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Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

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Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#1

Post by dvtrn »

A few jobs ago a coworker of mine, a fellow Senior Site Reliability Engineer who-like I-was frustrated with how our company manifested 'Devops', and also-like I-had zero interest in trying to play the 'hearts and minds' game of undergoing a devops transformation did something stunning (to me):

Because we were embedded with different development teams, we attended their stand ups and got intimate knowledge of what they were working on.

This friend of mine decided one day he'd pick a random ticket from this team's backlog, and assigned it to himself. He worked it, he wrote the code, followed all the same testing and QA steps the dev team did, merged it in, it got deployed.

Some would argue "this is what SRE's ought to be doing in the first place" and I agree, but lived experience has shown me the philosophy of Google's SRE way either gets perverted and bastardized entirely, or just completely abandoned for reasons that are taken entirely out of the hands of the SRE practitioners by engineering managers and org leaders (Warning, cynicism ahead: In my opinion for reasons due to poor capacity and resource planning by those very same managers and leaders)

Anyway, my friend started doing this more and more. To the point that he messaged me one day saying he was leaving the team. I asked him where his new offer was. He said "no I'm not leaving the company, I'm leaving the team".

The dev team manager noticed his work contribs, and when one of their developers left, grabbed our guy and pulled him onto their team proper.

My questions: - Is the a thing that anyone else has seen happen? - Have you done this/had this kind of internal "poach" happen to you (or someone you care about?) - ....would you do it?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#2

Post by Hermitian909 »

Haven't done this myself, but in large orgs politically savvy engineers do this all the time. A similar play if you're more senior is to pick a problem to solve that requires coordination with a team you want to be on, lead the effort, and use the success to convince the manager of that team to bring you on board.

Nothing wrong with it, would do it in a heart beat if I wanted out from my current team and couldn't just ask.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#3

Post by gigantecmedia »

this is normal in my case before I became a founder, and I was the "poached" one. no hard feelings for me--but my former boss hated me since. she still hates me... in fact, I believe this is very popular, especially with companies with politics-heavy culture, like banks, hedge fund, high growth startups (>~200 employees)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#4

Post by avl999 »

This happens a lot. In large companies you don't even need to "prove" yourself by creating PRs, most of the time the other team would be more than happy to "poach" you as you are a more proven commodity than anyone they can hire externally (they have knowledge of your work from internal commits, opinions of other devs and so on).

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#5

Post by 1MachineElf »

I've done it twice at the same place. Can't share many details, but it worked out great. My direct supervisors would get frustrated with me for not focusing on exactly what they wanted, but I stayed motivated as long as their boss higher up the chain was impressed. Never been promoted before, but each transition brought me to a place of higher authority and pay. I generally recommend getting cozy with other teams, especially powerful ones, as part of a career progression strategy.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#7

Post by milofeynman »

It's the only way to grow in my org, and why I'm leaving. As a feature team my best engineers are poached for the platform team and I have to rehire for them.

I live in silo hell. I've had to backfill hire 3 of my 4 engineers this year. Two of which went to platform teams.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#8

Post by dvtrn »

vanusa wrote: post #6

Who-like I-was frustrated with how our company manifested 'Devops', and also-like I-had zero interest in trying to play the 'hearts and minds' game of undergoing a devops transformation This sounds juicy. More details, please.

Sure.

I'm a Senior SRE, started off my tech career (21 years ago) on a help desk at a law firm, worked up to where I am now through various startups, roles, promotions.

It's been my own personal observation in other tech communities when a Devops practitioner or Site Reliability Engineer is bemoaning some of the more common antipatterns[1] that manifest when companies decide "We're Devops now", the popular responses are some variation of "be the change you want to see".

The person doing the venting is often encouraged to seek out ways of slowly winning 'hearts and minds' to adopting better practices, implementing better processes that more closely align with the ideal state of Devops and Site Reliability Engineering, take on the additional work of being the guiding hand for your organization to help them become the kind of Devops that actually practices Devops versus merely pretending.

Sorry but...

bollocks.

At least for me. I've been down that road, done that work, it's exhausting, it's painful, it's gotten me fired, and its made me want to quit the industry entirely. I've taken less pay to join teams that were more self-aware about who they are, the challenges they had and what works for them and that's far more ideal than trying to slowly convert a business from (for a lack of a better phrase) pretend Devops to practiced devops.

Hope that clarifies what I mean, then, when I say 'I have zero interest in doing the hearts and minds thing'.

---

[1] https://www.devopsgroup.com/blog/twelve-devops-anti-patterns...

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever been “poached” internally? Is this even a thing?

#10

Post by Iblue »

Very normal in my company. I was poached from another part of the company to the devops organization to lead a technical team that needed someone with better HR skills. I believe this was solely due to the reputation of me being well liked as well as professional. It wasn't an open position, I was just asked.
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