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The original was posted on /r/maliciouscompliance by /u/Think_Trouble9616 on 2025-02-27 16:54:39+00:00.
I don't know if this is MC enough, but I liked this sub too much and I've never done anything remotely close before so.. here it is.
I joined a startup's AI team, which consisted of just three people including myself, with the other two being more senior. We spent about a year developing a product that was gaining traction with new clients.
Then everything changed when our CEO decided that regular team-based sprints (basically once a day check-ins) weren't "effective enough." Instead, EVERY team member had to become a "head" of a project, organizing, managing, and running separate daily scrums. Typically, each of us was assigned to 4-6 different scrums, completely destroying any sensible resource planning.
This was the breaking point for the two senior members in my team, who promptly decided to quit. I tried to stick it out, but the CEO started giving me sh** all of a sudden. I believe he was holding a grudge because I once didn't answer my phone at 6:29 PM when work ended at 6:30 PM. I called him at 7, but apparently that wasn't enough.
After that, instead of talking to me directly, he would just speak to one of the seniors (who hadn't yet announced his resignation), and that senior was supposed to relay that to me. But… he was ready to quit and wasn't really that helpful. And with the work management going nuts, everything was just going to sh**.
I mean.. engineering becomes shitty if you don't know the intentions, but he just kept giving me tasks without an explanation. So I had a one-on-one with the CEO, and asked him to tell me what he wants directly.
This suggestion set him off. He implied that "this isn't working out," clearly suggesting my time at the company was coming to an end. Knowing what I knew about our codebase being built in Langchain and runnables (notorious for their poor readability), and that, well, all of the members are quitting… Well, I liked this sub too much to let this go. About a week after receiving this message, the two seniors quit.
That was about a year ago. I now saw them putting out a news article, first PR they've done so far since I left. Yap, the entire project that we developed for about a year, gone and replaced with something completely new and generic. Can't say I'm not happy seeing that product crumble.
TLDR: CEO implemented a chaotic work structure that made two senior devs quit. When I suggested direct communication instead of going through a middleman, CEO implied I should leave. I complied, knowing our codebase would be impossible for newcomers to understand. A year later, they've completely scrapped our promising product and replaced it with something generic and inferior.