Upper management views their employees as disposable cogs in the Bluebeam Machine. It does not occur to them that people have an inherent value beyond their on-paper list of skills. It does not occur to them that we care about each other, and that each person who leaves is a blow to those who remain. They have no interest in re-training people because they don’t see a problem with jettisoning them and finding someone new.
Upper management is adept at finding reasons not to listen to feedback. If someone points out something they don’t want to hear, they find extenuating circumstances. Pulse survey results look bad? “Well, we’ve been going through a lot of change (but we’d better not do Pulse surveys anymore).” Glassdoor reviews look bad? “Well, we expected that (given that we’re constantly laying people off).” Honest feedback about plans? “Sounds like ‘drama’ to me! Suffering is optional, buy-in is not!”
They will find ways to discount these reviews. They will find ways to gaslight you. The CTO will say that engineers just couldn’t be trained on web technologies. You know this isn’t true: not only does that not make sense on the face of it, but I have personally seen amazing React demos that the supposedly un-trainable engineers have put together over the past few months. Not only could they be trained; they already trained themselves. And as usual, they were amazing. They were ready, willing and able to work. It. Did. Not. Matter.
Upper management says there is a plan for the future, but when pressed cannot provide any details. It seems that the “plan” is to hire better, smarter types of developers who will somehow magically make a product appear in a couple of weeks that is better in every way, with no downsides. Throwing away your existing, successful product on the vague idea of a future product is not a plan, and if it were somehow that easy to create a brand new, highly successful product from scratch with new hires, then everybody would be doing it.
