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 Hi,

I just joined a small start-up (<20 ppl) after finishing my PhD in Pharmacology. We create software for clinicians.
The pay is good, and I was very happy about finally having some more responsibilities.
However, after little more than 2 months in my first management job, I am getting depressed and frustrated. I started with lots of enthusiasm and motivation, now I am terrorized.

First, my team, 3 people, all remotely managed. One only works in the weekends, for around 12 hours. 2 work in another country. I never met them in these first 2 months, and there are no plans to meet them soon. I am trying to build some relationship through Skype, but it's very challenging. These three are all around 24-25, they never worked a single day in their lives before this job and are very junior from the technical side of things. I am doing my best to help them every time they have a problem, but when they have a complaint or a problem they tend to skip me to ask the CEO directly. They seem to be quite insecure, and I suspect one of them is depressed, and I don't know how to handle their emotional fragility.

Three weeks ago the remote office had a brainstorming session on new applications to develop. I left the comment "This is too small to be an application, it's a feature for [...]. It's very interesting, so please remove it from here and put it in the list of high-priority things we have to do."

Ten minutes later, shit hit the fan: the CEO and CTO were shouting at me about making people feel stupid and killing the brainstorming process. After missing one day of work due to stress I spoke with that person and I was told that the proposal I commented had been aggressively criticised by other people in the remote office. I knew nothing of this, and I have been eaten alive. Moreover, I have no idea about what is going on. I make lists of things to do, for every item there are long discussions to be had with developers, original inputs from developers which take projects in unexpected directions and require more tests... lots of talking, slow progress, I have a very long list of things to write, test and check and my days are over after two or three meetings and "Skype tutoring" my team.

I don't know what to do. The CTO also doesn't speak English well, and sometimes I hear him shouting my name among his own language's words. And this also happens when the remote team has its own non-English Skype meeting (all the company except me).

We are a small startup, my salary probably will only be paid until the end of the year, but I am afraid I could be let go sooner. I want to do a good job, but I don't know how to handle this, and I don't want to learn a foreign language only to find out that I am getting insulted by the remote employees. I am sorry for ranting, but I am really lost here.