[jrockway]

It was weird. It makes me sad because the startup I worked at was really gelling despite the HPE interference. Then they just laid everyone off one day (multiple senior leadership changes later) for no apparent reason.

All the code is Apache 2 so I guess if I really cared I could just revive it... and as it turns out, I don't care that much. Other stuff to do.

[flutetornado]

Everyone in my entire team - best of engineering as well as every manager left. Underpaying and over subscribing people has become a hallmark over there - it's just a body shop now. Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout. Upper management has no vision and everyone's constantly firefighting and struggling to catch up with competitors who had long term vision to invest in engineering teams, tooling and infrastructure to scale up the products and people. They want to do in 2 years what took Google and Amazon a couple of decades. Result post-HPE: poor quality, unscalable, cobbled together, barely functional codebase. Before, the startup I worked for had a well balanced rare combination of high performance, modular and well architected codebase. Later the constant push to ship as fast as possible to catch up with competition, completely destroyed the whole thing - teams, codebase and infrastructure. All because they only know how to react and have no idea how to stay ahead of the curve. Buying startups has become their only means of survival as talent stays away from their brand and the only way to justify value to shareholders is to jump from one rock to another, hoping the new one will rocket them away from the black hole they are spiraling into - all they manage to do is stick to the new rock and pull it with them as fast as they were going into the hole they will eventually vaporize in.

[UltraSane]

"Engineers are just numbers on a sheet, to be exploited, chewed and cast aside when they eventually burnout."

This is exactly how Epic the Electronic Medical Record company operates, but on new college grads instead of Engineers.

[sheepscreek]

Most of the industry and most series C/D startups are like that. It’s a sad state boys and girls. Once you’ve been here long enough, disillusionment sets in. Corporate greed, (em)powered by shareholder greed, takes top priority.

[ornornor]

What do you do then?

I’ve been out of the work rat race for over 3 years now, but I’ll have to go back within a year… and I’m dreading it.

It’s my most valuable skill set, I just want to throw up when I see what the industry has become and I don’t know how to deal with it.

[jrockway]

I'm always a little embarrassed when I go to the doctor and tell them I'm a software engineer. I know your EMR system is terrible but if I had done it it would have been better. Sorry :(

(My primary care doctor's office was venture-funded at one point and they actually have a great system. But all my specialists are on MyChart and everything there is always a disaster. Doesn't even have a "preferred name" field, so it has to be noted on my records on a case by case basis and it's ... inconsistent.)

[franush]

Wow

[nar001]

What was it? Since the source code is open source, you probably wouldn't mind telling?