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Thanks for the example. I suppose that's a fairly unique position to be in, but one that you could have chosen not to pursue. On the surface, the only way that'

Thanks for the example. I suppose that's a fairly unique position to be in, but one that you could have chosen not to pursue. On the surface, the only way that's different than my most recent experience is that of being the director of the initiative, or otherwise responsible for the whole project, (also being laid off doesn't help). Do you think things would have gone differently had people not jumped ship?

SenHeng 3y ago
It's definitely a case of 'right time, right place'. But I also had several factors that helped increase my luck surface [0]. - I had experience with early versions of angular.js (1.2~) and typescript (1.x~) - I was willing to dive into an unknown codebase in an unknown language (coffeescript 1.x) that no one else wanted to touch - I had almost a whole year to get familiar with the codebase, the intricacies and weird bugs, and the crazy amounts of OOP in it - I came from the old definition of full stack (design + dev + database + user facing), making me a generalist among a bunch of technically minded people Also, everyone was pretty demotivated and mentally checked out. Some had spent 2.5 years working on the project, there was a public launch for the beta release, press releases and a whole PR event to our existing users. Less than a month later, the board/investors cancelled the project. Even the CTO was pretty checked out and let me do whatever I want, which was probably how my crazy proposal got through. Within 2 months, we lost the entire upper senior engineering division, from CTO down to team leads. There was a huge debate about whether or not to even keep the engineering division, if it would be better to sell our current product to our rivals and re-focus on being a design agency. That didn't happen because our rivals came to us first asking if we would buy them... 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425525

SenHeng 3y ago

It's definitely a case of 'right time, right place'. But I also had several factors that helped increase my luck surface [0]. - I had experience with early versions of angular.js (1.2~) and typescript (1.x~) - I was willing to dive into an unknown codebase in an unknown language (coffeescript 1.x) that no one else wanted to touch - I had almost a whole year to get familiar with the codebase, the intricacies and weird bugs, and the crazy amounts of OOP in it - I came from the old definition of full stack (design + dev + database + user facing), making me a generalist among a bunch of technically minded people Also, everyone was pretty demotivated and mentally checked out. Some had spent 2.5 years working on the project, there was a public launch for the beta release, press releases and a whole PR event to our existing users. Less than a month later, the board/investors cancelled the project. Even the CTO was pretty checked out and let me do whatever I want, which was probably how my crazy proposal got through. Within 2 months, we lost the entire upper senior engineering division, from CTO down to team leads. There was a huge debate about whether or not to even keep the engineering division, if it would be better to sell our current product to our rivals and re-focus on being a design agency. That didn't happen because our rivals came to us first asking if we would buy them... 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425525 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34425525