Old manager still thinks I work for him after my internal transfer
I officially moved over to the Data Infrastructure team about three weeks ago. It was a long process, plenty of interviews, and a massive pay bump, so I was pretty stoked to finally leave the Customer Ops department behind. My old manager, let's call him Dave, seemed fine with it during the transition period. He even shook my hand and said he was happy for me. I thought that was the end of it and I could finally focus on actual engineering work instead of fixing broken spreadsheets for people who cant use filters.
The problem is that Dave has not stopped messaging me. Every single morning I log into Slack and there are at least five pings from him about "quick fixes" or asking where some obscure file from 2023 is located. At first I tried to be helpful because I did not want to burn bridges, but it has reached a point where it is actually affecting my performance in my new role. My new lead asked me yesterday why a specific migration script was taking so long and I had to bite my tongue to not say it was because I spent two hours debugging a legacy report for my old boss.
I have tried setting my status to "focus mode" and even ignoring his messages for a few hours. Dave just ends up calling my desk phone or literally walking over to the engineering floor to stand behind me until I look up. He keeps saying stuff like "you are the only one who knows how this logic works" and "it will only take five minutes of your time". It never takes five minutes. It usually turns into a whole afternoon of me explaining basic SQL to his new hire who clearly lied on her resume.
I finally told him yesterday that I cannot help him anymore without an official request through my new manager. He looked at me like I had just kicked his dog and started talking about "team loyalty" and how he helped me get the transfer in the first place. It feels like a weird form of professional gaslighting. My new manager is a chill guy but I dont want to start my time on his team by causing a massive HR drama between departments.
It is just wild to me how some managers view employees as their personal property even after they have moved on. I am literally sitting three rows away from my old desk and it feels like I am still stuck in that role but with double the workload. I am honestly considering just blocking him on Slack at this point and seeing what happens.
I should probably just start charging him a consulting fee or something .