LOL Have I Been Pwned has pwned itself, cost-wise. Here the steps:
1) Go all in on cloud shit like Azure
2) Think you're a smartass
3) Trick the cost side with even more cloud, this time Cloudflare
4) Be not quite as smart as you think
5) Enjoy your 7000 EUR bill
6) Make some tweaks and continue with step 2.

Source: https://troyhunt.com/how-i-got-pwne...

Bonus laughter: he's a "Microsoft Most Valuable Professional", though not an actual employee.

In my last rant (https://devrant.com/rants/5523458/...) I regaled you lovely folks of how I had to diplomatically yet firmly defend my work/life boundaries during off-work hours for non-life threatening affairs (a frustratingly common occurrence), and concluded the thread by mentioning that I still had a job, but would make a note of my frustration of that for whatever exit interview happens.

Well, no need for those notes any longer.

I and half of the engineering force, along with several senior managers were laid off this morning in the form of a "mandatory on-site all hands".

I live and work in NYC. Several people took trains and booked rooms from as far away as Boston to be here (or at least I know of specifically two people who commuted up here on Sunday to be here for the "all hands"). I presume those people used their travel benefits to get here and back.

We were dismissed before the meeting even took place, and according to a coworker I became friends with (yes, despite my snarky comments in other threads, I *do* actually have coworkers I became friends with lol) who survived at least this round of layoffs, once the actual all-hands commenced, the company first disclosed the layoffs, then announced being awarded a major contract with the very client the entire org had been working on overdrive to win for the last nine months. He had already been looking for a new job and got an offer last Friday, had been mulling it over, but told me once we were off the phone he was calling them up and accepting. He had three people reporting to him, and lost two. Even he had no idea it was coming until one of his now-former subordinates asked him to come outside and told him they'd just been let go.

I knew going in to this startup that "it's a startup, anything can happen, just mind the gap". That's why I asked on numerous occasions and tried to get time with our CFO to ask about revenue and earnings; things that in my years at this place were never disclosed to the rank and file, I'm not a professional accountant or CPA by any means, but I did take a pair of corporate accounting classes in community college because I like the numbers (see my other rants about leaving the field and becoming a math teacher), and I was really curious to know how the financial health of the business was.

It wasn't so much a red flag as it was an orangish-yellow that no one ever answered those questions, or that the CFO was distant but not necessarily cagey about my requests for his time; other indicators were good while interviewing--they had multiple fully integrated, paying customers (one of which being a former employer from years ago, which aided me in having strong product familiarity during the job interview), but I guess not enough to be sustainable.

Anyway. I'm gonna use the rest of the week to be a bum, might get out of the city and go hang with friends Pittsburgh, eat some hoagies and just vibe for a while. I've got assets and money stashed up to float pretty easily for a while, plus a bit of fun money so losing the job isn't world ending. Generalized anxiety because everything is going to shit worldwide, but that quickly faded into the backdrop of the generalized anxiety I always have because existentialism or something like that.

Thanks for reading. Pay the teachers.

I thought of posting this as a comment to @12bit float' post, but then decided it better goes out as a post by itself.

https://devrant.com/rants/5291843/...

My second employer, where I am on my last week of notice currently, is building a no code/low code tool.

Since this was my first job switch, I was in a dreamy phase and was super excited about this whole space. I indeed got to learn like crazy.

Upon joining, I realised that an ideal user persona for this product was a developer. Wow! No code tool for developer. sO cOoL...

We started building it and as obvious as it could get, the initial goal was adoption because we were still at top of the funnel.

We launched an alpha release shortly followed by a beta.

Nobody used it. Tech XLT/LT kept pushing product and design team to run a feature factory so that their teams can use this tool.

The culture set by those two leaders was toxic as fuck.

Now, I decided to do some research and some more product discovery to understand why folks were not using it. Mind you, we were not allowed to do any research and were forced to build based on opinions of those two monkeys.

Turns out that the devs were really happy with their existing tools and our tool was another tool being forcefully added into their toolbox by the said XLT/LT.

Not only that, even if they decide to use our tool, out of pressure, they still cannot because the product was missing key capabilities like audit control and promotion from one environment to another.

Building those would essentially mean reinventing Github aka version control and Spinnaker aka CI/CD pipeline.

My new boss (I got 3 managers in 4 months because of high attrition across levels due to the toxic culture), thinks that tech XLT/LT are doing great and we all suck as a product and design team.

He started driving things his own way without even understanding or settling down for first 90 days.

Lol, I put in my resignation got out of that mess.

So agreeing to what our boy said here, no code tools are a complete waste, especially for a developer, and even as a non tech person, I prefer keyboard over mouse.