Comment by nfw2

I recently left a software dev job in academia, and the amount of inefficiency in the organization is insane.

As part of my off-boarding, the lead engineer mentioned she would ideally like to hire 5 more developers to the team. That would bring the team size up to 15 (8 devs, 2 devops, 2 Ux, 1 graphic designer, 1 pm, 1 eng manager). The team maintains two things:

- The static website for the library

- A pretty basic image server and viewer for the library and museum collections

Sure, the library needs a website, but that shouldn't require more than a person or two to maintain. The image viewer was only used by a handful of people.

But it doesn't matter. The team gets funded because the students will keep paying their tuition. The engineers can keep sitting around watching youtube all day and the world keeps turning.

Perhaps most egregious example was in my first 1:1 -- my manager said, "Don't expect much output from [SENIOR ENGINEER X]. He isn't a good engineer." The organization isn't willing to fire anyone. As a result, the people in charge are the ones who have been around the longest.

That said, it's risky to fire anybody because hiring is so difficult. The salary bands are set at the university level for all employees, which means the maximum a software engineer can make is much lower than market rate. To make matters worse, working "in person" is mandated by the library dean, and the university is in a college town in the middle of nowhere. The interview process also includes NO coding sessions although I'm not sure whether that's due to some corporate process or just incompetence.

To be fair, these sorts of issues aren't exclusive to academia, and I've seen similar issues in large organizations. Somewhat paradoxically, the more bullet-proof the business-model is, the more potential there is for rot to grow in a company.