Ask HN: What to do when the company is stretched thin?

[throwAwayWMS]

I joined this company that has a public image of a well put together company. They have a range of products with a fairly large user-base (in the few millions).

However, once inside I find that each product is kept together by a skeleton crew or sometimes by people who can only work on it part time since they're handling multiple projects.

It feels like the bus factor for most projects is one (or very close to one).

I don't know how I feel about the situation, and management response to my question/concerns "it is what it is".

Do you think this is a huge red flag?

[Tabular-Iceberg]

I made a thread about this a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30260271

Companies make all these technical blogs and conference talks about how to develop software in a sustainable and disciplined way, but it's all a bunch of lies to lure stupid devs to join in on their death march projects. And the scam is perfectly self-perpetuating, if all you're doing all day is fighting fires on these half baked systems you're not learning anything that's transferable to the next job.

[jrace → Tabular-Iceberg]

Thats where i find myself today, everything in on fire and we have no time to reflect on what we did and reinforce the learning.

Fortunately many opportunities are popping up… i am unsure if it really is better elsewhere though

[Tabular-Iceberg → jrace]

Every job I've taken so far has been worse than the one before. I hope you have better luck.

I've been thinking of taking some time off to learn one thing properly and try to turn it into a consulting opportunity, but as long as industry CTOs are fine with devs just copying and pasting from stack overflow to solve whatever the current crisis is, there is no real demand for that.

[franklursight]

Unfortunately standard.

If you want to effect change you will need to understand what the board consider “business value” - things like return for investors (roi to private equity, share holders, etc.), executive salaries, topline/bottomline ratios, etc. etc.. it’s unlikely to be customer satisfaction, especially if they’ve hit status quo/plateaued Once you understand management’s incentives you can work out how to motivate them to change, focused on those incentives, working backwards from them and pairing them up to your own goals.

‘The First 90 Days’ is a great book that provides tools on how to do the information gathering effectively.

[throwaway4good]

All companies will look bad and unhealthy on the inside if your yardstick is some abstract ideal or a polished external image.

The question you should ask is: Is this really that different from what I should expect if I went somewhere else?

[Clubber]

>However, once inside I find that each product is kept together by a skeleton crew or sometimes by people who can only work on it part time since they're handling multiple projects.

This is common, adding people to a project typically makes things less efficient, which is counterintuitive. It's mainly due to communications overhead and developers, "stepping on each other's toes." It also requires exceptional project management of clearly defining tasks, timing of tasks, proper resource allocation, etc.

>It feels like the bus factor for most projects is one (or very close to one).

The bus factor always exists. If the most important person leaves and there are other redundant people on the project, they will still take time to get up to par, and there are a lot of factors, some that you can't mitigate (like raw ability), that go into full redundancy.

>I don't know how I feel about the situation, and management response to my question/concerns "it is what it is".

It's hard to tell from just a blurb. I would stick it out and see how it goes. It might be that they have a bunch of top notch people who can handle it and like their work. If the turnover is really low, this is a good sign. The best teams are always a small group of really quality people. If that is the case, you get to be a part of something pretty rare. It'll take time to figure that out though.

[ibash]

Are projects failing when someone takes a vacation or quits?

If not, then the evidence says that what they’re doing is working, and you should learn how it’s so efficient!

[throwAwayWMS → ibash]

Vacations are centrally managed/approved so that it has minimal impact on projects.

But yes, we had someone catch COVID, and it lead to the project being delayed by several weeks.

Also (before my time), apparently some smaller projects/features died when people quit and the transition was poorly handled.

[beagle3 → throwAwayWMS]

Delays/dying-features with unexpected sickness / leave is common in startups and lean companies - if these things don’t affect schedule, it means you have “spares”, either in man power, in scheduling, or both.

Spares are a good thing, but they are a trade off - you either pay constantly to have extra capacity and avoid delays, or pay only when an event happens. Which one is preferable depends on the relative costs, your culture, your industry, etc.

One of my customers is a big government agency that is well staffed, and can keep on working at the same rate with 10% of their employees quitting tomorrow and another 20% getting one week off for Covid every month. You can imagine how (in)efficient day to day work there is. If I actually had to work there, and not just deliver finished projects, I would lose my mind.

[dimitar]

Unfortunately it's all perspective.

A sceleton crew might be good for mature projects that require very little support of any kind. If there aren't a lot (and that is subjective) of incidents and tickets from customers things might actually be good.

If you are not "top management" (executive, VP, C-level etc.) in that company there is very little you can do to change things.

What you can do is evaluate what you can expect as work and if you are going to find it rewarding.

[nikau]

>It feels like the bus factor for most projects is one (or very close to one).

Who cares, it's not your concern to worry about that.

[paulcole]

A big red flag about the company or about you?

I’m assuming you work at this company now?

What questions will you ask in your next set of job interviews that you didn’t ask this time? What questions did you ask during the interview this time where you felt like you got misleading answers?

[Tabular-Iceberg → paulcole]

Job interviews only consists of two parties telling the other what it wants to hear. They're completely useless for assessing either candidates or workplaces.

[paulcole → Tabular-Iceberg]

This just isn’t true.

[ge96]

How's the documentation?

[throwAwayWMS → ge96]

Discoverability is an issue for sure. I'm not sure if I'm missing hidden pages, or they don't exist.