[snapetom]

I took a PM role at a company that was "engineering first" company for decades. This is code for engineering with no accountability, and a culture where engineers do nothing but pat themselves on the back.

My product is utter crap. As an example, 2/3 of the code moves data from Oracle to JSON to MySQL back to JSON to PostGres to parquet that just reconstructs the schema of the original Oracle tables. It is fragile as fuck and the "architect's" proposed solution when I joined was to throw Redis in the mix. Customers hate it because it's always breaking down and has massive requirements.

I went to war with him, pointing out how absolutely asinine the whole thing is. Turns out, he was already on an RIF chopping block along with several other engineers that contributed to this mess. I just pushed it over the edge. When he left, I discovered one of them basically came in in the morning, logged in to customer sites, launched four screen sessions at each customer and tailed -f logs all day, manually restarting when their own shit code went down.

This is what happens when you get out of developer's way and let them build in peace.