I really hope more developers start to speak up against injustices at their companies.
We have a similar issue at our company. We’re around 140 employees and an IT department with 7 devs and 4 admins. As it so happens, our head of IT is retiring, and his designated replacement is generally disliked by all the devs.
We officially complained to HR and the CEO that the new guy spent 20 years working alone, has no IT qualifications, and has repeatedly ignored our processes and pressured devs to get them to do what he wants. The response? The decision has been made, accept it or resign. Now that two devs sent in their resignations on the same day, HR is scrambling to fix the situation but making everything worse. All the while, the current and new head of IT are dismantling our agile processes, outsourcing, and installing rigid communication structures.
Our department went from being the one with the most employee turnaround a few years ago to being the department with the highest employee satisfaction. Everyone is frustrated beyond words and are looking for new jobs. The way things are going, the company won’t have IT by the end of the year.
EDIT
Oh, and I forgot to mention that the new head of IT has repeatedly lied in meetings, strategically withheld information and pressured employees to sign faked timesheets. He disregards recommendations from internal IT, and badmouths his own coworkers in front of customers. All in all, a simply admirable character.
I have to excuse myself - I read into the issue yesterday and realized that I can’t really compare our situation with the one at Basecamp. Sorry for letting off some steam.
I’ll be fascinated to see if they make it!
My prediction: they hire back enough people to keep going but they never make anything meaningful again and the founders retire.
Yeah, that just seems like a death sentence to me. Especially since they still haven’t figured out the root problem: Trying to silence conflicts.
They’ll bring in new people, which means new turmoil and new conflicts that need to be resolved. They won’t resolve those conflicts, instead trying to silence them. And then those conflicts will explode another time.
Exactly. Or they’ll fill seats with people who think exactly like them to avoid any conflicts and mediocrity will ensue.
Can you imagine the chaos that would ensue if developers/sysadmins went on a general strike?
In that case I would make bets which online services would stop working first.
Probably banking/finance. I worked for a large regional bank in the US for my first developer job and one of the security guys told me that many banks run on extremely outdated technology and that if they would ever announce that they were switching over to something new that their stock prices would plummet so they just keep using the same stuff. Imagine people not being able to buy gas because their credit card transaction can’t go through.
tldr please?
Racist employees + minority employees + shitty management trying to silence conflicts rather than addressing them = very non-silenced conflicts exploding all at once.
