We have a situation in our IT services company. We have a capable lead Alice and a couple of high performing developers Bob and Chris.
Bob and Chris are with the company for about three years now (joined right after graduation), in these three years they prototyped and delivered some outstanding work, which converted to a lot of revenue for the company. Alice joined the company as a Senior Lead about a year back. She has about 6 years of experience and she is well versed with handling clients. In the past one year she converted a big project, albeit not as much as Bob and Chris.
Whenever a new challenging project comes, the higher ups want all the three to sit together and brainstorm for the project. Alice deals with client interactions and the overall architecture of the project (quite a bit of coding too) where as Bob and Chris take care of the coding majorly. It’s been the case for the last one year.
I (her friend) recently came to know that during the last one year few thing happened
- She is being constantly undermined by the other two developers
- this typically involves them simply ignoring her inputs in the projects
- dismissing her when she suggests something that they don’t approve off
- being very territorial about their previous work and taking credit for the projects
- basically treating her to be incompetent
- She came to know this during an unfortunate goof up by Bob while on a slack call, she happened to look at their chats during screen share, so she definitely is not imagining it
- She admittedly wasn’t on par with them in the first few months (due to her personal commitments she had to be on a leave for 10-15 days), but this continues till today even after successfully delivering projects
- She asked the higher ups to move her to a new team, but this will happen only during next company restructuring, which is still very far away.
What can she do in this situation apart from leaving the company ? How can she get them to treat her better ? How can she handle this situation better, given that she was hired into a role that she is in right now.
Edits after comments:
All the 3 report directly to the VP of Engineering (it's not normal for the developer to report to VP, but since Bob and Chris are there for a some time and delivered in the past they have this access).
Location: India