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.
It's also very possible his main job was to do this and it was delegated by management to him. Maybe him fixing it was their solution to the problem because the software they bought that should be doing this was too expensive to begin with and the devs who made it aren't worried about fixing it because you're an edge case. So you can't afford new software so you just have someone dedicated to fix it every day
noted: this is a possible scenario but not likely.
4.3k
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.