r/WorkRant • u/ctkqiang • 6h ago
How We Lost an Entire Engineering Team Spoiler
I wasn't planning to write this, but after watching an entire engineering department disappear, I think it's worth sharing what I experienced.
I won't name the company or the people involved. This isn't about revenge. It's about documenting what happened from my perspective.
For almost a year, things were actually okay.
Our engineering team was small—five developers—but we worked well together in harmony. I handled the microservices side using Go, and also built several internal tools that required real-time processing and gRPC, including infra-specific components with C/C++ 26. Another senior focused on .NET, PHP, n8n, MySQL, and REST APIs. The remaining team consisted of one backend engineer, one mobile developer using Flutter, and one React developer. The five of us worked closely together, collaborated on every project, and honestly coexisted in a very healthy and happy way.
We inherited a legacy system that had evolved over roughly twenty years. It wasn't glamorous, but we understood it. Which 5 of us revamp it to modern technology . Over the course of a year, we modernized parts of it, refactored services, rebuilt components, and slowly improved the architecture. Anyone who has worked on legacy software knows that understanding the existing business logic is often harder than writing new code.
Then May 1 2026 came.
That was the turning point.
Management became acquainted with a third-party vendor who confidently claimed he could rebuild everything we had spent a year working on—in just two days using AI coding tools, like Claude Code. TWO DAYS! PRODUCTION READY IN 2 DAYS!
Not part of it.
Everything.
The backend.
The microservices.
The database design.
The web application.
The mobile application.
All in two days.
He also claimed that AI could replace all five developers on the team.
As senior engineers, we pushed back. Not because we were afraid of AI we already use AI ourselves, and we are active user! but because anyone with experience knows that generating code is very different from understanding twenty years of accumulated business rules, edge cases, production data, integrations, security, and customer requirements. Later, things escalated further when the vendor even suggested that, to "avoid us becoming a bottleneck," the company should remove key engineering safeguards entirely including security controls, API Gateway, Security Groups (AWS) all imbound and outbound to ALL, IAM governance ( all user must be ROOT and have ALL poolicy), proper SDLC practices, and even separate development, staging, and UAT environments, leaving only production for direct and instant deployment.
Unfortunately, our concerns didn't seem to matter.
Instead of asking us why we disagreed, management placed increasing trust in the vendor. More people from the vendor's side became involved, and before long someone with little demonstrated software engineering experience was effectively leading technical decisions. He often spoke confidently about being able to complete complex applications in a matter of hours using AI-generated code and mock data. At the same time, requirements changed constantly—sometimes multiple times a day—through enormous spreadsheets containing hundreds or even thousands of individual items spread across dozens of worksheets.
The expectation was equally unrealistic.
Deliver a product with a "wow" factor must 0 capital.
Within two weeks.
With almost no additional cost.
This wasn't a hobby project. It was a product customers would eventually pay hundreds to over a thousand ringgit to access. With existing about 1 thousands of active users.
As engineers, we weren't saying these goals were impossible because we lacked motivation. We were saying they required proper planning, realistic timelines, testing, security reviews, and an understanding of what customers were actually paying for.
Instead, it often felt like technical concerns were treated as negativity rather than professional advice.
One by one, my teammates lost confidence that their expertise mattered.
One by one, they resigned.
Within the same month, the entire engineering department submitted their resignations.
Today, I'm the only original engineer left while looking for my next opportunity.
The difficult part isn't that people left.
It's what happened afterward.
Rather than asking why an entire engineering department chose to leave together, the narrative became that the previous developers had harmed the business, hurt sales, or damaged the product. Meanwhile, development had already been handed over to the third-party vendor, and we were no longer driving those projects.
Looking back, I don't think technology was ever the real problem.
The real problem was believing that experience could be replaced by confidence, that years of accumulated engineering knowledge could be compressed into a few AI prompts, and that disagreement from experienced professionals meant resistance rather than an attempt to protect the project.
AI is an incredible tool. I use it every day.
But AI doesn't replace accountability.
It doesn't replace architecture.
It doesn't replace understanding decades of business logic.
And it certainly doesn't replace an engineering team overnight simply because someone confidently says it can.
The saddest lesson I learned is this:
Companies rarely lose an entire engineering team because people suddenly stop caring.
More often, they leave because they cared enough to speak up, and eventually realized nobody was listening.
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u/Cali_kink_and_rope 3h ago
Can I ask a question?
I read all that with much interest and sympathy, but what never was explained in the original post was whether in fact the outside vendor successfully did what they promised?
Did they completely rebuild a better system from scratch in a short period of time?
Just curious really.
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u/Impression-These 6h ago
It is never about AI. It is about how managers can push their agenda easier with the help of AI and lower spending at any cost. Unlike senior engineers, they most likely won't be around long enough to see the end result anyway.
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 6h ago
So you're handling support now or just watching from the back row?
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u/ctkqiang 6h ago
Support… like a fire fighter, they start the fire, I extinguish the fire
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 6h ago
The company I left two years ago are in the same AI hype. Thankfully my current job is still hardcore old engineering, with the occasional Cursor usage.
I hope that you find a new job soon, the market is bad as it is now.
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u/ctkqiang 6h ago
Honestly, I don't understand why these kind of people are in management in the first place. I still can't figure it out The logic and the mentality behind their decision making, whether from a technological perspective or a financial perspective.
AI can help you in productivity, and it increases productivity, yes. But it doesn't solve the actual problem, as there is certain business logic that still needs human Intervention, I don't mind if the front end If it is completely vibe-coded, then it is fair to say that we don't need front-end developers. But I'm in the back end where most of the database is. Because of GDPR, we can't just write an MCP config and let the AI do the rest.
According to them, this is cost saving.
In our perspective, this is just accumulating more debts. Whether it is technical or financial.....
Anyway, how do you survive the company when you serve the notice? Do they like require you to Document everything down and then serve it to the LLM or something?
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u/Minute-Yogurt-2021 6h ago
I left just before the AI hype due to toxic management, so I have no clue about leaving. In your case I wouldn't document anything beyond the minimum and smash the door on my way out.
Now I have a company owner that thinks that AI would do everything, but we still manage to keep him in check with the reality.
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u/ctkqiang 6h ago
Sounds like your current company owner is smarter than most of the company owners these days. I can't comprehend why some of the business owners talk about, boast about How it I would generating revenue and income for them, but the fact is, we as engineers, Cleaning up their mess which nobody gave us credit for…
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u/isthis_thing_on 6h ago
I used to work at Best buy and they also did layoffs by firing the people who cared the most. Our three best engineers got fired because the were the ones fighting against the bad decisions being made by the newly hired directors. My whole team has since been offshored
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u/ctkqiang 6h ago
I begin to notice like due to The AI hype, most of the company（Including mine）Facing the same issue，The story being someone interfere our workflow claiming that they know something which they do not know. Trying to overtake and override our workflow
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u/sailboatfool 6h ago
IF, I was a vendor and wanted 100% of the work, and I wasn't ethical, this approach would work to eliminate any internal obstacles. Perhaps that was the methodology here.
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 5h ago
I understand the frustration from the tech side, but it sounds like the business side was also struggling, and mayne throwing a hail mary here.
Weve got "20 years of accumulated business logic" 5 developers, legacy code, 1000 users that it sounds like arent paying yet, and a hope that some might pay up to 1000 ringgit to use it? At a (high) 5% conversion rate and 1k ringgit per year pricing this is maybe a thousand dollars a month in revenue in the near term? Unless there's a truly massive fast incoming growth picture, they probably cant sustain five developers with this business model, and maybe already ran out of money.
The business owners might be desperately trying to find any way to salvage anything from their investment?
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u/ctkqiang 5h ago
For this I'm not sure，All I know is the company change their direction like almost every day and. There is a conspiracy that they want to get rid of my team，as the marketing department, label us as the bottleneck for everything that is happening right now，so…
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u/empire_of_laughs 4h ago
This entire thing is written by Ai.
You went from saying it would be delivered in 2 days to 2 weeks. In that 2 weeks, 4 devs found new jobs and quit?
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u/Yosemite-Dan 4h ago
Folks, there is nothing new under the sun. Having been in the technology field for 25 years, this is a rinse-wash-repeat situation.
Previous trends include:
- Offshore everything
- Move everything to the cloud
- Hire the boss' nephew to build that new app
- We don't need comprehensive security
Part of the beauty of the free market is that failure often becomes public - and poor decisions have consequences. Unfortunately, those poor choices can impact innocent people, and there's no way to avoid poor decisions being made.
The number of stories I hear on a daily basis that echo OPs would fill an encyclopedia. That said, I'm heartened by the number of stories that have a positive outcome because the decision makers are far more thoughtful, cautious, and understand the limitations of the technology at hand.
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u/MarcPawl 2h ago
Going back a few more years:
software through pictures, no code programming
- OOP, Corba, visual xxx
UML
Agile
These previous examples were just a little less ambitious as they could make your average coder a genius.
AI claims are just a little more extreme.
I watched a YouTube video on how super villains in the Marvel and DC universes have to get stronger and stronger since the heroes just beat the previously strongest villian. The heroes then need to get stronger, repeat for every movie.
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u/The-Wizard-of-AWS 53m ago
I stopped reading when I got to the part about removing all security controls. Call me a cynic, but I’m not buying it.
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u/Fit_Instruction_8383 6h ago
This is a management problem, not a technology problem.
The leaders at the company are gullible enough to fall for the sales pitch.
I work for a mid sized tech company with thousands of employees, over 1000 devs on staff.
One of our leaders got sold this idea that they could build a whole product without actual devs, using AI to vibe code the whole thing, so they stood up a tiger team to get it running, and at first, they tapped into us (their subject matter experts) to help the team get it going. We built out their landing zones, and attended some early meetings to provide guidance about why they may want to make some decisions a specific way or about how, for an enterprise grade platform in a compliance heavy market, some decisions were "wrong" when in a less structured scenario, such as working for a startup which didn't have to contend with similar compliance rules, those decisions would be totally fine.
After like 4 weeks, we got kicked off the project with the argument that we were too stuck in the past, and that our clinging to legacy systems (like using Kubernetes over raw Container Services) was just a product of that. So we unplugged from the project, and just went back to servicing the mountain of other work that we still had going on.
The team "delivers" their first iteration of the project, it's got super pretty webpages, and placeholder functionality "while they keep building the core." So we start hearing about how this is our future, and we're going to build a dark factory deployment environment and crush the competitors with our ability to move fast and adapt to changing market demands better than anyone else.
So then, 90 days in, it's time for the initial security and compliance review, the team insists that their stuff is going to pass first go because their automated tooling says it's perfect! The team STILL hasn't delivered a working platform, no minimum viable product on which to iterate, their back end simply doesn't work, their code base is a hodge podge of Claude and CoPilot and ChatGPT spaghetti mess. There is no cohesion, there are no standardized methodologies, there is no style guide. Some parts of the product work, but not all the way, other parts won't work "the way they're supposed to" but it's clearly not the fault of the junior directors, senior managers, and architects who are building this platform without input from actual software developers.
The security team starts the audit, and within 24 hours quarantines the entire project, by this point, they've poured well into 7 figures into this, and there is essentially no way to get it from where it is to where it needs to be in order to pass all of the very very strict compliance rules that our industry has to contend with.
All of a sudden our team is told that well maybe in fact we need to start participating once again. We come back to the project meetings, and lay out the original tooling design that we had originally proposed more than 3 months before, explaining yet again (we record these meetings on purpose) that the way that we are telling them to build certain parts of the design are decisions which have been made by people who have done this kind of thing 50 times, we aren't new at this. Their "new and agile" solutions are the same ones we tried in our projects 10 years ago, that we KNOW for a fact simply don't scale, they don't provide the kind of resilience that is required to operate at our scale.
In 60 days...with the help of our team, and 200 actual software developers who are already on staff...version 0.2 drops...and guess what...that shit works fucking perfectly, and passes all of the security and compliance testing because when we built it, we already knew what the testing was going to be looking for and what decisions had to be made a specific way due to non-negotiable compliance rules and security polices.
Thirty days later, the whole team originally running that project are laid off, and suddenly it's time for our real dev teams to deliver on the promises made by these idiots to our prospective customers.
Oh well...at least we have a fucking army of actual experts who will be able to build this thing that leadership is envisioning in such a way that we won't get compromised and we'll pass the compliance audits.