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PIP, PIP, Hooray! You’re Getting Well & Truly Shafted Today!
The ultimate death knell notification in software engineering tenure.
You might think things look pretty bad when an excited looking project manager rushes to the front of yet another company all hands meeting, opens up their overpowered and ludicrously expensive laptop, spends 10 minutes trying to get their display on the projector, then another 10 trying to get it the right way up, and then, finally, reveals “Good news everyone! We’re adopting Agile!”.
I’m sure someone’s pleased about that. Well, aside from anyone that has to develop software that is — as, for us, it’s a sign to update our LinkedIn profiles¹, contact some recruiters, and start looking for another job.
You also might think it’s bad if your project manager, middle-manager, or even CTO (who really should know better, but rarely does) begins to talk about how the company should start “leveraging AI”, maybe “employ some prompt engineers”, and start looking at “no code” solutions to enable managers to directly generate actual applications.
No-one in their right mind is pleased about this aside from the charlatans selling UI shells over OpenAI API keys, of course.
It’s not just developers who are firing up their browsers this time though (not Chrome or Edge, though, obviously), it’s also the various the <insert fictitious area of responsibility here> managers who really don’t want to get all involved in that work thing they’ve heard about. I mean, you know, that would involve making decisions and maybe being accountable for something — you know how it is.
Suffice it to say that a company’s bad decisions tend to either directly, or indirectly, put a lot of people on the job market — scattering as rats are wont to do when they see the ship slowly taking on water down in the engine room, well before anyone on the bridge knows what’s going on — even if they could understand.
However, there is also another common situation when the unsuspecting developer can find themselves unexpectedly on the job market.
This is, if you’re familiar with the title of this article, when they’re deliberately marked with the “Black Spot” of software engineering — the infamous “Performance Improvement Plan”…
