I walk into the kickoff meeting today. The first part of this project had 5 developers and a project manager. Former project manager handled communication and sheltered us from bullshit. We built an amazing piece of software in a very short time. Customers were so amazed that they decided to reboot the project, boost the funding by several million, and let us go again. They specifically requested the same team.

Now the team looks like this: the neediest tester guy, a UX lady that doesn't have any UX background, an agile "visionary", a project manager that doesn't understand how development works, a solutions architect, 3 COTS platform specialists, a devops specialist, and an account lead. They have booked all kinds of workshops and other shit to kick things off.

So development capacity is only 60% of what it was. Management ratio was 1:5 before. Now the management ratio is 9:3. The new project manager thinks developers should be on more customer calls and responding to all customer emails during sprints. We already built this system and devops pipelines end to end. The COTS people, solutions architect, or the UX person can't program. They want us to magically convert this custom application into one based on COTS. What we need to do is make the rest of the business processes that we omitted, integrate known feedback, rework the backend, build better automated testing, improve logging and reporting, add another actor to the system, add a different authentication method, and basically work through the massive backlog.

How do they think this is going to work? Do they think we can download a custom engineered enterprise grade software system from Microsoft and double click all the way to customer satisfaction? The licenses alone are too much for the customer on an ongoing cost basis. I guess we can discuss it during the agile team-building weekend at some remote lake that the team "visionary" has set up. For the sake of fuck.

Like development isn't hard enough. Hire two more developers and lose all of the dead weight. Get a project manager that won't let the trivial shit roll down on us. What the fuck.

Am I the only one that feels like the development and software engineering will loose the high paying benefit soon? Remote work normalised hiring developers from farther away. I've been approached by quite a few recruiters that want to hire from much farther away then usual. It seems like only a question of time untill most of the things will be outsourced to third world countries where developers get paid basically nothing. Sure they were usually a worse choice in the past, but it always gets better with time. I'm sure that there are a lot of vry smart wngineers there. Why pay your developer 50-90k/year when you can pay 10k/yr for two developers in India?

We're also automating ourselves out of jobs with all these no code platforms. Thoughts?

Have a question for more seasoned developers/techies in the industry. I started my first software development job 7 months ago and I am contract to hire. There’s only two developers (including myself) on my team and we’ve been working on two separate projects that’s apart of a bigger system. He was a contractor but because our company took too long to get back to him about converting he interviewed and accepted an offer at Amazon (don’t blame him). Now I have to take over his project as well as mine which would be overwhelming to say the least... our team is almost entirely remote so it can be difficult to communicate sometimes and our company is heavy in process so development moves slow. Should I start looking for other opportunities or should I stick it out and gain experience even though the workload is unrealistic?