Comment by rytis
1 year ago
> As far as I could tell, it’s because the CEO or CTO didn’t think the type of work they were doing was worth doing, and also didn’t think they were making a difference.
So the CEO/CTO weren't able to express their concerns and priorities and instead just fired the whole team?
If, as you say, there were no financial reasons, then the team could've been re-purposed to do more meaningful (at least in CEO/CTO eyes) work.
You are coming from a rational position with the focus on optimization. Large organizations are not rational, and rarely optimal.
Executive backlogs are so deep that purposefully re-fitting whole team to another job will never end up on the top list. You might see sometimes organization will rehire a whole new team with exact same skillset, and set them to do similar tasks. It happens because execs know how to setup things from scratch quickly, but running a re-fit is a custom project that requires problem solving and large amount of exec drive, and exec resources are extremely scarce and expensive.
From the outside this will seem totally irrational and suboptimal, not to mention unfair. But that's how large orgs operate.
IME working as a team in large companies is dangerously entrepreneurial. What I mean is that there is loose guidance on what needs solving and then it's up to you to figure out how to solve using what you have. If you stray from the original problem too far, you'd better be good at explaining why. It's dangerous because there's a lot of autonomy with the illusion of security.
Keep the original problem in mind always. Keep your head up looking out for competitor teams who might be solving your problem. Know them, align with them.
If you show up on an exec budget spreadsheet and the exec can't defend your value, then you're toast (or transferred).