As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I …

As employee #36 I lived through some of these things first hand and definitely agree with them (I think we were over 200 people when I left). It was painful going through the enterprise focus transition along with a nonsensical reorg imposed by the aforementioned Big Tech VP. One day we had focused platform-specific teams working on satisfying customers, the next we were moved to cross-functional feature teams and focused on enterprise features that (from our perspective) no one ever asked for. I also felt the sting from mediocre engineering managers. I remember sitting down with Tracy and Ralph at Uptown Bar and giving them both barrels on what I thought of several managers. To their credit those managers weren't working there very long after that conversation. IIRC Ralph asked if I wanted to move to being a manager and I declined but in hindsight I think that was a mistake - we needed good management in engineering more than we needed my code. Another thing that hurt us was hiring a bunch of PMs. Most of them were condescending, ignorant, or both... …