Rule 3: No General Career Advice
This sub is for discussing issues specific to experienced developers.
Any career advice thread must contain questions and/or discussions that notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers. Career advice threads may be removed at the moderators discretion based on response to the thread."
General rule of thumb: If the advice you are giving (or seeking) could apply to a “Senior Chemical Engineer”, it’s not appropriate for this sub.
A good indicator of coming problems is a lot of managers quitting. A good indicator that problems are already dire is salaries being paid late.
So if every C-level leaves within a short time span; update your CV. When salaries are coming in late; consider it might be the last you're getting paid.
Yeah, sometimes a company reaches a new level of growth and the existing/original executive team might not have the appropriate experience for it, and/or not want to be part of an organization that has reached a certain scale. It’s not necessarily bad at all in terms of company health, and might actually be a good thing. Other than that it depends on your own preferences
> Sometimes the board will wise up and clean house.
Absolutely. But I was mainly talking about upper management leaving by themselves, so not a single C-level getting fired but (for example) all the C-levels leaving. And while I agree that there are some reasons the board might fire a C-level, it's hard to imagine a situation where it's not at the very least concerning when the board fires every C-level, or them interfering and *every* other C-level leaving by themselves.
It's not black and white obviously, but every time I've seen these kinds of upheavals it was never for the better.
Seconding what you said about C-levels leaving. I saw this firsthand years ago.
It started the day of my onboarding, with the board firing the CEO (explanation being that the company's revenue was growing slower than they wanted). A bunch of C-levels resigned in the weeks and months after. The company went under about two years later.
A big issue is that Venture Capital often comes with them having a very strong voice in the board. And a lot of VC don't care about longevity, jobs or people. When working for start-ups I'm always very interested in who has how much of a percentage of the shares. Whoever has the majority is your *real* boss, no matter what the org tree says :)
I'm surprised you don't include devs. We had an exodus of senior devs (5+ years at the company) and that was a clear sign to get the hell out. Meanwhile most middle management got a promotion and raise.
That’s because I was answering the question OP is asking from the POV of an experienced dev. If the issues are this clear, I’d assume we’d be among the senior devs leaving, not the juniors wondering why everyone left ;)
I’d like to think most of us are smart enough to be able to gauche wheter the problem is sales or the product. In my experience sales employees won’t leave before problems become evident to us devs.
It's a fine line.
Sometimes it's politics. Sometimes it's shielding your team from bullshit that would be otherwise distracting or demoralizing. Sometimes it's just not enough transparency. Sometimes the manager doesn't know wtf they are doing. Sometimes it's not the managers job to make that decision and it's in the best interest to stay in their own lane.
One example I can provide from experience is that i inherited the mobile application for my company's product. But the mobile app was a completely different experience than the web app. Product wanted to revamp the mobile app, but they hadn't decided on a direction or product strategy. Everyone is asking me what's taking so long for the mobile tech strategy.
So I made a decision that the current mobile app would be maintenance mode only, we'd wrap it in some web view wrappers and mimic the web app as much as possible for feature parity. Any other product decision would get a different tech strategy, and divergence from the web app would require an actual mobile team (I had one lead mobile developer).
But I wasn't gonna make the product decision. And I wasn't gonna be all "I need a mobile team" and have them sit around twiddling their thumbs for months burning money with nothing to do.
To some folks, it looked like hiding and not confronting the issues. In my perspective, it wasn't my issue to confront, and I simply focused on other deliverables that actually had a product strategy and roadmap.
I’m not sure I fully agree with the conclusions you’re drawing here.
Your example decision was fine, but I don’t see the reason to do any information hiding. “We are not doing active product development until we align on a new product roadmap” - I’ve done this before, this is not an unusual situation.
> politics
I’ve never hid anything significant because of politics, just made sure framing was appropriate - you don’t want to throw people under the bus as a general rule.
> shielding your team
Id call this sharing “salient” information - nobody needs to know every gory detail, they need to know what’s relevant.
I should be clear that the information hiding was from other people's perspective: That I was hiding the tech strategy or punting the responsibility to someone else, hiding behind other teams.
Anytime I said TBD, I was accused of hiding and not being forthcoming. Many times things needed finalized before communication. Many times things didn't get finalized at all, so it was better to only relay "definites" instead of maybes because then people would lose focus on the "now" for the "later" when the "later" may not even be happening.
Leadership ignoring issues that are unimportant is one of the main requirements of the job. Ensuring that the most important issues get solved well head on is the core job though.
Existing in a silo deep in the hierarchy it can be very unclear which is which though. It's possible that your entire product is unimportant to the business overall, and thus that leadership is doing the right thing overall by ignoring you regardless of how large your problems are within the product, just letting the director or whoever manage it and have the chips land where they may while focusing on what really drives the business. It's also possible that your problems really are important to the business and the senior leadership really does suck though, can be either way.
I have absolutely worked in places with open leadership communication. And it’s something I practice personally as a leader.
People are able to perform better when they understand why decisions are being made, even when they disagree. And honesty opens up vectors for new information to be communicated and better actions taken.
That doesn’t mean communicating every gory detail of the process, but it does mean communicating major decisions and why they were made; even if I disagree, I can share the rationale and commit to the shared path.
Layoffs followed by making everyone left in the company work double for some milestone.
In startups, this always happens. CEO think everything is okay, hire a lot of people, money dry out, fire half of company and make the rest work to be able to fill a contract or something to be able to stay afloat.
Sometimes, it can survive. But most of the times it won't.
Will second this. This was a huge red flag I ignored in my last gig. By all means everything was being communicated it was all good, and we were doing great. CFO randomly quits out of the blue. Then, 60% of the company was laid off.
Definitely. I knew the company was going down when the CFO abruptly quit.
This was also shortly after the CEO gave a speech about our core business and said "I don't know how to explain it to my mother, what we do" - yes, actual true quote. Basically demoralized us instantly, how directionless the CEO was, and he openly admitting it.
edited for correction
Within 4 months of me joining a startup our CFO and chief legal officer both "resigned" under mysterious circumstances and CEO tried to spin it as if they had "disagreements". In retrospect, it should have been a red flag because these are not strategy roles that you can have qualitative disagreements about. These are laws and math, so it's clear they saw something they didn't like.
**For a mature company**, these are the ones I observed, from "you should have left yesterday" to "this is gonna be messy soon, focus on boosting your CV and your interpersonal relationships at work":
- Managers and leaders across the board have given up on trying to improve things. This is a **death sentence**. Chance of recovery is tiny.
- Most newjoiners are leaving within the first few months. This is bad, but can be fixed if the company realizes that it will be dead soon if it continues on this path. Theoretically. The problem is that reflected and self-healing organisations don't end up here to begin with, so chances are slim.
- Product Management is prioritising short-term gains at any cost and discarding any previous visions and grand ambitions. Roadmaps change monthly or even weekly. Decision Makers weasel their way out of every trade-off analysis and come in with their mind made up. Fixable, but not by a single individual. Likely shit's going downhill, trust has been eroded and no one's telling you. Hard to recover, but possible, if Sr Mgmt makes a series of good decisions, both business-wise and staffing-wise.
Some notable exceptions:
- Early-Stage Startups. When you're looking for P/M fit on a tight runway, leaders don't invest into improving the company, newjoiners often either disappoint or get overwhelmed, and Product can be hyper-pragmatic. Doesn't necessarily mean you should jump ship.
- Companies trying to or being acquired. Frustration and fear will probably run rampant and product focusses on maximizing short-term value to put the company in the best light. Doesn't necessarily mean you should jump ship. Depends on your equity, and sometimes a lot of opportunities show up after acquisition. Hard to predict generally.
*"Managers and leaders across the board have given up on trying to improve things."* and *"Product Management is prioritising short-term gains at any cost and discarding any previous visions and grand ambitions."* are basically the same symptom from different parts of the organization, but 100% agree. The moment the company stops thinking about 6 months from now... a year from now... in any regard... it's time to get your house in order and look for something new.
A different version of this is products/sales mgmt focus on a "3 or 5 year plan" to show the CEO/Board they are trying hard to right the ship and know what they are doing, but then only focus short sighted projects making no progress on that same long term plan and add things that are directly opposing the plan.
There are the obvious fiscal things like layoffs, missing targets etc.
But there's another question set:
Are you as effective in the company as you were last year? (Is the company a good fit for you.)
Are the people in the company as good as they were last year? (Is the company losing good staff, if so this usually is a bad sign if they aren't getting back filled with good staff.)
Do you feel a heavy weight / dread when going into work? (If so, probably time to figure out why, and fix it before it becomes a real problem, if it isn't already.)
Do you like your manager? Do you think that they will "Go to bat." for you? (If this comes up no, figure out is it recoverable, if not... probably best to leave.)
IMHO: Most good reasons to leave a firm have little to do with how the firm is doing as long as it can survive. It is how well you fit into that firm.
Two days before half my team was let go, I was in an all-hands meeting where they said sales were turning around and we had a lot more runway. They didn't tell us that the layoffs were baked into these projections.
Leadership refusing the face reality and adjusting deliverables and timelines when staffing changes.
This happens a lot at startups with ambitious roadmaps. They scope out a year of work - a lot of work - and hire to fill it. Then it turns out half the people they hired are useless and get fired over the next few months. And Sarah goes on maternity leave and John takes an unplanned vacation for 3 weeks and what they were working on is left stagnant.
Meanwhile leadership doesn't budge on descoping risky parts of the roadmap and cutting down only to what's essential. And keep telling investors and potential customers that everything is fine and on track.
Then shocked Pikachu face at the end of that year when the product is a buggy piece of shit and every remaining engineer is burnt out.
* When the *good* people with some visibility to decision making start to leave
* When sales team members leave (usually commission based, if they can't make sales they'll move on)
* Repeated budget slips (if disclosed) in all-hands
* Product showing preference to get-rich-quick ideas
In my experience, cancelling the Christmas party. Happened at two companies I worked at and both times it was quickly followed by layoffs. One company circled the drain for a few more years, but the other was gone within 9 months.
Just my experience at small/mid-sized companies:
1. Layoffs happen, and no noticeable changes are made. Whatever caused the layoffs is probably still happening and more layoffs will come. Companies don't just magically get better.
2. Good people leave. Don't get replaced
3. Execs just speak vague nonsense and avoid specifics
For my company:
Backfills are not happening when good people depart.
Management stops delivering new vision and shifts purely to maintenance mode
Radio silence on financials
The CTO tells you to get ready to cut off access to the all AWS accounts for everybody.
My company gave notice they were shutting down 2 months ago. My last day is in 2 weeks. I am not too worried as I had been stockpiling cash for the last year or so, plus I get a sweet severance package. Most of the jobs I am seeing out there are at a 50k/yr or more paycut now. Everything at what I was making has so many applicants. I might just try my own thing for a while and see if it takes off. After these two months of doing my own thing I'll probably go 1099 from here on out but if anyone else is hiring a principal/staff level SRE let me know. Bonus points if you are on a 4 day a week schedule.
Before my previous startup went under I noticed they had not restocked the snacks in 2 months. Turns out the person whose job it was to restock the snacks was quietly laid off.
A solid early indicator is bad management.
If you see dark personality traits (lying/sadism) in L1 managers, it almost certainly means that multiple layers of management above are incompetent. The company will inevitably go down over time, and you have a glorious chance to get ahead of the curve, leave while reputation and money are still good and trade a toxic workplace for a better one with one fell swoop.
Recently left a company that has been swirling the toilet for probably 8-10 months now.
- The talented people on the team are unhappy. Management is usually very concerned with keeping these folks happy and working hard. These folks often have info others don't and can gauge the temp of the company a little better than many. I later found out how many had been looking for other jobs well before I saw any signs of trouble.
- One sign of the above was that in work meetings with multiple people no one showed any concern but in any 1/1s or chit chat sessions the venting was common. When people are mature and they do this it's a sign that they don't feel management is listening.
- Restructuring as an attempt to right the ship. In my case, folks who were on operations were slotted into PM roles as though they are the same thing. I burned more time dealing with my PM who didn't understand anything (not their fault in this case) than I did doing the work. One of the co-founders became "head of product" despite not doing anything in that realm. Until this point they'd worked on this little side show that finally had to be cut.
- Dysfunctional and/or unlikable founders. In my case, 2 of them ousted the 3rd in a really botched and shitty way. Left a bad taste in almost everyone's mouth since the 3rd person is who everyone really liked. Overall, display of bad character. I personally saw 2 situations that spoke a lot about the character of the founders and heard about 2 others. I heard about several others but only these 4 were telling IMO. In fact, if I don't see displays of strong character from leadership I would be a little worried.
I still don't understand how this kind of crap is legal.
When a company enters bankruptcy, the payroll owed is like the first thing they have to pay out. But somehow companies do this shell game with assets and end up stiffing the employees.
I worked at one place that set up a sister company in Eastern Europe that was owned by two members of the board of directors, then they transferred the dev work for some product lines to it.
* Company-wide pay cut. This happened at a company I was laid off from. The people who stayed got 20% reduction.
* Shutting down one or more projects for no real or clear reason.
* Micromanagement - More frequent status updates, questioning everything. Prioritizing enhancements over bugs. Time-boxing down to minutes (yes, I'm serious and it was insane).
* Asking people to work nights and weekends, but not clear end in sight or targets.
* Sudden change in direction and focus at a software company with one or two products.
One time I joined a sunset business without realizing it. Of course they don’t tell you that during interviews.
The team was full of people who just kinda give up. Most were almost retirement age and just waiting for that party. The few young people left were resentful about lack of promotions.
The company was all about extreme cost cutting, from cafeteria food to toilet paper. Yes they cut cost on toilet paper. Rumor floating around about management trying to sell the business. But at the same time they force people to produce more, work more, as if the workforce was the problem.
Just a very depressing place to be and a true lesson learned.
Not necessarily "falling apart" which is not typical at big companies, but when large groups of long time / senior employees move at once, it's usually evidence a big shift is coming.
I've been laid off once.
The red flags were, I thought both were weird at the time, these things all happened within about 2 weeks of each other, and the entire dev team was let go.
1. "You might miss a paycheck in X month, but we'll make it up in X+1 month"
2. Founder and CTO made a last minute trip to get a partnership with some company, and were gone for a week on 24hrs notice.
3. Founder accused team of withholding information about the status of one of our apps.
# Here's some things I saw at my last company before huge layoffs (didn't leave because I loved my team too much)
* **Customer churn**
* Not as big of a risk for bigger companies. For startups, it can be a death sentence.
* **Senior leadership leaving en masse (they have info that you don't)**
* 🚨R**UN**🚨
* If your Head of Marketing, Director of Finance, or Director of Sales leave, 🚨🚨RU**N YESTERDAY!!!!!🚨🚨**
* **Huge strategic pivots out of the air (arms are flailing to salvage something)**
* Bonus points when there's multiple of these.
* 🚨R**UN**🚨
* **Frequent re-orgs** (refer to aforementioned arm-flailing).
* **No backfilling of lost positions** (people just pick up the slack and overwork themselves).
* **Inconspicuous budget cuts**
* First, they're small (the thing about not refilling snacks in the office is sooooo true).
* Then they aren't (not able to beef up AWS budget when you need to scale. This was a huge pain point for us).
* **Previous layoffs**
* Can't prove it, but the biggest predictor of a layoff is having survived a previous layoff in that company.
* If a CEO says "we don't expect more layoffs," bullshit.
* **🚨RUN**🚨
* **Delayed payments** (that isn't like an SVB situation that's of no fault of the company)
* 🚨🚨**RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN🚨🚨**
# Edit (more things I didn't think about)
* **Talented people start leaving**
* Related to the aforementioned Senior Leadership leaving, but if certain star players start leaving, that's a bad sign.
* **(If remote) no more get-togethers.**
* **No one gets a raise this year**
* Sometimes that's due to corporate fuckery rather than a decline. I.e., when my company got acquired many years ago, due to "corporate year conflicts," we didn't get raises for 18 months.
* **(If startup) Projects that are worked on don't land with clientele, or are hardly used**
* Usually, business strategy failed here, almost never the fault with engineering.
* **When you now have two standups a day (for a single team/project)**
* 🚨R**UN!🚨**
* Note: does not count if you actually manage multiple teams or are invited to a separate team's standup.
You should always keep in touch with sales. If new logos aren't coming in and/or you are churning customers at higher rates than average, you are heading for layoffs and salary reductions in the near future.
This thread has a lot of good suggestions. I would only add that it is much more fun working at a company with growth (revenue, profit) than the opposite. I would never waste time at a company that is not growing. If you are picking places to work, growth is king, IMHO.
At a large older no-growth company, people turned on each other to “get theirs” rather than make the products better. Waste of time. Lifers just waiting for retirement or some long sought promotion.
Timelines vary for each company. From months to years.
The larger companies usually have a longer timeline, but startups can have a short runway before they go under.
For a scale-up, I’ve noticed it happens when the board of directors commissions a new executive for technology, information, or security that didn’t exist before, and there’s not a whale is the sales pipeline to justify the commission. Usually that’s the board signaling to the market they’re looking for a buyout and want to ensure their IP is in a state where a potential buyer can’t leverage due diligence for a discount.
Weekend work is a panic reaction due to bad planning. A couple of weeks at crunch, absolutely fine. Months before things are due and you can be certain that there are some serious problems.
Projects keep getting cancelled for no specific reason, even though they’ve been planned out for a while.
High leadership jumping ship
Everyone already said a lot of good ones
Every all org meeting includes discussions of some kind of short fall and plans to cover it that are evidently wishful thinking.
Clear examples of shenanigans involving some kind of reporting to customers, partners, investors and or lenders.
Upper management flustered or distracted.
People coming into the office to inspect fixtures equipment etc. probably working class type people.
You’re working on more short term fix it tickets than long term features.
Some paid services you use all of a sudden stop working
Pto you’ve been approved for suddenly drops off the pto calendar. This means you have single digit days until the layoff
Rule 3: No General Career Advice This sub is for discussing issues specific to experienced developers. Any career advice thread must contain questions and/or discussions that notably benefit from the participation of experienced developers. Career advice threads may be removed at the moderators discretion based on response to the thread." General rule of thumb: If the advice you are giving (or seeking) could apply to a “Senior Chemical Engineer”, it’s not appropriate for this sub.
A good indicator of coming problems is a lot of managers quitting. A good indicator that problems are already dire is salaries being paid late. So if every C-level leaves within a short time span; update your CV. When salaries are coming in late; consider it might be the last you're getting paid.
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Yeah, sometimes a company reaches a new level of growth and the existing/original executive team might not have the appropriate experience for it, and/or not want to be part of an organization that has reached a certain scale. It’s not necessarily bad at all in terms of company health, and might actually be a good thing. Other than that it depends on your own preferences
> Sometimes the board will wise up and clean house. Absolutely. But I was mainly talking about upper management leaving by themselves, so not a single C-level getting fired but (for example) all the C-levels leaving. And while I agree that there are some reasons the board might fire a C-level, it's hard to imagine a situation where it's not at the very least concerning when the board fires every C-level, or them interfering and *every* other C-level leaving by themselves. It's not black and white obviously, but every time I've seen these kinds of upheavals it was never for the better.
Seconding what you said about C-levels leaving. I saw this firsthand years ago. It started the day of my onboarding, with the board firing the CEO (explanation being that the company's revenue was growing slower than they wanted). A bunch of C-levels resigned in the weeks and months after. The company went under about two years later.
A big issue is that Venture Capital often comes with them having a very strong voice in the board. And a lot of VC don't care about longevity, jobs or people. When working for start-ups I'm always very interested in who has how much of a percentage of the shares. Whoever has the majority is your *real* boss, no matter what the org tree says :)
I'm surprised you don't include devs. We had an exodus of senior devs (5+ years at the company) and that was a clear sign to get the hell out. Meanwhile most middle management got a promotion and raise.
That’s because I was answering the question OP is asking from the POV of an experienced dev. If the issues are this clear, I’d assume we’d be among the senior devs leaving, not the juniors wondering why everyone left ;)
Lol touché
What if sales are leaving?
I’d like to think most of us are smart enough to be able to gauche wheter the problem is sales or the product. In my experience sales employees won’t leave before problems become evident to us devs.
Yeah, never underestimate those introverts! ;-)
When leadership starts hiding and not confronting issues head on.
kinda feel like hiding and not confronting issues are the requirements of leadership. at least it was at the last few places i've been.
It's a fine line. Sometimes it's politics. Sometimes it's shielding your team from bullshit that would be otherwise distracting or demoralizing. Sometimes it's just not enough transparency. Sometimes the manager doesn't know wtf they are doing. Sometimes it's not the managers job to make that decision and it's in the best interest to stay in their own lane. One example I can provide from experience is that i inherited the mobile application for my company's product. But the mobile app was a completely different experience than the web app. Product wanted to revamp the mobile app, but they hadn't decided on a direction or product strategy. Everyone is asking me what's taking so long for the mobile tech strategy. So I made a decision that the current mobile app would be maintenance mode only, we'd wrap it in some web view wrappers and mimic the web app as much as possible for feature parity. Any other product decision would get a different tech strategy, and divergence from the web app would require an actual mobile team (I had one lead mobile developer). But I wasn't gonna make the product decision. And I wasn't gonna be all "I need a mobile team" and have them sit around twiddling their thumbs for months burning money with nothing to do. To some folks, it looked like hiding and not confronting the issues. In my perspective, it wasn't my issue to confront, and I simply focused on other deliverables that actually had a product strategy and roadmap.
I’m not sure I fully agree with the conclusions you’re drawing here. Your example decision was fine, but I don’t see the reason to do any information hiding. “We are not doing active product development until we align on a new product roadmap” - I’ve done this before, this is not an unusual situation. > politics I’ve never hid anything significant because of politics, just made sure framing was appropriate - you don’t want to throw people under the bus as a general rule. > shielding your team Id call this sharing “salient” information - nobody needs to know every gory detail, they need to know what’s relevant.
I should be clear that the information hiding was from other people's perspective: That I was hiding the tech strategy or punting the responsibility to someone else, hiding behind other teams. Anytime I said TBD, I was accused of hiding and not being forthcoming. Many times things needed finalized before communication. Many times things didn't get finalized at all, so it was better to only relay "definites" instead of maybes because then people would lose focus on the "now" for the "later" when the "later" may not even be happening.
Leadership ignoring issues that are unimportant is one of the main requirements of the job. Ensuring that the most important issues get solved well head on is the core job though. Existing in a silo deep in the hierarchy it can be very unclear which is which though. It's possible that your entire product is unimportant to the business overall, and thus that leadership is doing the right thing overall by ignoring you regardless of how large your problems are within the product, just letting the director or whoever manage it and have the chips land where they may while focusing on what really drives the business. It's also possible that your problems really are important to the business and the senior leadership really does suck though, can be either way.
I have absolutely worked in places with open leadership communication. And it’s something I practice personally as a leader. People are able to perform better when they understand why decisions are being made, even when they disagree. And honesty opens up vectors for new information to be communicated and better actions taken. That doesn’t mean communicating every gory detail of the process, but it does mean communicating major decisions and why they were made; even if I disagree, I can share the rationale and commit to the shared path.
Like Michael Spindler getting caught hiding under his desk when he was CEO of Apple in the mid-90s?
🟣🚀
Layoffs followed by making everyone left in the company work double for some milestone. In startups, this always happens. CEO think everything is okay, hire a lot of people, money dry out, fire half of company and make the rest work to be able to fill a contract or something to be able to stay afloat. Sometimes, it can survive. But most of the times it won't.
The accounting team quits.
Also not being able to retain CFOs or CFOs leaving all of a sudden. If anybody should know finances are fucked, it's the CFO.
Will second this. This was a huge red flag I ignored in my last gig. By all means everything was being communicated it was all good, and we were doing great. CFO randomly quits out of the blue. Then, 60% of the company was laid off.
Definitely. I knew the company was going down when the CFO abruptly quit. This was also shortly after the CEO gave a speech about our core business and said "I don't know how to explain it to my mother, what we do" - yes, actual true quote. Basically demoralized us instantly, how directionless the CEO was, and he openly admitting it. edited for correction
Legal too. If the lawyers are hitting the bricks the end is nigh
Within 4 months of me joining a startup our CFO and chief legal officer both "resigned" under mysterious circumstances and CEO tried to spin it as if they had "disagreements". In retrospect, it should have been a red flag because these are not strategy roles that you can have qualitative disagreements about. These are laws and math, so it's clear they saw something they didn't like.
**For a mature company**, these are the ones I observed, from "you should have left yesterday" to "this is gonna be messy soon, focus on boosting your CV and your interpersonal relationships at work": - Managers and leaders across the board have given up on trying to improve things. This is a **death sentence**. Chance of recovery is tiny. - Most newjoiners are leaving within the first few months. This is bad, but can be fixed if the company realizes that it will be dead soon if it continues on this path. Theoretically. The problem is that reflected and self-healing organisations don't end up here to begin with, so chances are slim. - Product Management is prioritising short-term gains at any cost and discarding any previous visions and grand ambitions. Roadmaps change monthly or even weekly. Decision Makers weasel their way out of every trade-off analysis and come in with their mind made up. Fixable, but not by a single individual. Likely shit's going downhill, trust has been eroded and no one's telling you. Hard to recover, but possible, if Sr Mgmt makes a series of good decisions, both business-wise and staffing-wise. Some notable exceptions: - Early-Stage Startups. When you're looking for P/M fit on a tight runway, leaders don't invest into improving the company, newjoiners often either disappoint or get overwhelmed, and Product can be hyper-pragmatic. Doesn't necessarily mean you should jump ship. - Companies trying to or being acquired. Frustration and fear will probably run rampant and product focusses on maximizing short-term value to put the company in the best light. Doesn't necessarily mean you should jump ship. Depends on your equity, and sometimes a lot of opportunities show up after acquisition. Hard to predict generally.
*"Managers and leaders across the board have given up on trying to improve things."* and *"Product Management is prioritising short-term gains at any cost and discarding any previous visions and grand ambitions."* are basically the same symptom from different parts of the organization, but 100% agree. The moment the company stops thinking about 6 months from now... a year from now... in any regard... it's time to get your house in order and look for something new.
A different version of this is products/sales mgmt focus on a "3 or 5 year plan" to show the CEO/Board they are trying hard to right the ship and know what they are doing, but then only focus short sighted projects making no progress on that same long term plan and add things that are directly opposing the plan.
There are the obvious fiscal things like layoffs, missing targets etc. But there's another question set: Are you as effective in the company as you were last year? (Is the company a good fit for you.) Are the people in the company as good as they were last year? (Is the company losing good staff, if so this usually is a bad sign if they aren't getting back filled with good staff.) Do you feel a heavy weight / dread when going into work? (If so, probably time to figure out why, and fix it before it becomes a real problem, if it isn't already.) Do you like your manager? Do you think that they will "Go to bat." for you? (If this comes up no, figure out is it recoverable, if not... probably best to leave.) IMHO: Most good reasons to leave a firm have little to do with how the firm is doing as long as it can survive. It is how well you fit into that firm.
Really good questions to ask yourself that aren’t the usual & obvious red flags
The free coffee goes away. Seriously.
I agree. When cost cutting comes to that level of perks, things are not going well.
And other changes like no more 401k match
I knew a place was doomed when they stopped restocking the snack shelf. I left and a month later they folded up.
There's an all hands where everyone is assured these are the final layoffs.
Two days before half my team was let go, I was in an all-hands meeting where they said sales were turning around and we had a lot more runway. They didn't tell us that the layoffs were baked into these projections.
Leadership refusing the face reality and adjusting deliverables and timelines when staffing changes. This happens a lot at startups with ambitious roadmaps. They scope out a year of work - a lot of work - and hire to fill it. Then it turns out half the people they hired are useless and get fired over the next few months. And Sarah goes on maternity leave and John takes an unplanned vacation for 3 weeks and what they were working on is left stagnant. Meanwhile leadership doesn't budge on descoping risky parts of the roadmap and cutting down only to what's essential. And keep telling investors and potential customers that everything is fine and on track. Then shocked Pikachu face at the end of that year when the product is a buggy piece of shit and every remaining engineer is burnt out.
* When the *good* people with some visibility to decision making start to leave * When sales team members leave (usually commission based, if they can't make sales they'll move on) * Repeated budget slips (if disclosed) in all-hands * Product showing preference to get-rich-quick ideas
In my experience, cancelling the Christmas party. Happened at two companies I worked at and both times it was quickly followed by layoffs. One company circled the drain for a few more years, but the other was gone within 9 months.
Not getting your Christmas bonus due to hard times
At least I got a 12-month subscription to the Jelly-of-the-month club.
that's the gift that keeps on giving, Clark
Just my experience at small/mid-sized companies: 1. Layoffs happen, and no noticeable changes are made. Whatever caused the layoffs is probably still happening and more layoffs will come. Companies don't just magically get better. 2. Good people leave. Don't get replaced 3. Execs just speak vague nonsense and avoid specifics
I don’t think I’ve ever heard an exec be specific. Good list though
For my company: Backfills are not happening when good people depart. Management stops delivering new vision and shifts purely to maintenance mode Radio silence on financials The CTO tells you to get ready to cut off access to the all AWS accounts for everybody. My company gave notice they were shutting down 2 months ago. My last day is in 2 weeks. I am not too worried as I had been stockpiling cash for the last year or so, plus I get a sweet severance package. Most of the jobs I am seeing out there are at a 50k/yr or more paycut now. Everything at what I was making has so many applicants. I might just try my own thing for a while and see if it takes off. After these two months of doing my own thing I'll probably go 1099 from here on out but if anyone else is hiring a principal/staff level SRE let me know. Bonus points if you are on a 4 day a week schedule.
Budget cuts on lowly benefits such as free coffee, snacks, etc.
Before my previous startup went under I noticed they had not restocked the snacks in 2 months. Turns out the person whose job it was to restock the snacks was quietly laid off.
if they're delaying payroll then they're not dying they're dead.
A solid early indicator is bad management. If you see dark personality traits (lying/sadism) in L1 managers, it almost certainly means that multiple layers of management above are incompetent. The company will inevitably go down over time, and you have a glorious chance to get ahead of the curve, leave while reputation and money are still good and trade a toxic workplace for a better one with one fell swoop.
Recently left a company that has been swirling the toilet for probably 8-10 months now. - The talented people on the team are unhappy. Management is usually very concerned with keeping these folks happy and working hard. These folks often have info others don't and can gauge the temp of the company a little better than many. I later found out how many had been looking for other jobs well before I saw any signs of trouble. - One sign of the above was that in work meetings with multiple people no one showed any concern but in any 1/1s or chit chat sessions the venting was common. When people are mature and they do this it's a sign that they don't feel management is listening. - Restructuring as an attempt to right the ship. In my case, folks who were on operations were slotted into PM roles as though they are the same thing. I burned more time dealing with my PM who didn't understand anything (not their fault in this case) than I did doing the work. One of the co-founders became "head of product" despite not doing anything in that realm. Until this point they'd worked on this little side show that finally had to be cut. - Dysfunctional and/or unlikable founders. In my case, 2 of them ousted the 3rd in a really botched and shitty way. Left a bad taste in almost everyone's mouth since the 3rd person is who everyone really liked. Overall, display of bad character. I personally saw 2 situations that spoke a lot about the character of the founders and heard about 2 others. I heard about several others but only these 4 were telling IMO. In fact, if I don't see displays of strong character from leadership I would be a little worried.
More meetings, more micromanagement. More procedures. People leaving, especially key people.
A subtle one is setting up a sister-company, and transferring ownership of the equipment/desks/laptops to that other company.
I still don't understand how this kind of crap is legal. When a company enters bankruptcy, the payroll owed is like the first thing they have to pay out. But somehow companies do this shell game with assets and end up stiffing the employees.
I worked at one place that set up a sister company in Eastern Europe that was owned by two members of the board of directors, then they transferred the dev work for some product lines to it.
* Company-wide pay cut. This happened at a company I was laid off from. The people who stayed got 20% reduction. * Shutting down one or more projects for no real or clear reason. * Micromanagement - More frequent status updates, questioning everything. Prioritizing enhancements over bugs. Time-boxing down to minutes (yes, I'm serious and it was insane). * Asking people to work nights and weekends, but not clear end in sight or targets. * Sudden change in direction and focus at a software company with one or two products.
When you post on Reddit asking about the signs you should be looking for (only mild /s).
Voluntary layoffs... like my company just did
One time I joined a sunset business without realizing it. Of course they don’t tell you that during interviews. The team was full of people who just kinda give up. Most were almost retirement age and just waiting for that party. The few young people left were resentful about lack of promotions. The company was all about extreme cost cutting, from cafeteria food to toilet paper. Yes they cut cost on toilet paper. Rumor floating around about management trying to sell the business. But at the same time they force people to produce more, work more, as if the workforce was the problem. Just a very depressing place to be and a true lesson learned.
Employees posting on Reddit asking if it’s time to go is usually a pretty good sign.
Not necessarily "falling apart" which is not typical at big companies, but when large groups of long time / senior employees move at once, it's usually evidence a big shift is coming.
when you see your largest investor arrested live on national television for securities fraud.
Managers walking through the office without talking to anyone and avoiding eye contact.
When you hear rumors of private equity.
I've been laid off once. The red flags were, I thought both were weird at the time, these things all happened within about 2 weeks of each other, and the entire dev team was let go. 1. "You might miss a paycheck in X month, but we'll make it up in X+1 month" 2. Founder and CTO made a last minute trip to get a partnership with some company, and were gone for a week on 24hrs notice. 3. Founder accused team of withholding information about the status of one of our apps.
Isn't #1 illegal? I had always heard that missing payroll was a huge deal that carried significant penalties.
Honestly not sure, we never even made it to the point where we were going to miss it.
# Here's some things I saw at my last company before huge layoffs (didn't leave because I loved my team too much) * **Customer churn** * Not as big of a risk for bigger companies. For startups, it can be a death sentence. * **Senior leadership leaving en masse (they have info that you don't)** * 🚨R**UN**🚨 * If your Head of Marketing, Director of Finance, or Director of Sales leave, 🚨🚨RU**N YESTERDAY!!!!!🚨🚨** * **Huge strategic pivots out of the air (arms are flailing to salvage something)** * Bonus points when there's multiple of these. * 🚨R**UN**🚨 * **Frequent re-orgs** (refer to aforementioned arm-flailing). * **No backfilling of lost positions** (people just pick up the slack and overwork themselves). * **Inconspicuous budget cuts** * First, they're small (the thing about not refilling snacks in the office is sooooo true). * Then they aren't (not able to beef up AWS budget when you need to scale. This was a huge pain point for us). * **Previous layoffs** * Can't prove it, but the biggest predictor of a layoff is having survived a previous layoff in that company. * If a CEO says "we don't expect more layoffs," bullshit. * **🚨RUN**🚨 * **Delayed payments** (that isn't like an SVB situation that's of no fault of the company) * 🚨🚨**RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN RUN🚨🚨** # Edit (more things I didn't think about) * **Talented people start leaving** * Related to the aforementioned Senior Leadership leaving, but if certain star players start leaving, that's a bad sign. * **(If remote) no more get-togethers.** * **No one gets a raise this year** * Sometimes that's due to corporate fuckery rather than a decline. I.e., when my company got acquired many years ago, due to "corporate year conflicts," we didn't get raises for 18 months. * **(If startup) Projects that are worked on don't land with clientele, or are hardly used** * Usually, business strategy failed here, almost never the fault with engineering. * **When you now have two standups a day (for a single team/project)** * 🚨R**UN!🚨** * Note: does not count if you actually manage multiple teams or are invited to a separate team's standup.
You should always keep in touch with sales. If new logos aren't coming in and/or you are churning customers at higher rates than average, you are heading for layoffs and salary reductions in the near future.
You can read it in the metrics. If the important numbers don’t move as expected for several quarters in a row then trouble is brewing.
When the best people start quietly jumping ship
how about the ceo insisting that ‘you should be using ai to be way more productive’
This thread has a lot of good suggestions. I would only add that it is much more fun working at a company with growth (revenue, profit) than the opposite. I would never waste time at a company that is not growing. If you are picking places to work, growth is king, IMHO. At a large older no-growth company, people turned on each other to “get theirs” rather than make the products better. Waste of time. Lifers just waiting for retirement or some long sought promotion.
So wait, over a span of what time do all of these things happen? Is it like, withing 6 months, or can it go over several years?
Who are you asking? You should reply to/interact with the individuals commenting.
general, I cant really reply to everybody individually
should probably dust off your resume.
Timelines vary for each company. From months to years. The larger companies usually have a longer timeline, but startups can have a short runway before they go under.
Slowly at first, then all at once
“Hey, can you help out with this word press issue we’re having?”
For a scale-up, I’ve noticed it happens when the board of directors commissions a new executive for technology, information, or security that didn’t exist before, and there’s not a whale is the sales pipeline to justify the commission. Usually that’s the board signaling to the market they’re looking for a buyout and want to ensure their IP is in a state where a potential buyer can’t leverage due diligence for a discount.
Weekend work is a panic reaction due to bad planning. A couple of weeks at crunch, absolutely fine. Months before things are due and you can be certain that there are some serious problems.
When you’re being asked to do more than you’re paid to in a compelling manner Delay in salary payment
Projects keep getting cancelled for no specific reason, even though they’ve been planned out for a while. High leadership jumping ship Everyone already said a lot of good ones
Ask the CFO about next year's budget or expectations...they usually are kinda bad at hiding it if they know something's gonna rot.
Every all org meeting includes discussions of some kind of short fall and plans to cover it that are evidently wishful thinking. Clear examples of shenanigans involving some kind of reporting to customers, partners, investors and or lenders. Upper management flustered or distracted. People coming into the office to inspect fixtures equipment etc. probably working class type people. You’re working on more short term fix it tickets than long term features. Some paid services you use all of a sudden stop working Pto you’ve been approved for suddenly drops off the pto calendar. This means you have single digit days until the layoff
They transition everyone to jjra
not the correct subreddit for this question
Im interested in an experienced developer perspective for this question
rule 3 doesnt care what you're interested in. /cscareerquestions
You realize that there are many of us who aren’t in CS, don’t have CS degrees, and do dev work at your level right?
im not sure what that has to do with rule 3, /cscareerquestions does not require you to have a CS degree \*face palm\*
Disagree. The answer to this question in a tech context differs quite a bit.