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Ask HN: What to expect with new CEO, CTO being fired, and tech rewrite project?

1 points by HowToFinishP ↗ HN
Long story short, I work at an ecommerce company that is undergoing massive leadership changes due to profits going down. The old CEO of 15+ years is on the way out, and they're replacing him with a long-time veteran of the company who has been here decades.

A couple years ago the old CEO hired a new CTO who embarked on a rewrite of the legacy platform. They hired new people (SVP, VP), etc. and basically tried to put rails on the old engineers who have been there for decades. Here's the thing, the new platform sucks, it's a terrible abstraction, and the new engineers don't take any sort of ownership / responsibility for anything. If something goes down with the old platform that's basically unmaintained, a whole RCA process and yelling in Slack about how this could have been avoided and which teams need to own this. When the new platform goes down and orders are not going through, they communicate very vaguely and say things like "we're working on it, we will let you know if any help is needed", and they hardly communicate when issues are resolved. They also don't do any sort of RCA / ownership that they want everyone else to do. The overall vibe is doing everything possible to keep it as quiet as possible. They post a bunch of GIFs as responses instead of proper respectful communication for an enterprise.

I'd like to hear more stories from other people about their experiences dealing with this sort of friction across engineering teams (old vs new), if there's any books to read, and in general what to expect as the new veteran takes over as CEO. The new CEO has basically stated they're getting rid of the CTO that was hired a few years ago and I'm wondering what happens to the new platform / new engineers. Everyone is acting like it's business as usual and nothing changes, new platform is still on, etc. but I can't imagine that to be the case, especially because of how much money and missed opportunities for marketing / selling we're losing working on this new platform that is genuinely awful.

5 comments

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codingdave
Sounds familiar, honestly. In my experience, you are looking at years of stagnation where the original platform keeps on running, nobody builds a decent successor, the customers start to slide away, and the whole thing just... shrinks. Eventually they sell it off to someone else or shut it down, but few people stick around long enough to see such ends. Instead, they'll churn new leaders and team members in and out every couple years. At each churn, some new group of poor souls will be excited for their attempt to revitalize it all.

There will be a few people who stick around through it all, happy to just collect a paycheck from a job that doesn't truly require much work or success. But if you have any ambition at all, get off the sinking ship.

necovek
Hopefully the first thing a new CEO and a new CTO (when hired) tackle is lack of communication between the two engineering teams and really make it into one team.

If that happens, there is maybe light at the end of the tunnel: by getting the two groups to talk in responsible, non-blaming way can put you on the path to a solution long term.

If that doesn't happen, or it's non-obvious to incoming leaders, then it's likely a slow death as depicted in the sibling comment.

HowToFinishP
There's not much the new engineering team can contribute. The old engineering team has years of insight and expertise actually generating profit with old but reliable technology. The vast majority of the new engineers / leadership come from the same outside company and their whole expertise is Kubernetes + AWS.

Yes, great tools, but they have shown they're not good problem solvers. Case in point, they decoupled the CMS and made it headless and the new headless frontend is an archaic management nightmare. They have to manually import pages every time there's a change via excel sheet, and it takes up to an hour to reflect new changes published from the CMS. Nobody who's been here for a while is happy because the new system absolutely sucks, and they're trying to pretend this is fine.

necovek
I don't think that attitude would help anyone: you are looking for positives, not for negatives. Calling them "not good problem solvers" won't help either — most engineers I know are mostly hampered by trying to appease stakeholders with conflicting requirements (or at least requirements in tension with each other). As I said, you need an honest, no-blame discussion to really bridge the gaps between the teams.

If I may suggest an easy read, look up Radical Candor by Kim Scott.

If "nobody who's been here a while" is ready to open their mind and embrace the new team members either, you are getting nowhere quick: hopefully this is not a battle, and you only come out a winner together.