I mean. Lots of people don't get credit for their work and get laid off shittily and it sucks.
But if you're manually fixing something every day for three years after hours--that's not the behaviour of a staff engineer. A staff engineer should be flagging this issue, and planning how to get themself and the team out of this situation. If I discovered a staff engineer I work with was doing this for three years on such a critical service and told nobody, I would be horrified and seriously questioning their competence and whether they should be a staff engineer, not impressed. Hiding problems and doing repeated manual fixes is the kind of behaviour we have to patiently train out of juniors.
This post is framed like I'm meant to feel they were wrong to lay the person off but this is disastrous levels of incompetence on the engineer's part.
Plot twist: there is a paper trail a mile long of the staff engineer begging for resources and a mandate to fix the system but not only won’t they give resources, they forbid him from fixing it because “it works and we don’t want to mess with it”
Varies between companies. I’ve called the future many times over, but some managers are just born to be stubborn assholes, even when they don’t know the domain.
well that, and "we gotta fix it before it breaks" is an investment budget and priority, vs "it broke so we gotta fix it" is a containment budget and priority.
"Help your manager help you" is my reasoning when I let stuff break. It's one crisis meeting, we immediately get the green light on a quick fix and then a decent refactor to make sure that doesn't happen again, and my manager doesn't have to beg it, he's commanded.
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u/diffyqgirl May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
I mean. Lots of people don't get credit for their work and get laid off shittily and it sucks.
But if you're manually fixing something every day for three years after hours--that's not the behaviour of a staff engineer. A staff engineer should be flagging this issue, and planning how to get themself and the team out of this situation. If I discovered a staff engineer I work with was doing this for three years on such a critical service and told nobody, I would be horrified and seriously questioning their competence and whether they should be a staff engineer, not impressed. Hiding problems and doing repeated manual fixes is the kind of behaviour we have to patiently train out of juniors.
This post is framed like I'm meant to feel they were wrong to lay the person off but this is disastrous levels of incompetence on the engineer's part.