| Startup had non-coding CTO and a Lead Engineer coding in PHP. New CTO (in his 20s.. warning sign #1) joined back in February (this one codes), and the Lead Engineer ended up leaving. I joined ~6 months ago. The first two envelopes were already opened by the new CTO (previous guy, equipment) when there was simply a lack of interest in investigating the actual issues because "PHP is digusting/stupid, ______ is an idiot.". (keep in mind it took a single guy two years to build the product) Language choice? Golang. CTO thinks VIM is the one true way and everyone else is a heretic, but everyone on the team except for his buddy from another other startup greatly prefers an IDE. (there's also "80 cols" or the PR gets rejected: warning sign #3) Original schedule had us starting at the beginning of September and launching at the end of December. Feature requests on the old product moved the start to the middle/end of October. The finish date moved to the end of November. (that didn't happen) Delivery date has been dictated to be the second Monday in January. CTO is working 11/17 days until then, his buddy 13/17- they're the guys who are (still building) the core of the product in Golang, and are the in-house knowledge resource for how the core product downcasts almost everything to interface{} when fetching from the database. What particularly concerning is that management at that level didn't/couldn't smell a horrible idea (the rewrite) Not sure if I should (or any combination of these) - just put my hours in - yolo, take off same days as management - take a bunch of vacation to job hunt over Christmas - go to the CEO and say something to the effect of "What are you smoking that makes you believe the CTO taking time off during crunch-time is a good idea?" |
With such an aggressive delivery date, they have already figured out they have no hope of reaching it, so they aren't going to blow their holidays on it. But they aren't telling you (and presumably the rest of the team) because they want to see what you can accomplish.
From here you have a couple options:
1) Get jazzed up about the technology and hitch your wagon to theirs. The project will likely fail spectacularly, but you might learn some skills that will come in handy for your next job.
2) Run, don't walk to your next gig.
My suggestion would be to stick things out through the holidays and start looking for a new gig in January when the job market is usually better. But don't work any more hours than you normally would.