What It Was Like To Work For A Sinking Company
From big nasty surprises and ignoring financials to picking up the slack of laid-off engineers, here's my experience of working for a sinking company.
I think that writing is the most effective way to remember, catalog, and introspect about yourself. That's primarily why I think it's time to talk about my time working for a company that knew it would die in less than a year, and how I essentially polished plates on the Titanic. This is both meant as a tell-all to the successful moves and mistakes I made over my tenure and a path toward healing the wounds it made.
It was October 2022, and I had led teams to make monumental moves in the company including new core systems and tooling for all of engineering. I had nearly finished filling the headcount for both of my teams. Then, it began.