It was to talk about "team restructuring"
Randomly got a message from one of my reports asking what this "Mandatory Team Meeting" was on his calendar. I hadn't been invited, but it was our whole company shutting down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
this post was submitted on 30 Aug 2023
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Hey, that happened to me, too!
I got scheduled for a mandatory meeting with 1 hour notice. During lunch.
I asked my boss what it was. He didn't know either. I joked that it was us being shut down.
Sure enough, 1 hour later we were both writing LinkedIn recommendations and helping each other find jobs after it was announced that our whole studio was being shut down by corporate and myself plus all my coworkers were all now jobless.
A former coworker of mine once learned that his company was shutting down because the office was raided by FBI agents who seized all the computers, servers and company documents. Everybody sat around in the empty office for a little while and then went home, and nobody ever got paid or heard from the company ever again. Even the tax documents at the end of the year didn't get sent out.
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Oof, how did it end up going?
The company shut down.
To shreds you say? How are the investors holding up?
To shreds, you say?
But the company's not supposed to shut down.
Is that not typical?
Of course it's not typical! Ordinarily, companies don't just shut down. I want to make very clear that this is not the normal state of affairs!
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Random team meeting on the first Friday after I got hired. "Telltale has lost it's funding and everyone is being let go". Fun week.
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Companies are often insane. I'm working in one who has this one guy build a super complicated architecture, because he don't know aws. So instead of just using a message queue on aws, he is building Java programs and tons of software and containers to try and send messages in a reliable way. Costs the company huge money, but they don't care, since he is some old timer who has been there for like 10 years and everyone let's him do what he wants.
I personally always try to engineer away from cloud services. They cost you ridiculous amounts of money and all you need is documentation afterwards. Then it can be easier and faster than AWS or GC
You're the guy 1984 was talking about...
Got to agree with @[email protected] here, although it depends on the scope of your service or project.
Cloud services are good at getting you up and running quickly, but they are very, very expensive to scale up.
I work for a financial services company, and we are paying 7 digit monthly AWS bills for an amount of work that could realistically be done with one really big dedicated server. And now we're required to support multiple cloud providers by some of our customers, we've spent a TON of effort trying to untangle from SQS/SNS and other AWS specific technologies.
Clouds like to tell you:
- Using the cloud is cheaper than running your own server
- Using cloud services requires less manpower / labour to maintain and manage
- It's easier to get up and running and scale up later using cloud services
The last item is true, but the first two are only true if you are running a small service. Scaling up on a cloud is not cost effective, and maintaining a complicated cloud architecture can be FAR more complicated than managing a similar centralized architecture.
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One time I rewrote an Azure function to make it slightly more efficient. The cost savings were ~$50k /yr. Cloud services have their place but it is amazing how quickly the costs can spiral out of control.
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No vendor look-in with his solution though.
It's a different form of lock-in since it's just his creation. When he leaves, all of this will be very hard to maintain and the company will probably rebuild it all on aws.
I have been bringing this up but they say that it's too late to change direction now (they are afraid to upset the guy).
But I'm looking on the bright side. I get to learn a lot of stuff I otherwise I wouldnt if this was a single managed aws service. I'm bringing in terraform and instead of just putting a message queue there, I need to spin up entire architectures to run his ec2 instances with all the apps and everything required to make things work.
Takes months... So for me it's fun. I don't have to pay for it. But companies are crazy. :)
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old timer
10 years
😬
Didn't you know, anyone that stays at a company more than 18 months is old...
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What the company likes about the old timer is that because he has been there for 10 years, he will likely be there for the next 10 years to support the complicated system he is creating now. If a younger team member creates something using a modern approach, there is the risk they will leave in a years time and no one knows how the system works.
No one knows how to use a well documented, publicly available service? No, I'd argue that no one knows how to use a private, internal only, custom solution.
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We have someone at my company who has been here for 30 years that gets to do whatever he wants basically - but what he builds is great. He doesn't even have a BS degree or anything related, he started as a paralegal who wanted to make his life easier, and has built several iterations of the software that the entire company uses. He's now my boss, running the data engineering and science department and I gotta say that he's genuinely great. The only bad things I've run across that he's built are things that he explicitly told management were meant to be just a quick bandaid fix to a problem to buy time for a full fledged solution... and they kept it as the full fledged solution. The stuff still works, it's just awful to make updates or change to
There is nothing more permanent than a temporary solution.
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"Team restructuring" is so much fun, you never know what you're going to get.
Your boss's boss now reports to a slightly different VP? Everyone is getting fired? No way to know which it's going to be, until the end of the meeting.
Bit let me first say that these are difficult times, and we're proud of this team.
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Best case: The harasser on your team has been fired
Worst case: ~~The harasser on~~ your team has been fired
The harasser has been promoted.
Spoiler: OP works for Blizzard.
Worster case: You're the harasser and the police are on the way.
Rollercoaster: Your disgusting behavior stems from deep psychological issues and your arrest is what set the chains in motion to get mental help. You come out a better person.
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This was just a "team restructuring" but I was scanning the invite list to see if there was a name missing.
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That happened to me. I noticed a vague Monday morning meeting when I logged on. Checked with my team to see if they knew what it was about and no one knew. Supervisor was MIA on slack. Just before it starts we got a group text from him that essentially said, "what the fuck. I'm so sorry guys. I'm not allowed to speak or I'm immediately fired"
I checked the invite list and, sure enough... VP of department, VP of HR, my supervisor, and my small team. I instantly knew we were all fired.
Joined the meeting a few minutes early and it was just my teammates all wondering out loud what's going on. They're all pretty young. Couldn't help but blurt out, "nice knowing yall..."
Supervisor texts me with "please don't, we'll grab a drink right after this"
The cool executives log and blah blah blah your team is getting shuttered thanks bye.
We did get drinks at 9:30 in the morning.
Oh and my supervisor quit a month later, right after he got the end of year bonus. I don't blame him. Good dude. He helped a lot of the team secure other jobs in the industry within 3 months
That's not just a supervisor that's a proper leader.
We got reorganized last month. Scrapped almost all the projects we were working on and fired 1/4 of the workforce (mostly sales and support staff). On the plus side, I'm still employed and I've been able to use the last month to catch up on personal shit while the higher ups figure out what they want to spend money on next. On the down side, the new project I'm assigned to sucks and is never going to be successful. At least I don't think it will.
But, as long as the paychecks keep rolling in...
As someone who has been there before, time to get that CV up to date, get any linkedin stuff sorted, and use that free time to start browsing the jobs market so that you're ready.
I once didn't take that advice and promptly got dumped on my backside without the last month's pay because the whole thing had folded (I got paid a few months later through the liquidators, but that didn't help get my rent paid when I needed it!)
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They won't for much longer. Assigning you to a crappy project may just be a way to get you to quit. If you don't, you may be in the next round of layoffs.
You may not want to work somewhere that has no direction anyway.
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How about a meeting an hour after our daily standup and it's the CTO and CIO saying "ok is everyone on the call?"
I was telling myself "oh crap, the company is gonna shut down"
5 minutes later "So as of this very moment, everyone stop working. The company is officially closed as of this meeting."
We were a start up essentially. Made it almost 9 years with ups and downs. This all happened at the end of July. At least got 3 month severance and insurance covered. I do start a new job Tuesday.
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Next Friday is Hawaiian shirt day
So, you should ask yourself, with every decision you make "is this good for the company?"
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They doubled the mandatory flare. Again.
So how the daily go?
The HR rep is the real red flag. The other two could be there for exciting announcements too.
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For me it was a random 15 minute 1 on 1 with the director that appeared out of nowhere on my calendar.
I checked his calendar in outlook and saw like 8-10 15 minute meetings scheduled back to back. I immediately knew something was up. 5 minutes later my coworker called me almost sobbing saying he had been cut. I knew the deal. 15 minutes later another coworker called and said he had been cut too. Sure enough, my time came too.
It sucked but, I found another job before my last day and managed to pocket the 6 weeks of severance.
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Sometimes you get the opposite too. Like an 8pm slack message stating the head of engineering has "decided to step down effective immediately" (aka: forced to resign). Which is a nice surprise cause you had a meeting booked with them for tomorrow.
This exact thing happened to me. They were canceling our project. :(
Luckily none of us lost our jobs. We all just got assigned to different projects/teams.
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