I’ve seen the decline of one of these companies as a consultant, here’s what I saw: Management will start fighting for different features, and communication on

I’ve seen the decline of one of these companies as a consultant, here’s what I saw: Management will start fighting for different features, and communication on what to build will be vague, with the possibility of engineers sitting idle while they fight it out. All benefits and travel cancelled. Once the development plan is decided, there’s huge pressure from higher up to work quickly. But they will not respond to feedback that some of their requests are conflicting or impossible. Senior engineers are gone now, hiring starts, but the managers are unable to assess the tech capabilities so inappropriate hires (people who can’t even fizz buzz) are hired. These engineers spend months “coming up to speed” then usually quit or have some health problem, or file a lawsuit Rapid project flip flopping starts. Developer Time managed in increments of less than 1 day. Computing infra starts becoming unreliable because the senior devops are gone, and it’s been outsourced to people who can’t run a cluster - in the organisation I was at we had a 75 node Hadoop Linux cluster which was administered by 3, 20 year old juniors who had not used Linux before. Deliverables failing and quietly deadlines being missed. Now managers are getting fired. New managers are overwhelmed at the giant mess. Manager turnover is high. Nothing is really getting done, legacy projects put in by the competent people before they left are the cash cows, but the giant mess the company is in means it will slowly decline. Any tiny win is celebrated as a giant triumph- some junior uses Keras to make a simple classifier in the weekend and suddenly the company “has an AI division” - though the benefits of this announcement are short lived because there’s no monitisation or strategy, or actual product I was on a 6 month contract and didn’t renew it after that, the company still exists, but they aren’t growing