Engineers have gone into survival mode. 3 months of rolling layoffs have left everyone rattled/spooked. People don't raise questions or concerns anymore because they're afraid of drawing attention to themselves that leads to them being let go too.
Job stability seems attached to some vague notion of impact. However that impact had better involve AI in some way. The safest way to show impact is to get yourself attached to the CEO's pet project FAST, an LLM powered analytics query engine.
Quality/Stability/Maintainability have taken a back seat to flashy new features. The few remaining QA/SDET employees have been let go.
Trust in employees have eroded. The new holiday deployment plan includes approval gates from VP level employees before deploying to production. That type of judgement used to be left to the teams maintaining those systems. There are rumors of senior leadership evaluating employee's AI token use to ensure they're following AI mandates.
A growing list of respected employees keep turning in resignations. It feels like an exodus is starting, leaving the rest of us high-and-dry.
It's heartbreaking. We used to be one of those "best places to work" companies. It's amazing how fast a great culture can turn sour.
