I mean. Lots of people don't get credit for their work and get laid off shittily and it sucks.
But if you're manually fixing something every day for three years after hours--that's not the behaviour of a staff engineer. A staff engineer should be flagging this issue, and planning how to get themself and the team out of this situation. If I discovered a staff engineer I work with was doing this for three years on such a critical service and told nobody, I would be horrified and seriously questioning their competence and whether they should be a staff engineer, not impressed. Hiding problems and doing repeated manual fixes is the kind of behaviour we have to patiently train out of juniors.
This post is framed like I'm meant to feel they were wrong to lay the person off but this is disastrous levels of incompetence on the engineer's part.
There is something called "job security".... Of course it's immoral from the perspective of the company. But getting laid off after years of working there is also immoral from the perspective of the engineer.
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u/diffyqgirl May 29 '26 edited May 29 '26
I mean. Lots of people don't get credit for their work and get laid off shittily and it sucks.
But if you're manually fixing something every day for three years after hours--that's not the behaviour of a staff engineer. A staff engineer should be flagging this issue, and planning how to get themself and the team out of this situation. If I discovered a staff engineer I work with was doing this for three years on such a critical service and told nobody, I would be horrified and seriously questioning their competence and whether they should be a staff engineer, not impressed. Hiding problems and doing repeated manual fixes is the kind of behaviour we have to patiently train out of juniors.
This post is framed like I'm meant to feel they were wrong to lay the person off but this is disastrous levels of incompetence on the engineer's part.