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by rovr138 1570 days ago
What kind of company is it?

• A startup can crash

• A fee for service company focusing on dev will probably crash

• An established company where development is just done for internal things. Can they pause feature requests and focus on maintenance for a bit? I'm not saying it may not come to having to hire people and talks need to start, but did they even think about the devs? What have they been doing in regards to their devs? Any help?

IMO, it's just the way it's being handled. They have their people fighting for their lives. Here's what looks like a manager or lead not being able to work with all the stress around it. And all that upper management sees is, fill in the chair.

1 comments

> What kind of company is it?

A contract company with customers. The company would likely "be fine", but 5 years ago it was ~6 people. We've pushed for some larger clients recently, which allows us to employ ~50 people. If rolling out to the larger clients fails, that income source dries up and we go back down to ~10 people or w/e. With a sizable failure on our track record, which will be a bit difficult too.

> IMO, it's just the way it's being handled. They have their people fighting for their lives. Here's what looks like a manager or lead not being able to work with all the stress around it. And all that upper management sees is, fill in the chair.

So in our case i imagine we'd attempt to fill in a chair. I'd advocate for it. But again, i want to keep the rest of the staff employed and fed, myself included. However i would _definitely not_ expect to see those employees let go. I'd raise hell and question my employment if they were treated that way. Just filled in while they're gone, hopefully still paying them as long as we can (which probably wouldn't exceed 6 months i'd guess).

Which is partly why these conversations can be difficult for me. My #1 concern is keeping everyone employed, including the people having a tough time. Which can often mean keeping my head focused on income.

As much as i love WorkReform and worker focused rights, i often feel these conversations are adversarial and don't seem to consider what will happen when the company goes under. But they're also framed against massive corps, like Starbucks or w/e, and the reality is much different for them than it is my company.

Talking about my company in the WorkReform context is really odd these days.

Is there anything on the company benefits or laws regarding active military or reserve members?

Regardless, it might be good to bring it up if the company ever plans to contract people again from Ukraine. Looks like you've found great developers there now and in the past, so it would suck to get blacklisted by devs there due to something like this.

Maybe it's possible to keep them employed and just contract out a company for devs in the meantime? Just something that can be renewed as needed but that would also leave your devs with a place to come back to after.

Good luck with everything. Good luck to your friends and coworkers fighting for their homes and livelihood.