As we often say, companies have many signs before large-scale layoffs.
The company's layoffs this time are really textbook-level layoffs, so I think it is meaningful to record the timeline of the company's entire process, hoping to provide a reference for all friends.
What I also want to know is, if it were you, in what month would you choose to actively look for a job?
Welcome to reply below!
January 2022
He was recruited to this company by a headhunter as a high-level software development engineer.
In less than a month, he was promoted to Team Leader and was responsible for building his own new team. The initial plan is that the team has about 8 to 10 people. Although it is not big, it can be considered to be able to do something.
February 2022
When the team was formed, there were only 5 people plus a software architect who did not belong to any team.
At the same time, one of the five people is from the Eastern European development team. We are responsible for training the members of the Eastern European development team to become team leaders and creating another development team in the Eastern European team.
At the same time, we were told that we would be in charge of the most important project of the company, because this project had been delayed for 3 months and could not proceed.
In the next few months, the project development went smoothly, completely in accordance with the development plan.
I asked the leader to add people to the team, and the leader was very supportive, and the interviews were going on as planned.
During this process, only one mid-level programmer was selected to join my team. Others had many interviews, but in many cases they did not meet the admission requirements, or good programmers were too demanding and unwilling to come.
In August, the company provided us with a senior programmer. The level of this programmer is still good, and he is more suitable for development. At the same time, the project progressed very smoothly.
September 2022
We were informed by our superiors that hiring was slowing down and that the company had temporarily frozen hiring.
If we still need people, we can only make adjustments from other teams. At this time, other teams are also short of people, so I didn't give them to me.
In addition, the team leader plan responsible for cultivating Eastern Europe has been completed, and the Eastern European team members have left our team.
At this time, our team is still very short of people and the task is relatively heavy.
October 2022
The project was officially launched, and the launch went smoothly without too many difficulties.
After the project was launched, the company also held a celebration meeting to reward our team.
Although it is not a matter of our team, the whole plan is still very smooth.
After the project went live, we merged with 3 other teams for another quick and important feature development. The development of this function requires completion within 3 months.
After 2 Sprints, the project was withdrawn without warning, citing legal issues.
November 2022
Founder plus CTO and founder plus CFO, 2 people left without warning, the company has a total of 5 founders.
The entire company was confused at the technical level, and didn't know what the reason was.
Finally, the reason given at the company's All Hands meeting was that the CTO chose to continue his studies, so he chose to leave.
Our team was responsible for cleaning up and merging some technical debt because the project was withdrawn.
February 2023
A new CTO takes office.
We continued to clean up technical debt on the project, during which time the only senior programmer on our team was hired and left our team.
At this stage, the company's management rated our team as the best-performing team in the United States.
Just this month, after completing the settings of some basic classes, the architects of Qifa began to comprehensively push the code specifications of Qifa in the company, and the resistance they received can be imagined.
I will list some weird requirements in another technical article.
Just this month, I have notified team members to pay attention to company changes and start other job search plans.
March 2022
Two characters need to be explained here.
2 people are VP (Vice President), one is Canadian and one is Indian.
The VP in charge of development was dismissed and dismissed without any knowledge or prior notice (Vice President India).
Personally, I think the professionalism of this Indian colleague is good, which is higher than that of another vice president (Canadian vice president) at the same level as him.
The vice president of Canada, after being dismissed in charge in India, is fully responsible for all the development, operation, and aspects of the company, except for testing.
It should be noted that the wonderful architect was recruited by the vice president of Canada to refactor the Maven project in the company.
An example of a weird requirement: all IntelliJ warnings must be modified.
If any IntelliJ has warnings, PR merges are all rejected, no matter whether some warnings are a bit weird, I don't know if everyone in the company that uses Eclipse has to jump off the building.
If you're a programmer, and you clone some code from Apache, you'll see thousands of warnings on it, and we've raised this issue at the company. The reply I got was: because the warning of the Apache Commons package has been proved by many people that this is not a problem, so there is no need to deal with it.
April 2023
Because of conflicts with architects and a lot of weird code specifications that we don't understand, our team got the message from the leader that it is the worst team of all teams.
And the modification of technical debt, because of the obstruction of PR merger, progress is slow.
June 2023
The company announced mass layoffs.
All Eastern European and Indian teams were disbanded, and the North American technical team was laid off by 40%.
If you look at it all according to the ratio of the number of people, the layoff ratio is as high as 70%.
Summarize
From the timeline above, we can see that every step is a signal to leave the job?
It's a pity that my procrastination ignored all these signals. In fact, I should have made up my mind to change jobs as early as the beginning of this year when I had conflicts with the architect.
Helplessly, my procrastination is a bit delayed.
When there are some uncertain signals in the company, from the company level, it should be that there are difficulties in operation and management. As employees, they need to prepare in advance.
If you were me, when would you choose to make up your mind and start looking for a job?
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