The competitor is a job posting
By Natalia Fernández Matienzo ·
The competitor is a job posting.
A req for two senior engineers, drafted, costed, sitting in somebody's approval queue.
I have costed pages like it, for my own team. Every figure on one is checkable — salary, employer contributions, pension, a start date. It is a good page. It goes up the queue and somebody signs it, and what they sign is a number.
What the page decides is something else: where the understanding of the system is going to live. Today it lives in the code, which is the version that runs, and nobody has read it end to end. After the hire it lives in two people, who will have their own reasons, in their own time, for handing in their notice.
None of this is an argument against hiring. Those two will be good. They will build the thing.
And on the morning one of them resigns, the understanding leaves at the same speed, and the other becomes a single point of failure with a mortgage.
The dependency moved somewhere with a face.
Nobody signed for that. It got decided anyway.