not even sure how many fields of expertise the designers have. that’s why something like roadmap.sh makes a total sense. provide someone interested a high level overview of the possible categories and then go deeper in the categories
I was sitting in an escalation-call, called by one of our most important customer and India’s largest ISP.
There were 13 of them, 3 of us, and only 1 technical (that’s me).
Things were super intense, extremely heated debates were going on, I was fixing a few issues, while answering the questions coming my way, in parallel I was also chatting with my teammates, who were back in the office and were on support calls with the same client’s ops team.
And, then it happened -
rm -rf /var/lib/mysql (i was already sudo su)
Escalation got further escalated - “Dashboard is not opening”
For a moment, I was shell-shocked, couldn’t hear a thing, just sitting there frozen.
Then i remembered the backup, i, against my usual style, took and the mysql replica i hosted, just as an insincere effort to calm the people in the room, i got to work. Restored the database, re-ram a few etl jobs, and we were back up online.
I was relieved, and actually quite happy, started interacting with the people in the room again, and showed them the system robustness even under a disaster, two of the 13 caught my bluff, but were smiling, They winked, turned back to face the others, and the heated debate continued.
The escalation went up till the CIO, but the guys who caught my bluff, never gave my deed away (in return i had to code a few more features and reports, just for them).
BTW, the software is still being used by their OPS team, it’s used to monitor a third of India’s internet backbone infrastructure.
The guys who caught me were the actual users of the software, their team actually.
Saves them a millions of $ per annum, because of being able to meet SLA.
It’s now running for 7 years in their NOC.
Users revolted against their CIO (second or third replacement CIO), who proposed replacing this software (and others in their NOC), with an HP unified monitoring suite(a part of CIO’s digital transformation initiative). Apart from this software, rest of the monitoring systems have been replaced.
My anecdote is that it's all employee #1: the fish rots from the head.
The gist of it is that one guy founded a company, company A, bootstrapped it, then disappeared to found another company (company B) and was busy with it for about a decade. In the meantime, company A had a non-owner CEO and went from 10ish people to 60ish and grew revenues many, many times over.
Meanwhile company B got huge (though never really got anywhere close to the $-per-headcount that company A did), got a real board, went public, and eventually the board forced the owner out of the company completely. He then came back to company A.
Mind you, we didn't know he was forced out of B. He came back complaining that he was tired of board meetings and corporate stuff. Fair enough, we thought. But a few people were still left from that original 10-ish and went: "uh oh".
Turns out the owner is a grandiose narcissist, and highly racist and sexist. Just an amazing mix. Over the next two years, he managed to turn over 70% of the existing staff and YoY turnover went from exactly 10% (they would do a stack-rank 10% cut to reach the target turnover each year) to 30-50% depending on the year. Incoming hires were suddenly a revolving door (2 batches of 20 were hired twice, of those 40 roughly 5 stuck around longer than one year). He mentioned at lunch one day that he wouldn't hire a non-white, non-male programmer (as the only Asian programmer had just quit recently). Some of us noticed that the only woman who was hired who wasn't blonde was the one who was a family friend.
On a technical level, suddenly nobody was allowed to work on anything that wasn't his idea. And his ideas weren't good. Our tech lead did a good job of shielding the developers from this, and lots of cool ideas were kept out of the owner's line of sight.
Anyway, I ended up leaving because of ^^^ once I got enough experience to switch without a large pay cut. (This job paid unusually well for the geography). The company I switched to has problems too, obviously, as do all companies. But they're much more fixable. Company A's primary problem is fundamentally unfixable: the person who owns 100% of the shares and commands the puppets on the board is honestly one of the worst people I've ever had the displeasure of knowing.
> they would do a stack-rank 10% cut to reach the target turnover each year
Does this mean leadership would rank all employees once a year and fire the bottom 10%, so they could hit a statistic? And that was before the owner came back? Obviously your story is insane and I'm sorry you had to go through that, but I can't get over this part. I think the concept of a terrible person owning a business is less shocking to me than the idea of someone giving themselves a minimum quota of people to fire every year.
It is an idea based on you have some method of determining the best employees and you select the most productive which sounds fair.
What happens is people make choices that put them in that 10%. Some by increasing odds by hiring awful in purpose. Some will target others work. Selecting the right group becomes more important than doing good work.
I believe you should hire or fire based in objective numbers. If 50% are bad fire them now. If none are bad keep them and give them a raise.
It was the owner's idea, and yeah as a sibling comment pointed out, it was something he copied from Microsoft.
In the owner's words, it was his way of basically taking people who were "doing fine" in that there wasn't an active reason to fire them, but who had plateau'd or something and "re-roll" to potentially get someone with a higher ceiling. This is, obviously, a completely sociopathic view of employees and people in general.
In between the lines, it was just a fear tactic to keep people "working harder".
> He mentioned at lunch one day that he wouldn't hire a non-white, non-male programmer
Holy crap! I'd like to think I'd notice that someone is that terrible before I start a job, but if I heard that from a boss, I'd quit on the spot. And I'm a white male programmer.
Agreed, funnily (not necessarily ha-ha funny, but you know) enough this happened the day prior to me taking a PTO day to interview at my now-current employer.
Python, C/C++, Perl, Celery, Redis, MySQL, Bare Metal.