After hours layoff at sharefile apparently. Their VP got let go last minute. Barely had a chance to get a slack message announcing it before they nuked him.
Looks like a lot more heads will roll at sharefile than originally thought. Anyone know anything about the replacement VP?
DH would've been great at Director or Sr Director, where your main job is to coddle eng teams. Like another comment said, VPs should be like startup CEOs, managing the business instead of just managing engineering teams. Instead, DH saw Product as the enemy - a view that his managers caught on to, and propagated to the teams. End result - under his stint, the business suffered to the extent that made DH's lofty "high performing teams" ideas seem pointless. I don't buy it that he was the victim here, stifled by senior leadership.
DLS, with all this failed decisions and his aggressive management style, at least knows the importance of having a healthy business. Hopefully, he'll build a strong team of directs to lead the engineering nitty-gritty.
It's not surprising, DH was a good guy but he did not know when to push back his engineering teams and when to support them. I understand that it can be an issue with someone like TK. He was the kind of guy who wasn't sure when to say no and didn't want to upset anybody. Sometimes daddy needs to slam his fist on the table to make some progress lol... I think his biggest mistake was to keep his direct reports... that was all about Fantasyland ...
If he wanted to build "high-performing teams" as he liked to repeat it, he should have started by surrounding himself with real engineering managers, not people who think that chaos self-organize itself if everybody is free to do what he wants...
Eventually, some teams, with the right people, converged to the best (and surprisingly these people left...) while some others found a good opportunity to slack off and are still hiding under the radar... but who said that layoffs were fair?
The funny part is that DLS has a totally different mentality and I would love to know what the current engineering managers who were before so brave pushing back on PMs and DLS are feeling now... popcorn time...
DH did precious little to stem the brain drain and retain top talent.
To be fair, everything was stacked against him - it's been an incredible steady stream of friction and insane decisions from above over the last couple of years. Anyone with any sense ran away for much better situations, and were grateful they escaped.
DH’s big mistake was never personally getting invested in the business. Other eng VPs in the past were like GMs for their businesses - managing engineering but also driving product roadmap with their PM counterparts, looking at revenues and top line, and talking to future customers. He was too deep getting CI/CD, etc fixed instead of building a strong mgmt team who can oversee all that.
DLS replacing a real engineering leader? Really?
Wow. DLS is really like a cockroach. He can survive any nuke incoming (or even personally caused). He failed two acquisitions, literally cost the company millions of dollars, and is still there. I bet his nose is brown. I just hope he'll stay with CSG, so I won't meet him anywhere else.
DH was the voice of reason in SF engineering. If we needed something, he was sure to get us there. Horrible loss for everyone.
DH did precious little to stem the brain drain and retain top talent. I can understand though why the few who've clung on to that sinking ship hero-worship him. There are many who "needed something", didn't get it, and left over the last 2-3 years. Maybe the brain drain wasn't something he had control over - in which case he should be happy to part ways. As a VP, your top priority is to build and retain top talent. No evidence to show DH did that very well.
ah yes, lets mu---r morale at the same time as saying SF success is directly tied to engineering success. this will go entirely well.
DH was the voice of reason in SF engineering. If we needed something, he was sure to get us there. Horrible loss for everyone.
DLS as his replacement is.. fine. Like many leadership changes these days, my trust has been easily misplaced, and my exposure to DLS has been mostly through the eyes of embedded PMs... It's not... great. Not terrible. I'm sure it'll work out eventually. More recently, my opinions of his opinions of engineering direction borders between "troubling" and "negligent".
KH really hitting us with the "believe or leave", I can't imagine verbally beating down engineering, removing the strongest load-bearing pillar of morale under the weight of crushing corporate nonsense will ever make sense. The ongoing brain drain and resignation wave from key "strategic" engineers won't help either.
I'm out. Bye. Good luck SF. I'm not looking back.