Team compression
Yesterday our team was informed, that it is planned to reduce the member count down to three persons who run everything related to our product development.
Three persons! For the development of a product where more than fifteen persons were busy some time ago. Two years or so.
The good thing is, that this development is planned to be less project-driven than it were until now, perhaps we can even arrive at a milestone-driven workflow.
Three persons doing the whole stuff, C++, PHP, PL/SQL, database administration, machine preparation, technical documentation, user documentation, testing, configuration management, quality management.
I don't think that this is a good idea, but I understand the reasons behind this. Another quite important project is sucking up developers like a black hole and our product is just below the importance and severity of that one.
Everyone knows, that we can get into trouble, if something time critical relating our product, ie. a new customer/project, comes to us, but everyone also knows that we just to have step through this situation.
It can also become critical, if one of us three leaves company or becomes ill, but that's also risk of business.
For me this means, that I'll get a few trainings regarding PL/SQL and Oracle database administration because our last database developer is not one of the three members and I have to take over his job.
I don't appreciate this, because in the past anybody who was known to be able to develop PL/SQL was pulled into one of the big projects sooner or later, and I fear that I won't be left out as soon as I'm not fully loaded with our product anymore.