Some layoffs
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Some people were let go last week at my workplace, including two software developers I'd worked with. One had been with the company 25 years, and somehow never showed himself to be incompetent, until right now. The project these two were on was something I originated for internal use many years ago, and which their manager had visions of expanding into something larger, more general, and customer-facing. This manager has no command whatsoever of the technical difficulty of any given project. He just has his hand-waved visions of what things ought to be. Nobody ever understood how difficult the project was. One developer we put on it in 2018 tried to wrap his head around it, failed, and left for a better opportunity elsewhere. Then these two were put on it. It was finally released recently, and now that the "work on it was done", and "due to macroeconomic conditions", they were let go.
It goes to show how important it is to avoid difficult projects at work, especially when that difficulty is not understood by management. All management will see, is results. I happened to have made the original version of this look easy, or at least doable, and that's the impressionistic bar against which all future efforts have been measured. Sad for everybody who's been thrown against that project since then. There have been no survivors.
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Some companies deal with it like this:
- Use contractors to develop something new, something not quite fit the company's existing portfolio
- If the new works or catches on, offer to make the contractors full time employees or reassign other full time employees to take the new thing further.
- If the new thing doesn't work or fail to catch on, let the contractors go.
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I'm confused about why they were let go? If they helped deliver a very difficult project, are you saying the company didn't see their value in the delivery of such a difficult task? In other words, did the company just think they took way too long and weren't very fast?
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I'm confused about why they were let go? If they helped deliver a very difficult project, are you saying the company didn't see their value in the delivery of such a difficult task? In other words, did the company just think they took way too long and weren't very fast?
@89th said in Some layoffs:
I'm confused about why they were let go? If they helped deliver a very difficult project, are you saying the company didn't see their value in the delivery of such a difficult task? In other words, did the company just think they took way too long and weren't very fast?
The official story is always macroeconomic blah. The real story is always personal performance. They were put onto a hard project that required a broader knowledge base than just software dev. But management never understands how difficult projects are. They may have become demoralized and sloppy.
