Comment by softwarebeware | Hacker News Reader

Comment by softwarebeware | Hacker News Reader

I think you're probably asking about mistakes like deleting a database? But more often companies, orgs, or teams dying has to do with engineering management in my experience. I'll name a few I have experienced and you all can decide whether or not these count as "engineering mistakes?"

- Saying nothing about it, but "secretly" moving the team to another country by changing the manager and director, and not hiring anymore in this country, even when team members quit. It took awhile but I figured out that the plan was to let natural attrition take over and for every person who quits from here, hire their replacement there.

- Different company: after being acquired, the acquiring company communicated for eight months that no changes in staffing would take place, and that once the acquisition closes, everyone will be put on exciting new projects and a new bright future will emerge. Then, after the acquisition closed, laying off a third of the company immediately. Another third chose the exit soon after. Eventually, the company died.

- Third company: after being acquired by a large competitor, the director of technology for this third company promised them a new product for four years. I'm led to understand by those closer to the situation than myself that this director then proceeded to coast on vaporware demos for those four years, claiming the need to "pivot" or "reboot" the product as necessary, and promising more and more pie-in-the-sky fantasies until finally the gig was up and he was fired. That subsidiary also officially closed its doors eventually.

Just a few from my own experience!

Ironically, I'm going through the opposite of #1 - not a bad company, but decided it needed to move countries. Made a big announcement, said basically in 3 months you're all out the door, but keep up the hard work, and help with the transition! I think they _just_ hired their first couple of FTE's in the new location.

You can imagine the general reaction - many left, those with vacation time are taking it, progress ground to a halt, motivation and morale through the floor - so basically, burning three months of salary instead of doing exactly what you were bothered by - hiring new teams in the new locale, scaling down work in the old one, and then after things are stable in the new home, shutting down the old one.

It's truly baffling to me given that they're moving to a more expensive location, they're confused by higher costs of hiring, slowed progress and doubling of expenses.

End of the day it seemed like the best way to set several million dollars on fire - I imagine an executive saved their bacon somehow, but I really don't imagine there will be much of a bonus after the math is all done and tallied. I'm really curious how the new teams will react, realizing that there was this massive talent dump and nobody seems to know where anything came from - the transition is being handled as professionally as possible by those that remain, but I'm pretty sure I wouldn't take an FTE offer from them at this point given the track record.

At least the company was being honest.

I have heard some companies hide the truth of relocating to another city and announce it right before the move. As employee, you either move with the company or find a new job.

It's probably better to build a team in the new location then announce the move in advance. It will be a shock either way.

>But more often companies, orgs, or teams dying has to do with engineering management in my experience.

Nothing can 10X sink a product faster than bad engineering management.

I once joined an established Enterprise software company where leadership had decided they wanted to make a new product. A lot of the justification was they saw the need with existing customers, and they could make $200M+ ARR by simply getting their existing customers to use it. They invested a lot of money in marketing, created a lot of hype, and built up a huge worldwide org.

One of the premises of the product was that if you had a fleet of machines using this product, it would be a force multiplier for extracting value out of a particular broadly defined use case.

Except, engineering and product management was so busy getting the engineers to build something that could scale to infinity, they never bothered to improve the basic stuff that let somebody get value during a trial period. Customers would struggle to deploy and integrate this thing onto one machine. And when they did, they didn't see the value.

Leadership always parroted the same thing. Slides about once you have thousands of machines using this, the value is there. But over 3 years nobody really implemented a nice way of integrating 5 machines, let alone 1000.

3 years later the org went from 3000 employees worldwide to a few sales people in every region and development mostly being done in India. Comically enough, the lack of financial resources meant that the new management had to focus on things that actually mattered to customers. So the product actually got a lot better. But by that time all the momentum and trust was gone.

I didn’t mean simple mistakes, but failures at design/architecture level (I was thinking more about technical leadership than management/staffing). This is a good list though!

Ah! You mean like adopting service buses for everything and watching them lose messages consistely. :)

> I figured out that the plan was to let natural attrition take over and for every person who quits from here, hire their replacement there.

Honestly, if the company has decided to move, that seems like a good way to do it, no? Nobody gets laid off, they avoid the bad will of axing a team outright or asking you to train your replacements; it becomes a simple gradual turn-over.

Yeah, so in hindsight I feel that there's a better way to resolve this than the two options of "don't tell anyone" or "tell everyone."

The way I would do it, is tell people that we need to move their team to {{other country}} and therefore we would like to offer them either a severance package to find a new job _or_ work out a plan for them to transition to some other team that is in their location.

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