A new round of layoffs hit last week, 8 people, one of them +5 years in the company, and because I'm the one with the keys I spent the morning removing people from every system they touched. There I am sitting in the vault rotating shared credentials and pulling access for names I recognize, people I got coffee with, and doing it one entry at a time in passwork and slack like it's any other wednesday. One week you're helping someone set up their laptop and troubleshooting stuff, the next you're the person erasing their footprint from the company because a decision levels above you got made. And nobody thinks about you either way, when it works, you're invisible, and when it breaks, you're the problem.

Is this a common feeling? I've internalized this feeling for so long it almost feels weird to finally let it out. I HATE doing layoffs, especially when it's not an incompetent person, just higher-ups choices, it almost feels like I hold a certain level of accountability in them.

been sitting on this for a while and i think i finally have to say it. a big chunk of what i do isn't project management, it's compensating for problems the company has decided not to solve. two teams that don't talk to each other? my job is to be the messenger between them forever, instead of anyone fixing why they don't talk. no clear prioritization from leadership? i spend my week manually refereeing which fire is biggest. a process that breaks every single time we hit the same step? i'm the one who manages around it, quarter after quarter, instead of it ever getting fixed.

and here's the part that actually bothers me. the better i am at this, the more invisible the underlying problem becomes. i smooth it over so well that from above it looks like everything's fine. so nobody ever feels the pain that would force a real fix. i've basically become the reason the dysfunction is survivable, which means i'm also the reason it never gets addressed. i'm not solving the problem, i'm making it comfortable to live with.

it's a weird spot. do the job well and you quietly enable the thing that makes the job necessary. do it badly and everything you were absorbing suddenly becomes visible and it's why can't the PM keep things on track. either way the root cause just sits there.

and i think this is why the role is so hard to defend when budgets get tight. our biggest wins are invisible by design. the crisis that didn't happen, the conflict that got quietly defused, the fire that never spread. you can't put problems you never saw because i handled them on a slide. so we're constantly proving our value by pointing at chaos we prevented, which by definition nobody experienced.

i don't have a clean answer. sometimes i think the move is to stop being such a good buffer, let some of the dysfunction actually surface so the people who could fix it finally feel it. but that's a scary game to play with your own reputation.

do you see your role this way too, as the workaround for stuff that should be fixed structurally?

Currently experience two coworkers trying to say my unit is a mess and that our unit needs help. Long story short I work I public sector and it’s taking us 6 years to finally get a SOW for a new network. Procurement rules change every 6 months or so, so every 6 months I’m learning how to do it all over again. The 6 year wait ended when I took the manager position and was direct with higher ups we are being neglected now at this point without our new network. They finally got everything together after I basically told them we felt neglected.

My executive director understands our circumstances and I regularly tell managers that procurement is the issue. It’s widely known they take forever and hold a lot of red tape.

Getting new software takes multiple meetings and multiple levels of approval just to have the software approved for usage. Then there is procurement to acquire said software and pay for it. Same goes for networks

Long story short these coworkers are constantly trying to put a bad image on us. Meanwhile it’s not us but the red tape of being in public sector. I regularly update managers that it’s the red tape. But these two people are not in manager meetings, and I don’t know if they are aware they make our jobs harder.

Same two people also do not qualify or have experience in working in IT so they could never hold my position or any position under me.

How do I play office politics to be civil with them without being direct like “Hey I don’t understand why you’re sabotaging my unit what have we done to you to do this? How can we make this right?” Cause apparently I can’t be direct like that…

Does anyone have a solid onboarding template they are willing to share?

I’m looking for something that could be used to provide useful links and information to new hires but also can be used for access needs on projects. The goal is to replicate the template across multiple projects and address getting team members up to speed using a document that is clear and organized.

I know I can create one but if someone already has one they’re fond of and willing to share, that would save some time.