Background
15 years ago I started at a software company of a fortune 500 corpo. In the beginning I did some pretty boring service tasks. Over time I dug deeper and deeper into more technical stuff. Worked on cloud topics, lived the DevOps life and came back to some legacy application where I have deep domain knowhow.
They asked me to re-join due to the fact that they wanted a major refactor of the whole application. Since we had a real bumpy start and some of our old world monolith was shipped to the cloud to have a second life as micro service.
I did what I like and dealt with all the disturbances which happened alot. So much that we got more management attention than we possibly wanted.
We shaped some simple process and established teams which consisted of the most experienced members of the services. We were honest and trustful which was our recipe to get shit done before it hit the fan. This meant also doing sometimes some pretty wild stuff on the live systems to keep things going. We got better and better and over time we made sure that almost no critical issues appeared anymore, at least from the inside.
Today
Two days ago we got info from our top management that we should prepare for an urgent organisational change. A mandatory meeting was set up and we have to attend. Most of us work from remote, so we were aware that it has to be important.
In the beginning we were gossiping that the final merge with the corp will be done and therefor our company will be vanishing. Oh boy how wrong we were. One day before the meeting I heard rumors that they will shut down the whole department. I thought it was crazy due to the fact we had running contracts and the application we serve is a multibillion one.
Then the day of the meeting came it was all clear within 2 minutes. This long it took to make sure that the whole company will be shut down and everybody will be laid off within the next 12 - 18 months. I wasn't mourning in the first place, I wasn't shocked either. I just thought how crazy it is to throw such amount of experience under the bus.
They explained that all this stuff we did and still do can be transferred near or offshore within this amount of time. It's a bummer since even our contractors know that this is complete madness, but their hands are bound, since we can't get on board due to the worker council and their own policy to decrease the head count on their departments.
So everything will go into ashes. Unnecessarily and for a price tag which is under the impression of numbers of the whole service and transformation process in the range of peanuts.
Today I heard that top management will not revoke the decision, since this was done in allignment with the board members. It's not even frustrating. It's just waste of time and money. 🚀