Re:Brilliant Jerks in Engineering
by auggierose on Monday November 13, 2017 @03:24PM
(#15689880)
I can't see this meeting ending well. Better in parallel look for a job opportunity with less than three layers of management above you.
If you think a Sr VP is going to take a meeting from a Sr Dev just to fire them because they tell them things they don't know or don't want to hear, I'd say you are being paranoid. Nothing I do in that meeting will be a fire-able offense. The reality is most Sr Managers crave hear honest feedback, as long as it's given in a respectful way. They may not agree, but they aren't going to take offense.
But if I'm wrong, and this Sr VP is one of the thin skinned exceptions (doubtful since they are taking the meeting from a Sr. Dev in the first place), then I can get a better job somewhere where it's less dysfunctional.
This is what I want to tell them:
Our core customer facing application is shit. The contractors who wrote it cut tons of corners and the marketing people who designed did a horrible job, the UI emphasizes features customers don't care about, and makes it extremely difficult for customers to actually reach and use the revenue generating sections of the app. Not only is the marketing leadership is disfunctional, and worse, you (the Sr VP) have created a disfunctional development organization, that makes me wonder if you understand how to develop commercial applications.
This is what I will say:
The weaknesses in our core application are costing the company millions of dollars a month. We are struggling with making quick, effective decisions and shipping new versions to address the major problems because we have "too many cooks in the kitchen" in our team meetings and planning. I will give specific examples and relate them to specific examples from my long history shipping quality commercial apps on time. I will finish by saying the team is demotivated and underperforming, which makes you, the Sr VP, look bad, and plead that we need to solve this, for them and the company both.