I've seen companies go on hiring sprees just prior to being acquired, which I don't fully understand. I guess the company tries to puff itself up to fetch a larger asking price? Guessing base cost factors in to sale price.
It's shitty, cuz their playing with people's lives. As soon as the acquiring company takes over, their like "what's with all these unnecessary people?"
Maybe it is to create the 'inefficiencies' which the merger can then 'synergize' away, so that the acquiring execs can get bigger bonuses. Because I've yet to see one instance where real (non-stupid/contrived) synergies actually occurred as foreseen, but plenty of cynical M&A.
Also plenty of absolutely atrocious dysynergies in corp history of course.
Pushing back, standing up for yourself, not being a doormat. All this is key to being treated with respect. The problem is that today, we've got a perfect storm. Developers do tend to be more naturally non-confrontational. Combine this with an abundance of opportunities, and developers will just leave rather than confront and push back.
Sometimes it's a matter of hygiene and humane working conditions. You might be surprised at the amount of codebases that are just the equivalent of working in filth.
If your workspace has shit smeared on the walls, you don't ask if you can clean it up. You just do it.
The quote from this article that really hit home for me, was this:
"Coding is generally a team sport. If you’re hacking away on your own then you can do what you want, but when we’re working with a team then we’ve got to discuss our ideas."
My current job has this quasi-team, where we all work from the same backlog, with very little coordination, collaboration, or communication. Everyone just pulls a ticket and runs with it in whatever direction they desire.
I can't stand it. When I raise the issue with my manager, it's just not registering. The turnover and retention is poor, so there are a bunch of new team members, and few people with tenure (like a single dev). The prevailing attitude is that if you reach out to collaborate with someone on your ticket, you're not only wasting the other person's time, but you yourself are incompetent. Because, why can't you just crush tickets all day every day without bothering anyone?
Sounds like Darwin award material. But seriously, those who can't survive the sea change of digital onslaught are eliminated from gene pool. Do the evolution.
Correct. What's best for the long term health of the business is not taken into consideration. The Board of Directors and the CEO only care about this quarter and this year, why would the foot soldiers take a long view?
As an engineer, the thought process goes:
I can use the same old tried and true patterns that will just get the job done. That would be safe and comfortable, but it won't add anything to my skillset/resume.
Or we could try out this sexy new tech that the internet is buzzing about, it will make my job more interesting, and better position me to move onto my next job. Or at least give me more options.
It's essentially the principal-agent problem. And by the way, I don't blame developers for taking this position.
I feel there is also a chicken-egg problem. Is IT hype driven because of RDD or vice versa? I also do not blame any party involved for acting like they do.
I wonder how much wfh and distributed teams change this dynamic. I totally get what you're saying with the whole experience of staying in the office after dark, ordering pizza, and just working through a problem, whatever it takes.
I think with people holed up in their homes doing the same thing, the experience is diminished somewhat.
"larger group of developers" is the phrase that caught my attention. Humans don't scale well. This is where microservices do become attractive. This service is owned by a small team, and that team makes these types of judgements. It may be very different from how other service is owned and maintained, and that's ok.
From my limited experience you get cross team discussions about unit testing, especially if one microservice has too many bugs in the eyes of other teams giving development a bad reputation or making working with a microservice hard. Especially if it breaks with releases and other teams get paged.
It's shitty, cuz their playing with people's lives. As soon as the acquiring company takes over, their like "what's with all these unnecessary people?"