[Aurornis]

> One endpoint with its own dedicated team of 3 engineers

> The team had its own kanban board and sprints.

My early jobs were at startups startups with limited resources. Every decision to build something or hire someone was carefully made after much consideration. This story would have looked like fiction to me at the time.

Later in my career I joined a startup like this where every new concern someone could think up turned into a new microservice with new hires to form a new team. It didn't matter how small it was, everything was a reason to hire new people and form a new team. I sat in meetings where the express goal of the quarter was communicated as growing the engineering team.

It was as weird time. We had this same situation where there were 3-4 person teams who had their own sprints and planning sessions where they would come up with more ways to make work for themselves. Some of them moved so slow that they could spend entire sprints doing tiny changes. Others were working on the most over-engineered solutions you'd ever seen for trivial problems.

There was one meeting where I suggested we re-assign some people on a stable project to work on something that we needed urgently, but I got shut down. That would have removed another excuse to hire more people, which would have conflicted with someone's KPIs to grow the engineering team to a specific number

[kypro]

> My early jobs were at startups startups with limited resources. Every decision to build something or hire someone was carefully made after much consideration. This story would have looked like fiction to me at the time.

This was pre-2015

> Later in my career I joined a startup like this where every new concern someone could think up turned into a new microservice with new hires to form a new team. It didn't matter how small it was, everything was a reason to hire new people and form a new team. I sat in meetings where the express goal of the quarter was communicated as growing the engineering team.

This was post-2015

---

Am I right?

You're describing exactly what I've tried to express in various comments. There was a point in the latter half of the 2010s when it became genuinely hard to find tech work where you were building useful stuff. Startups become increasingly absurd and the focuses of their engineering teams even more so.

In 2019 I was working for a company who were so desperate to hire new engineers at one point they decided to just start offering jobs to candidates which failed interviews. It was absolutely insane.

[swiftcoder]

Ah, the heady days when we shipped a new AWS service with a team of 40, and when I came into work the next day we had 120 people and 80 of them were just inventing work out of whole cloth…

[momojo]

I need to hear more stories, I'm begging

[dlcarrier]

That timeline correlates with new cell phones having fewer features than the previous generations, and was when Intel started releasing generation after generation of processor on the same fabrication process, with minimal improvement between generations.

Peak technology was 2015.

[mihaaly]

> someone's KPIs to grow the engineering team to a specific number

Sigh!

Specific numbers!

I believe a more common specific number is the yearly EBITDA or ARR (or some other acronyms in this alley I care zero about to memorize) nowadays, for investor's sake. Like in our company. Since we were acquired - and some time before - the only talk in company meetings are EBITDA, ARR, compared to a number dreamed up by someone and to be reached in 5 years time. Specific financial results in specific timeframe. Our goals are specific numbers being above today's numbers by a chosen margin. The company talk are marketing campaigns and reach, campaign efficiency measurements, pricing strategies, subscription centric licensing, sales strategies, churn, and other slang around customer bullying I also do not care about, also organizational streamlining - what a loaded word! -, bla bla bla, all for the specific sacred number put up on the pedestal.

What we have zero talk about? Functionality, engineering.

I seriously do not understand these people. Why are they fiddling around with selling software in a niche sensitive to global economic fluctuations insted of selling ... I don't know. Shoes? Or better yet sugary water ... no, better is vitamin water ... no, the trendiest is protein water. That is something that needs no balanced functionality and engineering that is laborous so it is resource intensive to achieve. And is in the way of reaching the sacred number put up there. Engineers are in the way towards our goals. We are pulling back the cart! We are cost center now!!

I do not stay long.

[dlcarrier]

I had an internship at HP that taught me to never get lost in a large conglomerate. I worked with people who's career was working on a piece of a piece of a design, only ever touching the same tiny aspect of every new project.

I can't imagine getting a job like that at a startup.