Another one bites the dust
Lost another person from my team today.
She resigned to pursue an opportunity at a startup that develops app support for Google.
She was the mini-me skill and work ethic wise.
(Front-end developer/Wordpress guru/does design stuff on her off days/works 10 hour days regularly).
Mini because she was just starting out with UX type work, but picked it up and churned out artifacts without my help due to her enterprising nature (use of google and ability to separate junk advice from real advice and apply it.)
I don’t blame her. Enterprise applications aren’t particularly fun to do, especially when a concept like “Jquery” is a newflangled idea to them.
Ever apparent dilemmas :
How do you recruit AND KEEP talent when your client is so behind the times?
How do I compete for talent with cool and agile start ups when I have no control over the work environment?
If I hire people more in line with the culture at the client, how can I bring them into the 21st century?
One thing for sure, all the battling and making UX a priority will slow down substantially, if not stop.
The UX capability is not just me. It’s my team. If everyone on my team can’t do what I do, then the capability is non-existent.
I have to get them on my level so I don’t have to hover or clean up behind them and so EVERYONE can be strong.
This is a lesson I didn’t learn from being an AKA in my chapter…”shining” isn’t good in the long run.
If everyone else isn’t “shining” as well, then you failed your organization.
Due to the events over the past few weeks, I feel like I failed my team.
Someone dropped the ball on a project and I had to do it for them…It’s my job to empower them enough to be able to do it themselves.
Second person leaving under my watch…I’m not sure how I could have helped with that. Before it was because we didn’t have enough true UX work.
Now we have it coming out of the woodworks.
She was also on the most “creative” project in the portfolio where they DID actually get to use things like the Twitter Bootstrap and javascript libraries.
And it wasn’t necessarily the hours. I’d get on to her for staying late and warned her to be careful about her work life balance because I knew she was like me in that respect.
Alas.
I wish I could just be a lead and not be in the weeds of projects so much.
It’s shaping up to be a 60 hour week because my actual functional job as a UX Analyst. That doesn’t even include the lead work…
If I had the time to just work on my people…or even like 20 hours a week to work on my people…the team would be so much better…
