In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.
As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.
I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.
In the article, the author says that he was fired alongside most of his team. Then makes a lot of statements about how great of a job he was doing. To me it looks like the firing was thus based on option 3, yet the author did not make a single comment about the profitability of the product he was working on, or the team performance of the group he was working on.
As an example, he made "features that helped power users", without articulating how much additional revenue these feature contributed for. How many of those power users were there ? Were they at risk of churning, or were they locked with the product anyway ? If they were, those hours were fully wasted as no additional revenue could be associated to those features. It's all fine if your product is bringing in a lot of money - with the current headcount - and the vision of your company is that you need to need to prevent competition from catching up. But otherwise it's not exactly the feature an exec will look at and be that happy to spend money on.
I read once: "Here is to discern a junior form a senior: If you are a junior, and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach it's audience; well you still did a good job. If you are a senior and deliver quality code for a feature that ultimately did not reach its audience; well you failed". In our industry, seniority is about looking beyond just writing code, especially with AI coding agent coming up and taking away that part of the job.