ThrowMeAway314

I'm an executive at a european SaaS Company that got recently bought out by a larger one from the anglo-sphere. The management of the parent company is fighting tooth and nail to retain people and hire additional ones as they have strong growth targets, and are adding more HR Staff because of this.

Due to the acquisition I'm in the position to talk to random people all over the organization from a semi-outside perspective and it has given me some insight I was lacking of this company, I assume many anglo-american companies share:

1. This company cannot divert the course of their goal to lower engineering cost, it's engrained in their financial models that push them towards IPO. -> Lowering engineering cost meant opening up offices in europe, eastern europe and asia and paying slightly above the local rate. -> This strategy is starting to fall apart as the labor quality from these places AT THE PRICEPOINT is dropping, as the experienced engineers have started working for full U.S. or full central european salaries and aren't going back. It will take a lot of time until the "our HR just isn't effective at hiring & retaining"-narrative changes into the "our strategy doesn't apply to the global labor market anymore"-narrative because the waters are extremely muddy.

2. If you pay for actual data, you can basically only get simple spreadsheets of salary/profession & level, the sources of which seem very unreliable and the conclusions you draw from them unhelpful. The employees themselves also don't make good decisions as on their behalf and so false signalling is going on a lot.

3. It takes management clout to push through U.S. Salaries for people in lower-income environments and is depending on the company culture frowned upon so kept a secret if it occurs. This has the potential to create cabals and "more equal than others" pockets in the org-chart.

4. The very people tasked with retaining their teams are also affected by the shifting landscape themselves and depending on their stance become very emotional around this topic as the pressure on them increases. Some develop a stockholm-syndrome-esque attitude when they personally don't want to leave or feel they don't deserve more, that creates tension because they quickly arrive at unhealthy points of the discussion and say things like "if you are only in it for the money, this is not the place" which is something you don't ever want your manager to phrase like that, although because of 1-3, this is going to be true for quite some time.

5. The employee-part of the discussion about payscale and cost-of-living adjustments is just getting started as inflation is increasing, open Q&A meetings have started to revolve around this topic. As much as the communication is centered on positivity for this company, this seems to cloud every other topic as a segment of the employees have stopped thinking further ahead than 6 months as they seem to wait how this will play out.

All in all, I'm very unsure if I will be able to stay at this company because of this situation, ironically this would hurt me financially, but the environment does not feel like a healthy one where I'd not only enjoy my time but will do anything but crisis management.

I tried SSRIs and SNRIs, both worked slightly differently and were a great help at the start, but NaSSAs actually helped with my sleeping issues, which became even stronger on SSRIs. I paid for better and deeper sleep with a slight hangover in the morning, but that was much better than what I had experienced from my depression so I was able to handle it. I took the SSRIs about 3 months and then switched to NaSSAs for the next two years until i was able to fade the medication out without much issues.

I've had a severe double down depression for most of my life. It started at around 10~11, after my father died and it peaked at 26 where I could not get out of bed without extreme amounts of stress or sleep deprivation. This ruined relationships, friendships and left me with practically all of my teenage years and most of my twenties lost to self-hatred and self-denial.

Medication was the life preserver for me when I finally got myself to accept that I would never be able to deal with this alone. Medication gave my brain some well deserved rest, let me take stock from a more balanced point of view.

CBT was my ladder to climb out of hell. Without CBT I would be still where I was those years ago, just less affected by it. Sitting in a room that was on fire, but just not caring about it that much, that's still a shitty place to be in.

The important thing about CBT was for me that it gave me tools to work with. A chisel for my mind so to speak. It is not at all about talking oneself into happiness, for me it was about NOT talking oneself into sadness. About giving me the logical framework to force myself to see good things where they were, instead of focusing on the bad things. It gave me ways to correctly differentiate between tackling bad situations and just glooming about non-issues.

I'm pretty sure without CBT my life would be nowhere where it is right now, so i'm very glad for its existance and would recommend anyone in a similar situation to try it with a GOOD therapist (mine was a guardian angel, battling the worst parts of my reasoning when I wasn't strong enough to do so).

Or we could just replace out politicians with urandom

Having worked on VW Software Projects i can assure you they drank all of the scrum koolaid.

I recently became CTO of a company with two moderately successful SaaS products. The second one is a fork of the first, but has been maintained by more competent people than the original product. Both are still monuments to technical debt.

About 4 million lines of PHP code, written by underpaid, sometimes not well meaning, freelancers and students over the span of 8 years. The CEO wrote a large part, but stopped learning new techniques around 2004.

I'm bringing competent and well paid people in through my network and try my very best to give them as much freedom as possible, I allow and encourage greenfield modules/services that run on separate and new infrastructure for anything that is possible to be rewritten in the timeframes, but the larger part of the job is still mind numbing to my team and that makes me question my wisdom.

If anyone has tips on how to steer such a ship in a direction where the work is less frustrating for my devs I'm very open for advice.