Ask HN: How does a tech person work well in a fire-all-developers style company?

Why are you trying to "rescue the product"? It's not your product. And whoever owned "your" product didn't value it nearly as much as you do, since they sold it to Idera.

The ship has sailed, it's time to move on.

Why? Because you're invested in it. Or you feel a responsibility to the users, some kind of ethical sense for your fellow developers. Or maybe just wanting to do the best in your job in the new company.

We all have things we love, or responsibilities we feel.

Sounds like your in a cult not a company. NPR had a piece the other day about how companies are having trouble retaining people. They are offering added incentives like paying student loans. Why do they have this problem? Because they have spent so many years laying off people to increase profits they now have to spent more money to retain people that no longer trust them to provide steady employment and move on to other employers every 2 years. If you really value those things find a company that values them also. You will be happier. https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/national-public-radio/how-i...

> Sounds like your in a cult not a company

I don't think that's fair at all. Idera acquires developer tools companies, and the tools are used by many developers - people here on HN. Let's suppose you built a tool used worldwide by your peers: would you just shake your head and go "yep, don't care"?

Have you read the tweets by the departing Sencha devs? They were desolate.

Tools come and go. Companies come and go. Developers will find new ways to work. The world keeps turning.

Yep, don't care.

“Don’t care” is not something to live your life by. You should care about your fellow developers and peers, and if you spent years of your life building respected technology, it is natural to care about it.

The answers on this thread (along the lines of ‘don’t care, give up’) shock me. I see HN as an audience of passionate, tech-loving people - people who would not want to be in the position described in this question and people potentially with the passion and drive to do something about it.

It's not about not caring, it's about realizing being the one person who cares in a company who doesn't isn't helping anyone, and that you could better apply your time and skills to one that does.

If there are a lot of people in need of medical attention, the compassionate doctor stops working on the dead one, and saves those she can. We're all trying to tell you your patient is dead. You loved your patient, but it's too late, and now it's time to move onto another.

You may be inspired by "Fork yeah" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16839529 - bcantrill on Solaris.

But that was a situation in which an earlier version was already open-sourced. You could consider reimplementing the system as open source, if IP rights and non-competes don't prevent it.

But accepting that the owners killed the system is likely to make you happier.

> You may be inspired by "Fork yeah"

I've seen that. A wonderful talk.

> But accepting that the owners killed the system is likely to make you happier.

I understand. Nevertheless, I always feel there are options for making something better. This Ask HN is about how to do so.

You may feel responsible, but can you change anything? It sounds like the answer is no.

You may love it too much to let go - you feel like you would lose a part of yourself if you leave. But if you stay and watch the thing you love being dragged through the mud day after day, is that going to be better, or worse? I suspect worse.

I suspect that you can't do anything to help. I suspect that you need to get out, because staying is going to destroy you. Staying (even at the price of being destroyed) to save others is noble. Staying and being unable to do anything to help isn't noble - just unwise.

Don’t cling to the Titanic, build a better, stronger boat.

Life is too short to work for people who care for nothing except money/profits. Sometimes it is best to cut our losses and move on, even if we love our users/product. Nothing can be more heart breaking than misplaced trust and misplaced loyalty.

From the land of 'Been there, done that'

2 choices: 1) Wake up, find a new job, before you get laid off too. 2) Wake up, find a job working on their product, before you get laid off too.

I worked for a company that had about 3000 employees. We were bought by a competitor. Layoffs came often as they tried, with some success, to convert our customers to their product. But many liked ours better. Eventually to kill our product and force acceptance of theirs, they laid off all the developers. The only ones not laid off were the cool aid drinkers who switched.

Myself, I was taken out when it went from 200 people to 100. The next year they closed our place. It put my career back a good 5 years.

Smart people left early on their own, not laid off, and found much better jobs.

All the while as we were being squeezed the place kept getting more and more depressing.

Another friend was in a company he loved on a product he loved. The parent company just outright killed the project. He and a few others quit and started working on the project. He worked another job to feed his family. He works 60 to 100 hours a week. Has recently found out the others are screwing him and if it takes off he gets nothing.

Moral of the stories: do not fall in love with a project so much that you cannot walk away.

2nd moral, get it in writing.

If you want to stay, you are going to have to learn to speak the language of business. When you propose something, you will need to give estimates on how this will affect business metrics. In particular you'll want to focus on how this project either increases revenue or decreases costs. Additionally make sure that you network with your new management company. Essentially, you need to look for executive sponsors who will step in and say _I need this person._ Particular effective ones tend to be Marketing/Sales or Finance.

At the end of the day, an acquirer is making an investment and hoping to make a profit on that investment. If you can help the company make money and do it more effectively than an outsourced partner you are likely to stay. You will need to put on your business hat and talk and walk the business walk to be successful.

Excellent advice.

Do you have resources on how to learn USA C-level and board-level corporate speak? And how to learn American corporate financing to understand their revenue reports and expectations?

Check out ProductHunt, it has a few "MBA in a day/week/month" sort of apps and sites which will help

Thanks! I will check it out.

Get an MBA.

That’s not really useful advice.

That knowledge needs to be found and learned fast - now. Leaving and going to college is clearly not an option. Are there good reliable or solid online resources for that kind of material?

It may not be what you want to hear, but no quick solution online resource is going to do anything but teach you how to cargo cult c-speak. The reason business types use business jargon is so they can bypass the first few levels of explanation of complicated subjects, and know that those that understand the jargon understand the complicated subjects as well.

The least worst move is to get out. If that's not an acceptable answer, then your question is basically, "how do I become an expert deck chair arranger on my sinking ship?"

I get what you say. But are you also saying it is not possible to communicate with that style management team, and not possible to educate them about the effects of lost institutional knowledge, etc?

I feel it must be possible. The question is how. How do you survive well in such an environment?

Do you really think a fire-all-developers style management team is interested in being educated by someone in your position?

s/interested/capable/

They have no love of the product. They have no love of or loyalty to customers. They have one target, to make money, and they have their system for doing it.

The only chance you have of changing them is showing them that they can make more money doing it differently. And, because they have their system that they think works, they're not likely to listen even to that.

Honestly, I think the best career advice I've learned is to not be idealistic or over invest in a product or company. At the end of the day you're hired labor unless you own the company. You can go join a competitor who is working on a similar product. It's so easy to get wrapped up in your own hype about how great the product you're working on is. Not saying it's not a great product loved by customers, but by doing this you miss the completely transactional nature of yours and your employers relationship.

> How can you rescue the product that you've spent so much time on and love?

Start a company, get a few hundred million (or a billion+) of dollars together, and buy it.

> How do you communicate with that kind of corporate leadership?

At the end of the day in any situation, you have to learn to speak their language, which is informed by their values. These questions always boil down to "X doesn't have my values, how do I change that?" If you can't make your values align with theirs, the ship has sailed.

I'll leave the company and will stop using any product or service owned by Idera. But I don't think you would do that given your situation.

If I were you I would find out who the key decision makers are of the company. What they are like and how they do things. Befriend them and lobby hard. Not thank it would do much if you are not already well connected. God pointy-headed bosses are worst.

Anyway, thanks for the heads up. Not that its going to affect me much as I use CircleCI and not TravisCI.

Idera has a pretty simple goal you can work towards: make the company as profitable as possible. You might not like this goal as much as purely serving the target audience, but in the long run, the example positive example of Travis CL turning into a sustainable profit will lead to further investment in the sector. This behavour will probably be incentivized by bonuses, and any stock you had most likely just had a liquidity event, so you stand to benefit.

The company I work for has been acquired by the same equity firm as Idera. This happened recently (it's public news, so I'm not giving away any secret). What should I expect, given I have a responsibility role and in my country you can't easily fire an employee (in my case, I can be fired only if I misbehave severely or the company goes bankrupt)?

My skeptic side says you should expect either to be found misbehaving severely or for the company that got bought to "go bankrupt" in some form.

> What should I expect

Certainly you can expect yourself and your peers to be fired. I don't think laws matter - Idera has reportedly fired entire teams in the past in countries with similar laws. I recall hearing of two times that has supposedly happened. In those cases, the employees did not band together. Perhaps that's the advice: do so. Find a collective lawyer. Advertise and promote the company's activities towards you; make their actions publicly clear. HN here is a good place. Do everything you can.

What country is this? You can only fire an employee if he misbehaves or company goes bankrupt ? Wtf? What if the employee is a bad fit? What if they trying to replace with soemeone better????

Italy. Factually it is like that, the law was meant to protect against unfair dismissal but over the years it has become quite clear that if you work all the time you're meant to, and you don't intentionally harm the company (or its business) you're very unlikely to be fired. And if you are, you can sue the company and AFAIK most of the times (I have no direct experience though) you are likely to win.

This law has been modified and partially canceled in 2014-2015, but people that has been hired before that date still benefits of this law.

EDIT: Look at third page (numbered 70), second column half way, to get a better explanation. https://preserve.lehigh.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=http...

You should research European labor law.

Usually every employee has a trial period of 3 to 6 months during which you can fire them more or less at will. But once this trial period has passed, you're stuck with them for life (or bankruptcy/misbehaviour)

The only realistic answer is to leave and go somewhere else or start your own thing.

You won’t change the attitude of the company, they won’t bring development back in house - even if you had the best argument in the world the investors would block it.

From the comments it looks like you are desperate to stay, if that is right then you have a choice either accept it for what it is or leave.

The only way you could make genuine changes that you are looking to make is if you were part of the investment crew.

We have all seen this played out time and time again, either there will be no more updates or it will slowly turn to shit - if you stick it out and your name is “mr product” you will be associated with that shit, if the product is good today then run.

You already know how this is going to end. How long do you wish to remain personally involved?

You don't. You stay and get paid well, or you leave.

Work is a business transaction. That's all it is. You're overinvested.

This is a no brainer. Run!

To make this more substantive: unless your dream is managing remote offshore teams (maybe it is?) who all lack the institutional knowledge of how the product works (so expect a lot of time teaching and rejecting code reviews), then I reckon your career would be better served by another company.

Quit. ASAP.