geeky4qwerty

I work in senior IT leadership for a rapidly growing company (100MM -> 2B through M&A) and I'm curious about the experiences of different companies when it comes to the decision-making process behind developing internal tools versus relying on 3rd party apps/SaaS providers. There seems to be a pivotal moment for many businesses where the scales tip in favor of custom development, but I imagine this varies widely based on industry, company size, growth phase, and specific business needs.

When we had 500 users, a simple SaaS solution for $5 a user made sense, now that we're at almost 6000 it seems ludicrous for us to be spending $15k a month (after the 50% 'enterprise' discount) for software that that could be internally developed and maintained for a fraction of that cost over the products lifecycle.

With the recent Elon interview where he stats that he's cut "about 80% of Twitter's staff" (1) I was curious about waste and unnecessary labor overhead in the tech industry.

Anecdotally I work for a fairly large (~4k employee) company that has a laughable amount of "cargo cult" positions (I'd even say departments). I often find myself replaying the scene from Office Space "What would you say...you do here?"

So HN, how much of your company do you think is actually needed to function? (1) https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/12/tech/elon-musk-bbc-interview-twitter-intl-hnk/index.html

EDIT - My TL;DR is merely a cynical joke based on my experiences and conversations around the oft used scapegoat of all problems faced today. Please don't take it at face value.

TL;DR - Boomers ruin everything.

Hello HN!

While I earnestly desire my question be nothing more than hyperbolic ramblings of a crusty old IT guy, the antidotal conversations I've had with many of my professional contacts (most working in IT, but not all) seems to be reinforcing this drearily pessimistic observation:

Over the last several years a substantial amount of highly specialized, process critical employees have either retired early or quit abruptly across many sectors in the economy. These positions carried immense tribal knowledge that ignorant/incompetent/inexperienced management failed to adequately prepare any succession plan for, leaving entire system processes void of the knowledge and skills to necessary to perform.

These events appear to be leading society towards a sort of "critical mass of burnout" where remaining employees are being forced to saddle the responsibilities of the previous coworker but lack the experience/knowledge necessary to either perform the job efficiently, or at all. The vast majority of these people are have added duties, and the stressors that accompany them, saddled on them without the commensurate increase in compensation.

Thoughts?

Hello HN!

I've just started working at a large (~5000 employee) company in a senior IT management role and in the last two weeks there have been several mission critical issues that key, senior people I've emailed, then IM'd on teams thst have been completely unresponsive.

These are all fully remote positions and "forwarding the email to their boss" in our org structure would be the CIO, and having only started two weeks ago I'm not really ready to be -that guy-....yet.

How does your company handle slow or no reply communication issues?

HI HN!

TL:DR - When did poor communication etiquette become normalized in American corporate culture?

I re-entered the job market several months ago after not needing to touch my resume since 2008 (see last submission) and my experience has been nothing short of brutally sobering. My age (40s) and experience (20+ years in IT) was definitely helpful in keeping me resilient through the process, and I'm extremely fortunate to have landed a senior IT leadership role that I love.

BUT I have come away from this entire ordeal a touch jaded and syndical towards much corporate America and how people are treated within the job search process (almost all other job seekers I spoke to had very similar experiences) . These are several key takeaways from my job hunt that I wanted to get some feedback/input from the HN community on potentially why this is happening and why it seems to be so prevalent across so many companies today:

1. Of the 13 staff-level (not recruiters) virtual interviews I had where no job offer was given, 9 of them that moved onto second interviews, 4 to third, I only received follow-up "dear john" communication from 2 of them. Ironically these were both from first-round interview companies. Is it normal practice to ghost applicants at the staff-level interview process? In brutal self reflection I even recorded several of the interviews and shared them with friends in senior leadership positions to ask for coaching advice and the feedback was overwhelmingly positive.

2. Communications, especially logistical planning for interviews, was at times borderline comical. This is not hyperbole when I say that more often than not I would need to write follow-up emails after an email communication would go unresponded to for over a week, sometimes longer, sometimes not at all.

3. I have, as of today, well over 30 ATL optimized applications still sitting in "applications purgatory" with many large fortune 500 companies. Most of these applications are from 3-4 months ago. The fact that these companies have no automated purge/rejection process seems bizarre to me.

Help me out HN. How does your company handle communication etiquette? Am I out of touch to be expecting email replies to relevant, time sensitive information within days, not weeks? Why is ghosting tolerated, or is it normal now and I'm just expecting too much from this new generation?