Ours is this guy who is almost 70 year old and is retiring soon. No degree, no official computer science education, but boy does he have some experience. Apparently started doing network stuff 40+ years ago, worked for the feds at some point, worked at popular legacy computer companies, knows everything there is to know about low level networking and other niche topics, has a few patents, and basically created the entirety of our large company’s networking infrastructure. He is ‘on a team’ but effectively works alone, builds what he wants whenever he wants, and from what I’ve heard is paid very very well. Peak wizard status.
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For deep ancient knowledge it was two guys who were near retirement. The software product itself is >20 years old, they'd been working on it for probably most of that lifespan. They got laid off last year and this year.
Then the next best was an Ops guy that had been here for around 10 years. He got tired of having to do the new contractor's work for them so he left a couple months ago.
Since then, it's been me, been here 6 years. I just resigned last week.
What happens in situations like this? The software just breaks? 😳
Guess we'll see. I offered to consult on my way out, for a big bag of money. But the probable answer is yes at some point it breaks and someone up the chain gets their 40 lashes
Gotta leave your consultation offer in the alerting message in case they reconsider when things break
How does leaving your consulting offer work? Was it just over email, do you have a company set up for it etc?
Just said "hey I'd be willing to consult" when I told my manager I'd be leaving. I don't expect them to take me up on it as it would basically be admitting that their big layoff and restructuring plan ended in disaster. I expect them to just roll the dice and try to placate customers with price drops until it becomes unsustainable then they may just kill the product and put a big dent in the company's valuation.
Companies would rather watch things crash and burn than admit they did something wrong and seek to right the ship sometimes. It’s pretty nuts to me how after all this time some companies still don’t realize you need employees to keep this shit running and just treat them as expendable resources they can plug and play with someone right out of college because the salary is a lot lower. By the time they find out a college grad (through no fault of their own) is not in fact an effective replacement for an engineer of 20+ years it’s too late
Nah. Its more that the people at the top (or shareholders) legitimately are too stupid to know what went wrong and the person responsible will never admit it.
Its the person responsible (CEO or similar) who really would rather crash and burn the ship than admit they're an idiot.
I think it’s really hard to hold one persona accountable in reality (not by job title) depending on the size of the company. Very rarely is one person the sole decision maker for high level direction. A lot of these problems could be solved with better alignment between the business and technology side of things. That being said, does not always pan out this way and if all of the c suite is aligned on something in spite of the technical folks there’s not gonna be much you can do to change their course of action barring some significant issues
People can figure it out. But it usually takes awhile for the team to get back on track. The real problem is the drop in the average level of experience on the team. If the team is mostly senior you can make it through. if it's all juniors you're going to probably crash.
The entire original development team (about 8 developers and 2 QA) got laid off in two stages, first 18 months ago then the remainder 6 months ago. They left the DevOps team intact as the overseas contracting agency the company hired has lots of developer resources but not may traditional ops resources. And because this software product is so old it has a lot of traditional greybeard sysadmin hands-on terminal debugging requirements that's becoming a less common skillset.
So anyway I guess they felt the original devops team would be able to keep the lights on while the contractors just scraped by enough feature work to keep the bigger customers happy.
But the contractors are bad and basically lied about how ready they were to take over product development, because our department head was pushing for a faster layoff to meet quarterly cost cutting targets faster. So the end result was the DevOps team having to teach the contractors how to develop on this codebase. And again, it's an ancient codebase with a lot of quirks, in a mostly-dead language. It's already not a good outlook from this point.
So the devops team isn't stupid. We know we're probably 2 years or less away from this shit crashing and burning, or eventually being laid off ourselves. So one guy leaves, then our most senior guy leaves, and now I'm leaving.
So I am the last pre-layoffs original team member left. I do pretty fully expect this to be unrecoverable, they just won't know until it's too late because our leadership is entirely reactive to disaster and don't know the meaning of the word proactive.
I’m getting strong Visual FoxPro vibes from this.
well that looks bad