demotivation

After a Holiday season filled with indecision over staying at my employer, I got motivated again last week. I decided that there was interesting work to be done, and that I really like everyone I'm working with.

Then, the bombshell Wednesday. Lay offs. Because while we're profitable, we're not growing fast enough for our parent company. Why not outsource all our content production? All our competitors are doing it, so it must work! Quick, outsource everything in a month and a half!

Out of my group of 10 (including my manager), I'm one of 4 software developers left. The content production team was hit much worse, only 2 left out of over 20.

Now we're looking at an avalanche of legacy code maintenance work for at least the next few months as we train outsourced software developers to maintain our convoluted production system that has grown into a horrible mess over the last 10-15 years. There are a ton of services and applications that interact in odd and poorly documented ways. As if that wasn't bad enough, anything over 5 years old frequently isn't in source control.

We have an experienced set of users who know how to push the data through the tangle of applications. We'll lose that in a little over a month.

Fun times ahead.