4 ms·
This fucking year... So, for starters I'm already really depressed and low energy due to a death of a really close family member. I have particularly low toler
by 74847399281 7y ago
This fucking year...
So, for starters I'm already really depressed and low energy due to a death of a really close family member. I have particularly low tolerance and high fatigue due to this.
So, we shipped a product, successfully on time in a company that has had many years of difficulty of shipping products in our target market. Which was the goal. So the new management decides to disband the team, most of the team is already laid off.
I get moved into an adjacent org, onto a ~15 person team building a complicated piece of technology that I have great expertise in, and have built 3 versions at other companies to commercial viability, sounds great.
Well, the team has nobody else anymore who has the experience building the tech we are trying to build. Has existed for nearly one year, and (almost?) the entire team has changed through attrition already (maybe more than once). We have the sunk cost of almost 150k lines of code, that is immensely over-architected, and still doesn't provide any customer visible features for what's expected of this type of software. The team is stuck thinking way to big, and the few people who will focus are kept chasing around the rest of the team like cats. At this rate we will build something that can solve any conceivable problem in about 20 years.
There are already a lot of hands in "architecture". Politics, and honestly my previously mentioned fatigue are preventing me from fighting the engineering fight I need to try to get a handle on it myself.
I honestly like the new manager enough. He listens to my complaints and recognizes my experience, but solving the problems are more difficult, and honestly I think we really should just scrap everything. This is already a rewrite and we have an old version of the code base that would be a better start, or I have enough experience to properly build a new one. But the sunk cost fallacy is ohh so stronger when you have this much of a sunk cost, and a lot of expectations from execs and external teams.
Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine.
Anyways, thanks for an opportunity to rant.
- Dude2029 7y agoWhat managers don't understand is that there are developers with negative work output.
- chupasaurus 7y ago> Ohh, and build times are like 40+ fucking minutes on a good day in a fast machine. Reminds me one of my past colleagues who worked at some_proprietary_compiler with so many tests for corner cases that it took 6 hours for each build on a top enthusiast grade PC each person in a project was provided. Also the presence in office for 8 hours a day was mandatory, imagine the whole team spread around the place for the most part of the day doing nothing with an excuse "I'm compiling!"
- sterlind 7y agoI've had to work in some gnarly monorepos where pulling the dependencies down itself took an hour and a hundred gigs. Local builds were not fast. I usually ended up hacking the build system to build individual projects manually and copying things where they needed to go. sigh much much happier now that I'm living in a smaller repo.