[kafene]

Except it looks like Nick fired everyone except himself and one customer service person who is 'Rather excitingly, Sarah is also spending some of her time to improve her software engineering skills so she can help with developing Synergy' (https://symless.com/blog/open-letter-synergy-team)?

Seems like a really terrible plan, when you need to retrain CSRs to do your engineering.

[morganvachon]

Yep, and starting several months ago I was getting weekly emails asking if I'd be interested in moving to England to work for them as a software engineer. Except, I'm not a software engineer (I'm a hardware guy), just a customer of theirs from V1 days. They made it sound like an emergency situation where they had to stall development until they could recruit some more talent.

It got so bad I had to unsub from their mailing lists.

[nly]

No software engineers were fired. There were 3 devs at Symless, including myself, and we left of our own accord for various reasons.

This certainly did create a bit of a crisis, because hiring C++ talent in small towns outside of London is hard.

[davvolun]

Thanks for the insider update.

I don't understand, with the nature of the product (coming from open source) why is Symless doubling down so hard on centralizing this? Look for remote C++ developers across the world and get the tools to make remote work work well.

I was just talking with a coworker -- I used Synergy around 4-8 years ago, then my employment situation changed and I didn't use it for about 3 years. Have just started using it again, and it seems like it's actually worse than it was then. Anecdotal, obviously, but that's not a good trajectory.

[morganvachon]

Thanks for the info. Please note I never said anyone was fired, perhaps you meant to direct that to the comment above mine?

[mintplant]

Reread the sentence, the parent commenter is correct.