It was to talk about “team restructuring”
Randomly got a message from one of my reports asking what this “Mandatory Team Meeting” was on his calendar. I hadn’t been invited, but it was our whole company shutting down ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Random team meeting on the first Friday after I got hired. “Telltale has lost it’s funding and everyone is being let go”. Fun week.
Hey, that happened to me, too!
I got scheduled for a mandatory meeting with 1 hour notice. During lunch.
I asked my boss what it was. He didn’t know either. I joked that it was us being shut down.
Sure enough, 1 hour later we were both writing LinkedIn recommendations and helping each other find jobs after it was announced that our whole studio was being shut down by corporate and myself plus all my coworkers were all now jobless.
I at least had the cathartic experience of being told “hey we need to shut down EVERYTHING before 7pm because that’s when the email will turn off, so log into every service you know we use and delete it all.” And then I spent the next couple hours clicking every delete button I could.
K8s clusters? Delete. Prod DB? Delete. Prod DB backups? Delete. S3 buckets? Delete. Cloudflare account? Delete.
It was actually kinda fun.
This sounds therapeautic
Hilarious that one of your reports got invited to the company shutting down meeting but you didn’t, F
How about a meeting an hour after our daily standup and it’s the CTO and CIO saying “ok is everyone on the call?”
I was telling myself “oh crap, the company is gonna shut down”
5 minutes later “So as of this very moment, everyone stop working. The company is officially closed as of this meeting.”
We were a start up essentially. Made it almost 9 years with ups and downs. This all happened at the end of July. At least got 3 month severance and insurance covered. I do start a new job Tuesday.
Is this what happens when you start a start-up instead of starting a business?
That happened to me. I noticed a vague Monday morning meeting when I logged on. Checked with my team to see if they knew what it was about and no one knew. Supervisor was MIA on slack. Just before it starts we got a group text from him that essentially said, “what the fuck. I’m so sorry guys. I’m not allowed to speak or I’m immediately fired”
I checked the invite list and, sure enough… VP of department, VP of HR, my supervisor, and my small team. I instantly knew we were all fired.
Joined the meeting a few minutes early and it was just my teammates all wondering out loud what’s going on. They’re all pretty young. Couldn’t help but blurt out, “nice knowing yall…”
Supervisor texts me with “please don’t, we’ll grab a drink right after this”
The cool executives log and blah blah blah your team is getting shuttered thanks bye.
We did get drinks at 9:30 in the morning.
Oh and my supervisor quit a month later, right after he got the end of year bonus. I don’t blame him. Good dude. He helped a lot of the team secure other jobs in the industry within 3 months
That’s not just a supervisor that’s a proper leader.
If it’s after 4 on a Friday and your VPN has just kicked you out, start leveraging those external contacts HARD.
We got reorganized last month. Scrapped almost all the projects we were working on and fired 1/4 of the workforce (mostly sales and support staff). On the plus side, I’m still employed and I’ve been able to use the last month to catch up on personal shit while the higher ups figure out what they want to spend money on next. On the down side, the new project I’m assigned to sucks and is never going to be successful. At least I don’t think it will.
But, as long as the paychecks keep rolling in…
The HR rep is the real red flag. The other two could be there for exciting announcements too.
expired
This exact thing happened to me. They were canceling our project. :(
Luckily none of us lost our jobs. We all just got assigned to different projects/teams.
Companies are often insane. I’m working in one who has this one guy build a super complicated architecture, because he don’t know aws. So instead of just using a message queue on aws, he is building Java programs and tons of software and containers to try and send messages in a reliable way. Costs the company huge money, but they don’t care, since he is some old timer who has been there for like 10 years and everyone let’s him do what he wants.
No vendor look-in with his solution though.
It’s a different form of lock-in since it’s just his creation. When he leaves, all of this will be very hard to maintain and the company will probably rebuild it all on aws.
I have been bringing this up but they say that it’s too late to change direction now (they are afraid to upset the guy).
But I’m looking on the bright side. I get to learn a lot of stuff I otherwise I wouldnt if this was a single managed aws service. I’m bringing in terraform and instead of just putting a message queue there, I need to spin up entire architectures to run his ec2 instances with all the apps and everything required to make things work.
Takes months… So for me it’s fun. I don’t have to pay for it. But companies are crazy. :)
I personally always try to engineer away from cloud services. They cost you ridiculous amounts of money and all you need is documentation afterwards. Then it can be easier and faster than AWS or GC
One time I rewrote an Azure function to make it slightly more efficient. The cost savings were ~$50k /yr. Cloud services have their place but it is amazing how quickly the costs can spiral out of control.
You’re the guy 1984 was talking about…
Got to agree with @[email protected] here, although it depends on the scope of your service or project.
Cloud services are good at getting you up and running quickly, but they are very, very expensive to scale up.
I work for a financial services company, and we are paying 7 digit monthly AWS bills for an amount of work that could realistically be done with one really big dedicated server. And now we’re required to support multiple cloud providers by some of our customers, we’ve spent a TON of effort trying to untangle from SQS/SNS and other AWS specific technologies.
Clouds like to tell you:
- Using the cloud is cheaper than running your own server
- Using cloud services requires less manpower / labour to maintain and manage
- It’s easier to get up and running and scale up later using cloud services
The last item is true, but the first two are only true if you are running a small service. Scaling up on a cloud is not cost effective, and maintaining a complicated cloud architecture can be FAR more complicated than managing a similar centralized architecture.
You are paying aws to not have one big server, so you get high availability and dynamic load balancing as instances come and go.
I agree its not cheaper than being on prem. But it’s much higher quality solutions.
Today at work, they decided to upgrade from ancient Ubuntu version to a more recent version. Since they don’t use aws properly, they treat servers as pets. So to upgrade Ubuntu, they actually upgraded Ubuntu on the instance instead of creating a new one. This led to grub failing and now they are troubleshooting how to mount disks etc.
All of this could easily be avoided by using the cloud properly.
What the company likes about the old timer is that because he has been there for 10 years, he will likely be there for the next 10 years to support the complicated system he is creating now. If a younger team member creates something using a modern approach, there is the risk they will leave in a years time and no one knows how the system works.
So he’ll rip an even bigger hole, when he is retiring because the company never bothered to get a new solution running. Then they get a hydra of legacy code that is poorly documented and probably using some old hacks based on even older forum posts, nowhere to be found again.
