AMA: Me, my manager, my firing, and Cruise's cheap moves (imo)

Start here for the story -- baseline post: https://www.teamblind.com/post/Kt1u2Pgi Timeline of events leading to my firing, and the culture of "Hiding Stuff by Sr Managers" at Cruise: https://www.teamblind.com/post/odQfXxN2 I am starting this thread as a follow up to my previous post. I shared the news of my company, Cruise (a GM subsidiary), terminating my employment just a couple of days before disbursing non-salary cash compensation. This move surprised me, in my opinion was unfair, very much upsetting in nature, and when I come to think about it, and reflect about events that led to this quick dismissal, I think it was malicious in intent. I will detail my experience, interactions, perspective, assumptions, and judgements here. I see no reason to hide dismissal, or psychological torture I had to endure because I decided to fight for the culture I believed Cruise wanted to have. Before I go into details, if you are a former colleague, if you are a current Cruise affiliate of any org, if you are a prospective candidate, or if you are just a bystander, or a Blind troll, I prefer to set the scene and be explicit on what I am sharing and what not. About me: I don’t intend to share any name other than Blind’s practice of initials, and only that for senior leadership of the company. I will try not to mention anything identifiably relevant by initials or such. I don’t intend to and will not share any confidential or even non-confidential but technical information. So don’t ask. I intend to share my personal experience, as a professional, at Cruise; why I believe they wronged me, in financial and non-financial ways. I may or may not engage you if you are being a troll or an asshole. My insults are usually sarcastic and deprecating. If you are being an entitled asshole (with good intentions or not), I probably will say something very snobbish or insulting in your book, but I’ll be polite. So heads up! At work, I strive to be kind, but not necessarily nice. If you behave entitled, bullish, or unreasonable, I don’t take bullshit, and you will know about it. I have a bitter tongue, I know about that. It’s a vice and I’m not proud of it. But I take a genuine disturbing honesty to gaslighting and empty dismissive smiles. I am passionate about what I find right and people I care about. It’s easy for me (and liberating) to acknowledge when and where I am wrong and reflect on what I don’t like. I am also outspoken, I strive to be fair and generous in my interaction with others. I have my own vices and I slide at times, but I strive to know what’s right and what’s wrong. Historical context (and what’s up with PIP) I have been a front-line engineering manager and before that, tech lead manager, for a decade now. I have worked in companies big or small, such as Oracle, Uber, Cruise, Yahoo, … to smaller startups for short stints as engineer. I have worked at Cruise for the past three years. I have managed teams such as Data Processing, Data Management, Data Infra, Data Exposure .. at Cruise over the past 3 years. During my employment I had 4 managers before my latest manager, ME. Over the past 2.5 years before ME’s arrival, I never had a performance gap, PIP, or any rating lower than the default “Meeting Expectation” rating. I was not on a PIP or had any performance conversations with my manager, anybody from HR in 2024. Neither did I have any performance discussion with my skip manager, during the few weeks that my manager was out of office during Q2. No conversation during Q1 (in fact my manager acknowledged how much our work together has improved during Q1). I did not have any performance conversation after layoffs from 2024. In 2023-Q3, my manager started taking notes in our 1-1 document that clearly was screaming I’m making a case against you. After a few weeks of 1-1, he asked me on one occasion to add my comments to his doc. I took the opportunity and provided long answers to his notes. He didn’t like that. We never used that document for 1-1 follows up anymore. I guess I messed with his evidence. I shared my concerns about constant intentional hostility, lack of interest in psychological safety of the team, and my failure in coming to a mutual understanding with my manager and my HR representative at the time. I was told to listen to my director and let her be present, mediate, and manage our 1-1s and hopefully the relationship will improve. My contacts in HR later left our org and maybe Cruise altogether. It was never communicated to me that I am on a coaching plan or a performance improvement plan. Even now, I don’t know if I was ever on a performance watch. After all, I worked with ME only for 2.5 months before he started making a case against me. Mind you, he wasn’t the first manager I worked with at Cruise, but for some reason, every other manager I’ve had close interactions with in DI, is either laid off, left the company, or got fired. I promise you, the problem wasn’t *my performance*. But I will go into details of what these declared gaps shortly. My manager and I My relationship with my manager, ME, became very contentious late in Q3. Later in Q3-2023 my director found it necessary to mediate our 1-1s and asked both of us to have 1-1s in her presence. My manager ignored this request when she went on PTO. Then layoffs happened. My director + another senior manager, CH, at the same level as ME were laid off. Later my contact in HR who had all the context about my situation with my manager left. After reorg, in the beginning of Q1, my manager, ME asked me to forget everything between us, and reset our relationship, as we move to a new org and a new year. He asked me to think about that. Prior to this conversation, I informed him that I intend to change teams. He invited me to stay (although later he offered to be onboard with my move to another team). This sudden change of heart was suspicious but I welcomed a reset, assuming good intentions. There has been zero conversation about performance, gaps, PIP, coaching plan, or such in Q1, or Q2 or late Q4 when the reorgs happened. My speculation was that he just managed to get every senior manager in Data Infra laid off, and now he is moving to a new org, where, with the personality that he has, he would be in a power struggle with other sr managers in this new org. He didn’t want to bring any baggage (like a months-long, HR-informed fight with another EM who recently started taking it to HR and MLI leadership, at the time). In my opinion, the toxicity of our relationship boiled down to him being unable to hear no, or to see his mistakes pointed out. This level of toxic ego and an obsession with flexing power to folks working under him, and behaving just as a yes-sir kind of a person to anybody above you, was my psychological analysis! However, the story is more fun than just that: Just one month after I started to work with ME, right after I returned from a month long medical leave, I realized the lack of care or sense of support for the engineering teams. This started with what I call the PagerDuty saga. I objected to a policy requested by DI management, about PagerDuty escalations for our on-calls. This was such an unnecessary move, which was against explicit “don’t do” sections of PD guidelines on Wiki. I shared these documents and asked them to revisit their ask. Every engineer was angry and disappointed after this arbitrary policy. This new policy would add multiple sr managers and directors at the first level of pager duty calls, to be paged at the same time as on-call (day or night), so that folks would know someone is watching or waiting over their shoulder. This was so childish, to be unable to acknowledge a simple mistake and instead pick a fight with a colleague just because you have managerial leverage over another person, is just mean, cheap, and below me. I wrote an elaborate email to my manager, ME. I asked him to share that with our director, and reflect the spirit of feedback to SLT. The feedback I provided was about normalizing unreasonable expectations, lack of psychological safety, and lack of focus for execution of almost anything in any team. It was after that email that all hell broke loose (but the policy didn’t change). Oh, and fun fact, I shared that email and all the context about the situation with *leadership* through pages-long feedback in the last Pulse survey. This became a pattern. Stupid asks, ill-informed interventions, absolutely no care for productivity of engineering teams or their calendar/time, or their sprint plans, a mindset of engineering teams vs management team (something I was asked by ME to clarify my loyalty to), and an attitude that his engineering manager directs need to figure out solutions to problems he creates while they have no influence over anything to fix these problems. Observing that my manager can’t say no or resist any pressure from top, and can’t hear no and prefers to scapegoat engineers and EMs was a very disappointing experience working at Cruise for me. I am sure many at Cruise can understand and recognize which recurring managerial genre I am talking about. Take it from top, shift it down. [to be continued soon, after I finish walking dogs and eating dinner :-) ] #tech #cruise #gm #selfdriving

I got fired by Cruise 2 days before our Long Term Cash (LTI) Vest date. AMA - Blind

Blind

On the Timeline of Events Leading to my Firing, and Cruise’s Culture of *Hiding Stuff* that Lives on - Blind

Blind