
Ask HN: How engineering teams look like when super IT companies start failing - wbsun
There have been many super IT companies which used to be the top of the entire industry and shine, but now being either nowhere or struggling. E.g. Xerox PARC, Bell Labs, DEC, HP, Apple in 90s, IBM, Sun, SGI, Nokia, etc. People could possibly list 100 reasons they fell off the throne. But I am curious how the internal engineering teams&#x2F;culture look like when these superstars started falling from the acme. I guess the culture would change and focus on short-terms with pressures from competitors, etc. It would be interesting to know if people are willing to share their experiences. Or maybe recommend some books&#x2F;articles to read about that.
======
malux85
I’ve seen the decline of one of these companies as a consultant, here’s what I
saw:

Management will start fighting for different features, and communication on
what to build will be vague, with the possibility of engineers sitting idle
while they fight it out.

All benefits and travel cancelled.

Once the development plan is decided, there’s huge pressure from higher up to
work quickly. But they will not respond to feedback that some of their
requests are conflicting or impossible.

Senior engineers are gone now, hiring starts, but the managers are unable to
assess the tech capabilities so inappropriate hires (people who can’t even
fizz buzz) are hired.

These engineers spend months “coming up to speed” then usually quit or have
some health problem, or file a lawsuit

Rapid project flip flopping starts. Developer Time managed in increments of
less than 1 day.

Computing infra starts becoming unreliable because the senior devops are gone,
and it’s been outsourced to people who can’t run a cluster - in the
organisation I was at we had a 75 node Hadoop Linux cluster which was
administered by 3, 20 year old juniors who had not used Linux before.

Deliverables failing and quietly deadlines being missed. Now managers are
getting fired. New managers are overwhelmed at the giant mess. Manager
turnover is high.

Nothing is really getting done, legacy projects put in by the competent people
before they left are the cash cows, but the giant mess the company is in means
it will slowly decline.

Any tiny win is celebrated as a giant triumph- some junior uses Keras to make
a simple classifier in the weekend and suddenly the company “has an AI
division” - though the benefits of this announcement are short lived because
there’s no monitisation or strategy, or actual product

I was on a 6 month contract and didn’t renew it after that, the company still
exists, but they aren’t growing

------
CyberFonic
The Decline and Fall of IBM by Robert X. Cringley is an interesting read. Some
of Alan Kay's writings give an indication of how Xerox Parc fell. Bell Labs is
an outlier in that it was the AT&T break-up that ended up starving it of
funds. You might also want to read some of Steve Blank's blog entries - his
site is very well organised so it is easy to find his version of events.

Since your question specifically mentions engineering teams, the changes there
come after PHBs start issuing Dunning-Kruger Syndrome based edicts. Engineers
at first push back and when that fails, the ones who can find new jobs leave
in droves. Eventually the best engineers are gone and only the less talented
ones (generally more junior due to lack of of experience) remain which in turn
leads to a dual problem of them not knowing enough to push back and
implementing solutions poorly partly due to lack of ability and also partly
due to lack of motivation to do the right thing. While that is going on, the
managers get increasingly antsy and demanding, issuing ever more bad
decisions. It really becomes a downward death spiral.

As an aside, I worked with DEC and watched (from the side-lines) as it was
acquired by Compaq and then the merger with HP. The management incompetence
was unbelievable and the technical teams' morale sank like a lead balloon.

