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How screwed am I? (self.experienced_devs)

submitted 2 years ago by buxton to c/experienced_devs

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I started working for a big corporation about six months ago. Turns out a few months before I started there was a new CTO hired from a startup. This CTO has been on a hiring spree and basically hired all of the technical staff of the startup he came from (to the point that they're suing the company I work for).

All these people from the startup have their own office, away from all the corporate offices. And they're writing something (that they won't reveal) in what they refer to as their bunker. The best we can gather is that they're coming up with modern equivalents of all the backend services. This would mean that everything the devs do in the office I work in will be redundant.

I have the feeling that within a year or so (maybe less) there'll be mass layoffs of all the existing devs. Am I being paranoid?

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[–] lowleveldata 56 points 2 years ago (3 children)

There there. Rewriting from scratch never go smooth. You at least have 3 years I'd say.

[–] wicked 23 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Yeah. Everything depends on the complexity of the product, but it's just as likely that it's the new CTO and his team that gets canned when they get bogged down in the details and the costs start racking up.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 2 years ago

Startups inside companies usually get shut down once the bill gets too high. I've experienced this first hand

[–] buxton 15 points 2 years ago (1 children)

This may be the case. They've gone from "this should be easy" to "oh, we never thought about that" pretty quickly.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 years ago

That screams inexperience in their end, to me. 20 years in the field, I learned to respect legacy. Can't move away from it without getting it under control first and then weeding out the smelly parts.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 2 years ago

The biggest problem with that approach is your team loses their roadmap, funding for new initiatives, and ambition while that's happening. Your sprint backlog has nothing but minor tech deficit tickets in it, and overall it becomes a chore to get anything done.