on my component but they are rarely things I can work on or fix as they are not actually things coming from my code base but as everyone relies on my component its easier jsut to make me the fall guy when things don't work.

On Wednesday I spoke with our QA team before a morning meeting, they had opened up a defect which I simply could not reproduce and believed it to be false. I spoke at length with them trying to figure out why they are having a problem when everything works fine, they only told me about this ONE defect.
We then went to a team meeting and when giving a status update the QA team said they had REOPENED ALL defects I had marked as fixed for my component... there were groans in the room as eyes were directed on me. This was the first I heard of this, why would they talk to me for an hour before the meeting and not inform me of this once. I had no explaination as I didnt know what the problem was.
Afterwards I checked the tool and there was only 1 genuine defect open and it was catered for as I was expecting a vendor fix next week and it was fully tracked. Other things were all duplicates of items previously closed, and "tracker" defects which are basically reminders for QA to test stuff later but these are not defects, they should write their reminders in the outlook or a notepad or something, not open defects against me which reflect on my reports to senior managers.

My manager is now very untrusting of me due to the bad reports. I have requested the QA team to work with me to close these defects which are logged but do not exist but I ge no responce.

I tried getting my manager to speak with me twice today but she bailed on 2 meetings I had set up with her.

My team are very hard to communicate with. Our project is very far behind and I know confidence is low in our group within the company well before I joined. People do not communicate well and everyone is wrapped up in their own little areas and don't help each other at all despite we are all building components which interact and integrate with each other.

When I ask for help or ask a question, people just do not respond. I have gone to team mates desks where they ahve opened their email client and there is a list of unread emaisl from me and others which I can only have assumed thy had read and were aware of. I have taken to sending mails then going to their desk and asking them to read it if it is important but the answers I get are usually just to brush me off or tell me they'll reply later but rarely reply.

I really don't know what to do, I came a long way to further my career, I thought a successful stint in the US would be GREAT on my CV but right now it's like a dead end job.

I have a half year review coming up soon and even my team mates joked this week how "fun" that will be given how my reports are always so bad for my component.

No mater how much I try to explain the reasons or causes, senior managers only involvement is when they see these reports and if they look bad they don't care what the fine print says. A bad report is a bad reflection on me.

I really don't know what to do. I've tried speaking to team mates and communicate better but the team in general is poor and it seems to be well known.

I've tried talking to managers but they are disinterested or just don't want to know.

What do I do?

Irish_Nomad

Sounds like there are some serious problems there. I'll just do a braindump of some things I would want to do in your position. They're in no particular order.

Put read receipt on all emails
It's harder for them to ignore emails when you know you know.

Try to bond with your team
This can be hard work. You have some obstacles to overcome (you're new, you're foreign, and graduate programs [GP] often have a bad reputation). I don't know what would help in your situation. It might be talking to them about local sports or going bowling some evening. Ask the other people on the GP if they have found any little tricks.

Get a mentor
If this isn't a standard part of the GP then take the initiative and find someone senior yourself or ask the person running the GP to help you find someone willing to mentor you.

Ask for the defect list to be published and circulated in advance of the team meetings so that everyone is working off the same list
This shouldn't be a problem if the meetings are weekly. How often are they ?

Don't be the fall guy
I gather that many of the defects that get assigned to you are really faults elsewhere in the system. I can't tell how these defects eventually get resolved so I'll assume they get re-assigned to the correct module somehow.

You need to go to the meetings with the numbers laid out so they clearly show which defects were really your problems and which were not.

I would show something like :
A Open at start of week
B Newly assigned to you
C Resolved
D Withdrawn
E Reassigned to other team

F = A +B-C-D-E Open at end of week

A few weeks worth of data will show if wrongly assigned defects are significant.

Demonstrate you are in control
Following on from the previous point provide a breakdown of the defects that are officially open categorising them such as :
- under investigation
- fix in progress
- awaiting vendor fix
- awaiting retesting
- no action required (those QA notes you mentioned)

This should give the managers confidence that you know what's going on, are in control of it, and that the the situation is better than the overall numbers imply. It also helps focus attention on the defects that really need to be discussed.

If your multinational is anything like the one I worked for then they love metrics and no amount of verbal explanations will substitute for showing them the numbers.

Version control ?
The company must have controls and procedures to handle situations where more than one person works on the code. This shouldn't be a problem so get together with the other guy and sort it out.

Whose side are you on ?
I worked on projects in several countries and I was always treated with suspicion initially. The locals often had the fear that I was a corporate stoolie, there to keep tabs on them and report back, so they didn't trust me. For me that was the hardest obstacle to overcome. I had to demonstrate again and again that I cared about the project and that I would take their side when dealing with other groups. This may not apply in your situation but I recall working with another person who had major problems with local management because he never overcame that perception.


I hope some of that is useful. If I think of anything else I'll add it later.
It would help to have some ideas of your team size and the number of teams in the overall project.

Copper23

Thanks,
I appreciate the feedback.

Read receipts are a good idea. The communication is very poor in our team, anything that will maybe force people to read emails sent is something really needed. I think this is a good idea, they many realize I want them to read things instead of selectively ignoring.

I will look into a mentor. I'm not sure if this is an option since most of our team are all very consumed in their own things and as communication is poor they aren't often very helpful when needed.

Yes, we do have a weekly meeting and I should make a point to view reports before they go to management however we also have daily standups. These are often a forum for people to express their problems since they have everyone in the room or on the phone. It is here I often hear from our QA team of new defects open or the amount of failed tests before I am even aware and I can say 90% of the time the problem is either not my component or not a valid failure. I have spend a lot of time showing THEM how to use their test tool to test my component as they are doing it wrong and if they can't do the test they mark it as failed. That doesnt mean my component is broken, it means they lack understanding. I don't like going into those meetings knowing the QA team can come out with anything they like and I am not informed before hand.

I have done my best not to b a fall guy, if defect are not related to my code which most likely they are not. I try to get meetings with my manager to discuss action items which she no shows for. I try to speak to QA but they seem to gloss over things face to face. I send mails detailing each defect and where they need to be reassigned but they get ignored. If I reassign myself then they are ignored and the defects are just let sit there.

Version control is in effect but if the other guys work on the code, as they are more experienced managers assume its just stuff I couldnt do and they were right to do it. Thats all fine and well but it causes a lot of pain when code is changed an works differently and I can't understand why, it wastes time. Speaking to the guy in question, he just brushes it off that it needed to be done.

We recently moved to an "agile" method, even our project manager has reported how resistant to change our team is, and I feel it in every sense. I feel they can't be shown up by a new young guy and its easy to just make me look bad at their expense.

If I saw the sky is blue but my team mate says its yellow then the manager assumes it must be yellow as they have been their 20 years compared to my 1. Sometimes its like they will insist the sky is yellow as it makes me look bad when I insist I disagree.

Another new guy started on our team lately, but he is an experienced guy but I can see how threatened they feel by him. He is asking for a lot of help to set up his environments and get to grips with the project in his first few weeks but the team is largely unhelpful. H'es asked me for help too, asking how did I learn everything when I joined without any documentation on anything. I didnt want to discredit the team but I just said I'd help as much as I could but docs don't exist and I only learned about our team by just being here and listening to whats going on.

Another manager was hired a few months back and has been left go already. She was undermined a lot by my manager, I think my manager felt she might out do her. The truth was she was hired to share my managers work load to let her focus on what she needed to do but i felt it was obvious how much she disliked her and undermined the new manager a lot. After 4 months the new manager was let go, she had been undermined so much they felt she was not contributing enough but having worked closely with the new manager I felt she worked very hard and helped the project a lot, its just that when she made decisions or plans they would be over-ridden by my manager when it was not her job to do so.

I just feel its a bad environment to work in, I've heard some of the above noted by others but some of the new people like myself seem to be taking the fall as it means minimum blame or responsibility can go to established team members.

Its not everyone, I find our architect quite good and helpful but as he is not strictly part of our group, we are not any sort of threat to him and he gets on with us quite well, but he's one of the only ones.

Irish_Nomad

Frankly I thought read receipts was the least significant thing I suggested but you seem to see it the other way round. People not reading your emails is a symptom of a problem, not the root cause. I think you need to step back and look at the bigger picture. If people don't rate you and don't trust you then you need to understand why and figure out ways to overcome it. Read receipts are at best a band-aid.

Re a mentor : This should be someone outside your work group. They don't even need to be in the same country.

Some of the things you said in your second post worry me :

Version control : If this in place then how come you are not aware when the code is changed by someone else ?

Reassigning defects : If I understood correctly you do not re-assign defects to other components because you think they won't be worked on. Surely they won't be worked on while they are wrongly assigned so what's the advantage in not routing them to the correct team ?

Disagreements with team members : You didn't give a real example of the type of disagreement so I'm guessing somewhat here. If I were the manager and 2 team members gave me conflicting advice I would definitely give more weight to the guy with 20 years experience. That's perfectly natural. If the other guy is deliberately lying to the manager to make you look bad (and presumably sabotaging the project at the same time) then I'd say you are truly f*cked. However I think the probability of that is small (although I have encountered it before) and it's more likely that the whole situation is making you a little paranoid. There is probably a genuine difference of opinion and if possible you should try to resolve the disagreements before any discussions with the manager.