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/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/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.