Where to begin.
Starting at the beginning of 2019 Inntopia had significant layoffs followed by a steady stream of high-profile individuals leaving the company. Our salaries were frozen, and during that time period our CTO left as well as ~60% of the technical leads in the company. Then, near the end of 2019 they laid off the new CTO and as well as the entire project management team. I suspect there would have been further layoffs had so many people not chosen to leave voluntarily over the course of 2019.
The core product is rooted in architecture that was developed in the early 2000s. While it works for its original purpose, it is extremely brittle, so even minor changes have the tendency to break and require significant refactoring. As a result of the antiquated architecture, engineers working for the company don’t learn marketable technical skills. A number of our most talented developers left for that reason. The real work that would have modernized the system was consistently deprioritized to work on various, seemingly random, customer priorities which only added to the overall unwieldiness of the system.
The engineering managers at Inntopia all had critical flaw(s) that prevented them from being effective. One did technical work so long ago they thought screen-scraping was fine. Another had good ideas but literally took months to execute on things as simple as putting up chalkboard paint. Another had no understanding whatsoever regarding the technical aspects of the work that the people they supervised were performing. All treated Agile development methodology as a cargo cult and seemed willing to ignore that roughly half the teams made no progress in any given two-week interval.
