They’ve been a bit over bloated for a while and honestly too many better alternatives out there
I think it's fair to say that virtually every company right now has been "a bit over bloated for awhile".
Even as someone that foresaw pretty much what we're seeing now roughly a year ago, I still find it shocking to watch the slow unraveling of our industry.
My company hasn't had layoffs yet, but it's painfully obvious to everyone that they're coming (but just not obvious enough to create maximum anxiety from the uncertainty). Because of this I've put my feelers out to see what other options are out there and... it's bad.
We should also keep in mind that quite a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs if it wasn't for the massive hiring spree in the past few years.
The industry is not unraveling. It's just reeling from an economic bubble. Despite the layoffs few companies are shrinking back down to the size they were in 2020.
how is it possible for most companies to overhire? where did all those hires come from? maybe facebook doubled by poaching non-faang people, but where did the non-faang companies get all these extra hires from?
> a lot of the people who are being laid off never would have had jobs
since tech layoffs mostly affect eng, pm's, hr and a bit of management, it seems strange that these mostly well-trained people were just idling around without a job until a couple of years ago by tens of thousands.
Like C++ Staff engineers, etc.
It seems more like a realignment to shift those jobs to cheaper subsidiaries like India, Pakistan, Mexico, etc.
Where they typically fall down compared to juniors with CS degrees is a couple of years later, when the practice doesn’t make up for less fundamental knowledge. But that can be easily overcome with good management.
They had worked on some serious case studies with real version control, real databases, real bugs and he basically came ready to solve real life problems.
The worst part here is a lot of companies were making real products, that customers really wanted and really paid good money for. But if those customer companies were VC reliant / vaporware, then even that strategy won't pan out. Only by predicting that and actively working to skip easy money and find more durable businesses, pivoting quickly, or having extra cash reserves.
Postman "Labs", a company that produces a glorified cURL UI and some incoherent most likely useless tools around it received $433M investment at valuation of $2B and apparently has hundreds of employees. Current state of tech is not sustainable.
Most engineers are not in a business to support the day to day running of an app. They're there to build new things to provide growth and support change. This is why you can do an Elon and fire 75% of the staff without something collapsing immediately. That strategy even works in the long term if you're happy to scale back future ambitions and focus on a single app. It wouldn't work for most companies that are constantly fighting for market share though.
For reference, another company that sells developer tools, JetBrains, has around 2000 employees.
They have a suite of IDEs supporting a multitude of languages, that are almost universally considered best in class. IDEs are not an easy thing to build. They developed and maintain the Kotlin language which has all but become the standard for Android dev. And they have integrated team collaboration tools that range from project management to CI to cloud dev environments.
Atlassian on the other hand lol.
It is to be determined if "doing an Elon" will work out for Twitter in even the short term. Give Twitter 1-2 years of "doing an Elon" before we judge the success of this approach.
The public UI (and performance) of a SaaS business is the one thing that adds value to society and is valued by its customers. Yes, new products development is a really great place to put some people, but how often do you see those large companies develop something good by themselves?
And also ThundeClient a VS Code extension when using VS code.
I like HTTPie and HTTPie/http-prompt, too, although I wish they had more secure storage for cookies.
It'll do more, with richer libraries, and an obvious path towards automation into CI/CD.
Someone has to modify the auth script and have it update for everyone.
I thought this is what the tool is designed for, but it's been a nightmare. Team members have to wipe their environment and start again regularly. I want to think that we've completely mucked up using it but I'm not sure it's us and not the tool.
But it seems to be getting worse not better as they tack on more features and make it more complicated.
It seems like it's been years since they added anything I need and instead it has just gotten harder to use due to extra fluff. And it's buggier than it's ever been.
The Postman UX is not good on it. It's easy to get lost in tabs, they should ditch the tabs and categorize requests under the actual endpoint. There is also no way to easily save like requests and give them better names that is also searchable. It's also built on electron which means its slow and clunky.
There is nothing good in this space. Swagger would do it if they let you save requests to local browser storage and just added a history dropdown to the endpoints. I use swagger and save common requests to a file system and open them in sublime. if its just JSON payloads I am working with it does the job.
I'm no particular JIRA fan and have had the misfortune of having had to administer an on-prem instance of it but the people who complain about it have clearly never used TFS or the bespoke solutions hacked together from off-the-shelf software (Domino, Sharepoint, Notion) that I've been exposed to. JIRA's a solid 6.8/10 and has always been far down the list of things that I'd change at any job I've had that uses it.
I can appreciate preferring customizable tools, but if I were to personally choose for the company I'd prefer a constrained and opinionated one. Not coincidentally, this is analogous to the choice many companies make in their programming languages / linters the team's use.
My guess is you wanted a Kanban board but didn't realize you can change the standard ticket view to a board view? If you're in the Active issue view for your team you can click the boxes icon at the top right (or hit cmd-b) to get a kanban view.
I first opened my personal Linear account in 2020 and the default was no Cycles. I created a new team in that account today and it's the default.
I opened new one somewhat recently (2 months ago) for my company and the default was to have them off too.
The docs for Cycles say that here too: https://linear.app/docs/use-cycles#configure
Maybe you didn't have admin permissions on your team? Not sure.
Linear is essentially a mildly opinionated and hyper fast version of Jira. It will be immediately familiar to anyone coming from Jira, which is a really great thing for adoption.
Don't underestimate the speed feature. The effect here has been that people stop using Jira and only use it at a bare minimum as required by management. People end up moving all of their planning and notes to things like Google Sheets, random docs, or just Apple Notes. Linear is so fast and easy to use I found I was back to doing planning and notes live in the tool because it was easier.
Highly recommend you give it a try. My company is unfortunately already heavily entrenched in Jira and I found a vast amount of work to move us all so I had to abandon our move.