I was at a very small tech-adjacent company for almost 10 years and we definitely let people go who just weren't working out. What surprised me was how blindsided they typically were when it was blindingly obvious to everyone else there was a problem. They'd probably all have been able to find a role to coast in at a larger firm.
I did some contract work with a team in a large company. Within about a week I realised this team was a dumping ground for poor performers from other parts of the IT dept. They looked after all sorts of little odds and ends systems, and didn't really write any new stuff (that's what I was there for - they didn't trust them to create new software).
I have heard from contacts within the company that successive downsizing rounds has removed all of them, and as far as I am aware, none are working in the IT industry in any capacity anymore. They were nice guys but were just contended to sit back and collect paychecks and not learn anything new.
If you get into a age+skills death spiral it can be very hard to get out.
The few times I tried to be blunt it didn't work out at all. Hurt feelings, trust and motivation squashed. But I've got crap people skills, so it's easy to believe the problem is me, not that it couldn't be done better.
If someone wasn't working out, I tended to sideline them and try to move them to some other group. It was certainly better for me, and honestly I think it was better for (most of) those people too. I was happy to see several of them find a better fit away from me.
Being retired now, it's easy to think back on all the mistakes I made. I much prefer working on solo projects for fun.
I've had to separate a couple of people from the company. In both cases they very quickly found another job, and on following up with them they were much happier doing something that looks quite different from what they were trying to do before.
The world is big, and the chances that you happen to be in the optimal role at the optimal company are vanishingly small. In my book, a category of management failure is letting someone doggedly clutch on to something that's hard on both themselves and those around them.
I too have worked for two small technology companies. The first one was great. Smart boss, heavy but realistic workload. Got bought out by a much larger competitor. Sales people making unrealistic commitments to clients, then project managers driving the tech team to breaking point with unattainable deadlines and budgets. It became toxic. Got bought out by an even bigger competitor, a multinational company. I refused to sign on to the third company. They had a reputation. If the second company hadn't been bought out I would have probably quit anyway.
This, exactly. I left a great company because I was at the top of the (small) technology department and didn't see any chance for further technical career development, either in management or in technology. It didn't make sense for the company to radically change their technical direction nor to hire a larger team.
At least that was my assessment. Nine months after I left they spun off a small start-up that, if I had known was coming, would have made me more likely to stay.
At my first job out of university I was hired into a company with a developmental program that lasted for the first 3-5 years. New engineers would do rotations for about a year to find a team with a good fit–but new engineers could also be fired pretty trivially within the first year.
During one of my rotations I worked on a project with a recent PhD graduate from a fairly renowned university–we'll call him Dave. Dave was terrible at...everything, really. He could not seem to do _anything_ right on the project, and struggled for months to make any progress at all. Eventually I wound up taking over his part of the project, and our manager basically told him "you're being let go at the end of the probationary period unless you find another team that will take you".
Dave shopped his resume around internally for the few months left in his probationary period and eventually transferred to a different group in another town a few hours away. I went to work full time for the team where I did my rotation, and a bit less than a year later my boss tells me he had gotten an unsolicited call from the director of the team where Dave transferred. Evidently, Dave was a rockstar there–like a duck in water. The director was calling to ask where Dave was recruited, and if we had anyone else like him or could help them with their recruitment pipelines to source more candidates like Dave.
All this to say: to this day I think there are a lot of reasons someone might succeed or fail in any given job. It has been my experience that finding the right team fit is hugely important, and often completely ignored.
Sometimes people leave because their ambition is larger than the environment allows. I have a story of when I did just that.
Early in my career I joined a company and I knew from day one that it was going to be an awful experience. I knew the product was going to fail, and my team seemed unconcerned about this inevitability. I hadn’t realized this in the interview. I left after six months, and I spent all of them preparing myself and searching for the best possible next move. When I looked back two years later the company no longer offered the product I was working for, and every single member of my team also left. The experience was an expensive lesson in what things I should look for in a job interview.
A friend of mine was hired as a back-end dev. When he started they told him they'd rather need some urgent front-end tasks to be done, which was clearly not his strength and he never lied about it, so he gave his best shot. Then on the last day of his probation month they told him he was not good enough and let him go. I'm thinking this might have been a similar case...
I couldn't imagine not fitting into a company - it would be miserable past a certain point and when you get to that point everyone knows your work and effort start to diminish and most of the time it's definitely noticeable.
It's not always large companies where this happens.
I had a similar situation in my late 20's at a very small company. Having fewer than a dozen employees, they (obviously) knew I was there, but I literally had no work to do for months. I was the only engineer and there was no engineering going on, so my days were spent basically learning new skills. Eventually I got bored enough to look for a new job, but the company went out of business before I jumped ship.
Had that happen to a co-worker once. He moved (on his own dime) from Chicago down to Dallas, then got let go just three months later. He wasn't even bad, he just wasn't performing at the level I guess they wanted him to. I never imagined back when I was in school that programming, of all professions, would be as cut-throat as it is.
A lot of organizations have this problem, not covered in the article:
> Anxiety, low abilities
I was once a software engineering manager at a company in the financial services realm. This was a low margin business that had suffered a decade of layoffs when I joined. It was a morass of low effort, punch the clock, do just enough to get by teams and leaders. Making any sort of forward progress was nearly impossible. I gave it my best shot though, and managed to find like minded people throughout the organization. We had a good couple of years and made some real progress. Then the next round of layoffs saw some of these key people let go.
It was very disappointing, but I too left after a time. After the layoffs, 75% of my remaining team quit for better pay. My boss, a director, gave me some support people who could spell "java" and told me to train them up, because we weren't hiring (no one would work for the company anyway, horrible reputation). Yep, that was it for me, I resigned.
All that to say, at some point it's a business problem. I hope others in similar situations don't stress as much as I did.
I had to lay off an employee who was incompetent but nice. She was constantly anxious and paralyzed by blockers. I did everything I could to reduce her stress levels, give her mentors, ensure her work was reasonable and achievable. She could not make forwards progress unless she had a pair programmer basically doing the work for her.
She was in the wrong job at the wrong time. She didn't have the skillset to have a successful start. Her work patterns were unhealthy and ineffective. She couldn't learn how to unblock herself within the org, and became paralyzed by stress.
We had multiple people to compare her against who did not suffer from any of these challenges. I am sure she can find a job that will work for her, as she was nice and did have successful moments, but a fresh start was clearly needed.
Example - about 2005 I was a junior dev thinking I was about to make the cut to senior within the year, in a medium sized IT company. Let it slip accidentally to my boss that I used to install servers in racks in a previous role. Ended up being shoved into a "lateral move" into the systems engineering team because they couldn't hire quickly enough. Fast forward another six months and I get laid off after a migration to the cloud makes my team redundant. Expensive lesson, but lesson learned.
I had worked at smaller shops, then took what I thought was going to be a next big step at a company who's mascot is a reptile. Friction EVERYWHERE. The TLDR was that I left after 5 months and that company was the most unhappy I've been in my career.
When I started, I had a single monitor machine that didn't have Visual Studio installed. I was told I'd have to wait till the next budget cycle for a second monitor. I didn't get Visual Studio installed for 3 WEEKS and no one seemed to care. I'm not sure why they thought it was fine for a six figure developer to basically be sitting idle for 3 weeks, but that attitude was basically the norm.
When I actually got coding, everything was road blocks. Policies and procedures everywhere. No one had time to explain anything. Everything had to be submitted through a ticketing system. It was just bad. Daily standups where I just made up BS because they'd barely given me anything to work on, and no one seemed to care.
The thing was that when I looked forward at my team lead, my manager, etc., who in theory would've been my next steps at the company I'd have to jump through ridiculous hoops just to get into those positions, and they all fundamentally had very little power. They were still at the bottom tier middle managers, and the BS policies, procedures, and technology decisions all got handed down from managers above them.
I couldn't deal with the environment, but from my coworkers who were there, I got the sense from them that they just accepted things. Progress was slow, jump through the hoops you're told to jump through, but by in large, it was steady well paying work that they could just check out at the end of the day. No harm in that, but it just felt like my career would just stagnate there, and I'd find it very hard to get out once I got comfortable with it. I planned on sticking around till 6 months, then looking. I wound up starting to reply back to recruiters earlier and was out in 5. Best decision I made was leaving.
That's easy and I agree with you. In 20 years I've only worked in a large corporation with a lot of bureaucracy for two and I said I would never do it again. I only work for small companies for the same reasons you cited.
But the same thing applies. I worked for a company where any day the doors could be closed if the VCs gave up on us. Management was very open about the situation but there wasn't really a mass exodus, and I slept well at night not worrying about it, thinking that worse case I would be out of a job for at most a month.
We all got laid off during an acquisition, no one was overly concerned, we all went to lunch had fun and looking at my coworkers LinkedIn profiles, we all had better jobs in month.
Security for software engineers should never come from our jobs. It should come from keeping our skill set up to date and keeping our network of former coworkers and recruiters.
I had a similar personal experience. I was hired by the technical team at a very big company(after 6 interviews; 3 face-to-face and 3 remote), but the HR was not sure. All my experience before that was working for smaller companies. The argument the HR made was that I will not survive in the big company as most of my experience was with smaller companies. The HR was right. In a year I just could not stand the inefficiency and waste of talent at the company. I moved to another division within the same company. The same story repeated. I left the company after 2 years. Interestingly I was not the only one. This was a major problem at the company. But the company is so big that it does not even care if people leave as there are a lot of engineers knocking at the door every single day to get in!
I was once the tech lead of a 4-person team of programmers. One person quit to go be a middle school math teacher, a second to move to another city, a third to move back to his home state, and then I quit to move into a different area of work (and ended up moving out of state a few months later).
When I gave my notice our manager was baffled, and genuinely wanted to know if it was something he'd done that had driven us all away. There wasn't.
I don't have any idea what happened in this case. Perhaps all those people moved to other groups at Google or got recruited to startups. Or perhaps that group's manager was a jerk and everyone left to get away from them.
Depends on the culture. After working in startups, I joined a bigger company. I burned through the work they gave me & convinced myself that I’d get fired for not having stuff to work on. I started proposing stuff to work on, but the problem was I couldn’t get access to any of the systems. I couldn’t push containers to the container registry. I couldn’t access GitLab admin settings. I couldn’t commit to repos with our Chef recipes. Everything I wanted to improve was in someone else’s sphere of influence, and I had to justify extracurricular commits on my team’s projects because every change had to be review by our understaffed QA team. I finally realized that the expectations of me were really low and that I needed to accept being underutilized or I’d go crazy.
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