Reorgs happen

In thirteen years at GitHub, I was part of 25 reorgs and reported to 13 different managers. That’s a new org chart roughly every six months and a new boss roughly every year—like clockwork.1 I know these numbers because I tracked them. What started as a humble spreadsheet eventually metastasized—as my side projects tend to do—into a full statistical forecast model that predicted the date of my next reorg with confidence intervals.2 When colleagues asked how I stayed so calm during shake-ups, the honest answer was that I’d seen the data: reorgs are a disruptive fact of life in tech, and they can be a major source of stress and uncertainty. But they don’t have to be. Why reorgs happen# Most reorgs aren’t about you. They’re rarely malicious, and honestly, they’re rarely even that strategic. Organizations reorg because priorities shift, leaders change, headcount fluctuates, and Conway’s Law keeps asserting itself—if you want the system to change shape, the org that builds it has to change…