Here's the kicker, I hate to say it, but they probably didn't notice you left.
That's the thing about places like that.
That's the thing about places like that.
My departure would've been less than ideal.
Either way, the company's haemorrhaged talent (now including long term CEO and long term CTO) and the stock price has plummeted since I left.
(In no way am I crediting myself for this; at best I was a canary in the coal mine - but I take my solace in schadenfreude.)
that describes pretty much every tech company in the past 18 months ;)
Whatever decision you made they yelled at you. I got yelled at once for not lying to a government official. When I quit, every sr. developer quit within 3 months of me; 7 total left and left behind 6 non sr. devs. This was 3 years ago. The company is hemorrhaging money but just keeps issuing more stock to stay afloat. It used the money from that stock to buy its competition in a very niche market and essentially just put them out of business. So they survive and lurch on.
I ask about ‘points’ in interviews, its an immediate stoppage for me
I asked him why he was so upset. Eventually he admitted that closing tickets in jira was how upper management measured how well our team was doing - and by extension him. I thought that sounded like his problem and still refused to put the issues in jira. So he did it - meticulously creating a couple dozen issues, making up a BS point estimation and closing them all as complete.
Whenever I think about bullshit jobs, I think about those silly cost estimation cards, that guy, and how deeply satisfying it was that day just diving in and making our product actually better.
- Why the commit was made should be in the commit message
- What the change is inherently lives in the diff
- Why the code is how it is should be in comments adjacent to the relevant code item.
There is some tiny marginal benefit to what you’re talking about (there’s a chance someone might later want to look at the corresponding issue). But you aren’t acknowledging the cost, measured in my sanity making a bunch of one-line issues in jira, and the team’s time doing cost estimation.
It’s nice to leave breadcrumbs for future code historians. But our job is shipping product. Cost estimation, jira, etc all only have value proportional to how much they help us ship. If the meetings are pointless, and jira isn’t needed then doing that anyway is a waste of time.
You're lucky not having been discussing money budget per ticket instead.
I have had projects where sprints got money budgets assigned to them, which divided by the cost per hour of each developer got us the amount of hours available for the sprint.
Those hours were the budget for the sprint, no more no less, better chose wisely the stories that fit in.
To make it even better, some project activities only were given such kind of budgets in specific times of the year, then one of the external consulting partners would have the go at that specific sprint.
So not only were the tickets chosen to fit the budget, every few couple of months, the teams doing the work were always rotating.
But when they become the subject of endless meetings it's a tell that maybe the company has hired too many people too quickly and is in the "bullshit jobs" phase where it's happy to waste precious salaried hours on meaningless debate.
I have had your experience with poorly organized PM and horror stories during sprints...
And I had the best planning sessions with a proficient PM, that made picking up tickets a marvellous pleasure.
+100.
Booking.com and JIRA come to my mind as good examples. Just about everyone complain about Booking, customers, engineers working there, hoteliers etc., Yet it continues on. I hear they've been trying to migrate to a modern tech stack for years but to no avail.
I am reaching 50 years old and am yet to see any ticket management system that is as powerful as Jira, while offering a relatively good usability story, and the integration story of having a ticket bind to documentation on confluence, SCM related history and CI/CD reports.
Likewise the competition to Booking usually fails to show as many properties, have as rich filter selection, and in many cases their prices are higher than what Booking offers, moreso if one happens to have Genie level status.
The irony of jira is the years it takes to realize how few pieces of software can soak into complexity like it can.
The pain of jira is how it largely can’t universally handle complexity out of the box or how you’ll find yourself in it - how it must be actually setup for your use case - how much it benefits from being setup by someone who has experiences with the pros and cons of cocaine one of the many ways of doing something.
The new project type (team?) is a step forward to start with from scratch. But a kiss of death if you need to outgrow it for some features that aren’t there yet.
Unless you're a mega corp - you're not getting a good work management solution.
/Softwarecompanies/Some companies/g
I wrote a paper for an assignment (maybe ten years ago, ask me for a link, and I'll see if I still have it), in which I called this phenomenon Corporate Inertia, and it isn't only applicable to software companies.
Sometimes the inertia is good - it allows the company to weather bad times.
Other times the inertia is bad, because the company cannot pivot in time to address new challenges or take advantage of new opportunities.
Mostly, the good outweighs the bad - if a company cannot pivot in time because it is so large, it merely buys the smaller company that verified the idea already.
First week was rebooting servers at random to try and get things working while I mapped everything out.
Eventually rebuilt everything and put together a good team.
Key was learning to tell management no. And having someone to keep upper management off our backs.
nobody will care if you leave, nobody cared about the last person that left, they have other priorities and software engineering is not one of them.
if its that much of a problem, their business will fail and some other business that does care will take over their market. but that might take decades because software engineering isn't actually core to a lot of business activity. youd be amazed at how bad some software is for major companies, and yet they are very profitable.
you only have control over yourself not other people.
I was in a similar situation once, I spent months telling management that I was the only one keeping them afloat technically and that it was a critical risk to the business. They responded by trying to pressure me into unlimited unpaid travel and overtime.
I left and they fared poorly.