When the founders of the company leave and you see the soul slowly getting drained out of the company. Hurts to see..

Sounds like the founders sold you down the river.

I would find a new job before the place starts hemorrhaging talent.

@Sunsette @sariel

Well, thanks for making me realize exactly what has happened to my employer.

It's post-talent-bleedout here.

I kind of feel like I'm trapped in some desolate wasteland filled with rather benign zombie creatures.

Nothing bad is happening. Nothing substantial is happening at all. It's just zoom meetings which serve to kick balls forward. The company is profitable so my salary is being paid... BUT ABSOLUTELY NOTHING IS HAPPENING. All conversations are completely devoid of substance.

On one hand, I could watch Netflix all day, not do any productive work, and no one would have the brain cells to even notice.

On the other hand... Coasting along with this brainless mob is slowly killing me, my fingers dragging over keys in apathy, the shells of my coworkers are infecting my mind with this hollow parasitic manager verbiage.

I know it's time to go.

But leaving the familiar, even if it's a toxic pit full of rotting corpses, is fucking scary.

@bittersweet I would think you're describing at least 50% of all companies today.

Let me guess, staff is around 200, company made around $20 million last year, no raises, and you're always getting questions about reducing costs?

@sariel

Staff imploded to 30%, estimated revenue of quarter billion (non public), no one is thinking of reducing costs. No investments either. Basically nothing is happening either way. The CFO left, and our financial record is a mess of dropbox'ed CSV files.

Profit margin is insanely high, the product has great value, but not a lot of polish, and it's practically abandoned.

There aren't any new features — managers are currently just changing the location of a button back and forth every few weeks and saying "we improved audience engagement by <random> percent, great job team!"

We're basically a rollercoaster ride which flew off the tracks at 300mph in unicorn startup land.

The carts have so much upward momentum that we're still doubling revenue every quarter — but gravity is going to kick in eventually.

@sariel

Which makes the choice to leave even harder.

I got 3 raises last year, without asking, while kind of slacking off, being quite demotivated by nearly empty sprints, ambiguous team structures and continuous random department renaming.

Everyone at the company is pretending that "all is well".

And from a manager's short term perspective that's true. Record breaking numbers and all.

But the engineers are leaving in droves to find a place where they can do more than move buttons around — a place where they can find some intellectual challenge, which isn't coasting on last decade's freakish succes explosion.

I wish my place was making at least 10% of that

@sariel it has already started but it's really hard to leave since hope is the last thing to leave a person.. the glory days can come back right? RIGHT???

@bittersweet I think you just described my 2021....
"My fingers dragging over keys in apathy" damn, right in the feels

in my case that would be an improvement. (depending on who replaces them ofcourse)

You have the time to could your own product. Pretty sure that is challenging.