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?
There there. Rewriting from scratch never go smooth. You at least have 3 years I’d say.
This may be the case. They’ve gone from “this should be easy” to “oh, we never thought about that” pretty quickly.
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.
Big companies going startup rarely goes well. If they’re doing what you think, then it’s already on a path to failure as they’re doing their work in isolation without input from the people who know the current system well, or the many legacy intricacies that need to be addressed.
Migrating from an old backend to a new backend written by people who don’t know how the old backend works sounds like a recipe for disaster. They will also be under pressure to deliver whatever it is they’re making in a way a startup is not - so expect a cluster fuck of chaos as a rushed migration to a half written replacement is forced through.
If you don’t trust your new CTO and he’s not sharing a vision for the future but instead seems to be building a new private kingdom, then ask yourself is that the kind of place you want to work. You’re a dev working in a company where the CTO doesn’t respect your or your team enough to keep you updated. Maybe it’s time to be thinking about moving on if you can’t get any concrete assurances. That doesn’t have to be immediate but maybe time limit how long you will work for the company and have an exit plan ready to go early.
Assuming that your company has a profitable business, and you are working on the part brings in the revenue that pays the bills, you’ll keep that as long as your company is interested in keeping that business. Your CTO is burning money (and fast!), maybe they’ve picked that habit up in a zero-interest environment, but well interest rates aren’t zero anymore, so I’d be more worried if I were part of the secret internal startup.
The company is fucked, you are not. Apply for new jobs elesewhere, pronto.
Should probably start looking yesterday.
