Uncertainty
Five months to update this website, and the first update I'm putting out is a bit of a freakout.
Long story short: my manager at work is leaving the company. He and his brother started the whole thing together over a decade ago, and he hired me as an intern back in 2018. In the past year the company then got acquired twice, and he just let us know last Monday that he and his brother will be leaving.
It's kind of bittersweet, on one hand I'll miss him, on the other, he needs to get a life. He's devoted most of his life to this company, and hasn't taken an actual vacation in years, so I'm glad he's finally gotten to a place where he can leave this all behind.
That being said, all of this has lead to a giant upheaval in my work life, almost bigger than what COVID did. He's gone by the end of the month, so we don't have much time to do the handover from him to the three of us that are left. There's just so much that he was responsible for, I just know something is going to get left behind and in three months we're gonna get fucked by something we don't know about until then. I also don't know what this departure will mean when it comes to the rest of the company. I know the devs have all been given incentives to stay on for at least another two years ($$$), but I doubt that exists for everyone else. And since my enjoyment of this job is very tied to the people I work with, I'm wondering if anyone else is thinking of jumping ship. There's also just the huge amount of responsibility that just got heaped on me in the blink of the eye.
Anyways, this is all just very stressful. My parents suggested looking for a new job, but those incentives are... incentivy. And with this new responsibility also comes with control over a product that I really do care about. Five years working on a single thing will do that to you. I know there's more places we can take this thing, I know all the places that we can improve on. The kind-of benefit of working for a larger company is that we don't have to focus on quick, cheap, custom development to get deals anymore. Of course, we're also publicly traded now, so there's the whole "profit growth" thing that we have to care about now (yay late-state capitalism) so who knows how much control I actually have.
Anyways: everything is uncertain. I am not having fun.
- cords