Predictions year 2 (and a month)

 A year ago (and a month) I wrote about some predictions about the company after a major shake up. Some things have changed.

The President became the CEO after a period of time and was very forth coming in terms of what happened with the previous CEO and COO. Did actually get 6M for the company. During this time though several very important engineers left the company (fr, w, j, n part time), but haven't replaced them. Towards the middle of the year a new CEO was brought in to lead the team. Someone highly regarded by current CEO but basically just a serial CEO. First hires were more director levels. CTO hired a good QA dev, but next hires were again director types.

Now, more thanks to the previous CEO's hard work, installing a pilot version of the product at a big company. Initial pilot has been rocky due to several issues. Was quite a strange production leading up to the release, lots of know errors and issues being glossed over with one engineer even saying "Are they aware of the very large number of issues?" Current CEO angrily got after the CTO about the significant issues the customer was facing after spending a large sum of money. Tone of the meeting at first was more positive and encouraged to work to get the system fixed. After CEO's outburst, tone was much more defeated. To CTO's credit, he down played the 'grim' take on the situation and rallied the software team to start addressing some of the more significant issues. This type of deployment is also something the rest of the team has already endured with other customers, with the last deployment being almost issue free.

Big shift in attitude when new software director came on as well, CTO has practically kowtow'ed to this unknown, shifting the way the team is doing things (which is to be expected, it is a new software director). But the biggest issue that he's yet another clinger-on instead of one of the many engineers we need to replace the missing engineers and to increase the company in general. Granted that j has been replaced, but the other software engineers have not.

Predictions going forward. Short term, more annoyances around Jira tickets, demanding that we enter more info. Further harassment about taking time off (unfortunately when HR rightly stated that next Monday is a holiday, CTO jumped in to remind every to 'keep the pedal to the metal' and that we have a lot of work to do, possibly trying to impress the new Director for some reason?).

Some other things that I'm kicking myself about. When I started this company I had agreed to 155 a year. They said they wanted to do it differently with 150 and 5 bonus. That 5k bonus never materialized and in the second year my pay stayed at 150 and with out a raise for two years. I negotiated a 'cola' raise of 2% but should have been doing that each year. I did again request a raise last month and 5% for the whole team has now been approved and will be effective the end of this month, but that only brings me to the original 155.