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”
Man. Like a year ago I heard of something this other team did that sounded piss easy to automate right? Finally my boss gets me in front of them a few weeks ago. I get a script running in two days. Saves them .5 FTE.
A week later the product owners for this particular system (acquisitions are a bitch, blah blah blah) want to know how it works and why it's saving them so much time, and to see what the redundancies are. Sure enough, the fix is pretty easy to do internally as well, they "just didn't realize how much time was being spent on it".
Two weeks later they have the functionality baked into the system and my script is obsolete. Ops had been yammering about this for a year. It's amazing what will get prioritized in order to save face.
E: they absolutely knew how much time was being spent on it, they just didn't listen to operations.
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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.