Your intuition is right. I work at a big corp right now and the average age in the operations department is probably just under 50. That's not to say age is bad, however... these people have never worked anywhere else.
They are completely stuck in the 90s. Almost nothing is automated. Everyone clicks buttons on their grossly outdated tools.
Meetings upon meetings upon meetings because we are so top heavy that if they weren't constantly in meetings, I honestly don't know what leadership would do all day.
You have to go through a change committee to do basic maintenance. Director levels gatekeep core tools and tech. Lower levels are blamed when projects faceplant because of decades of technical debt. No one will admit it because it (rightly) shows all of leadership is completely out of touch and is just trying their damnedest to coast to retirement.
The younger people that come into the org all leave within 1-2 years because no one will believe them when they (rightly) sound the whistle saying "what the fuck are we doing here?" "Oh, you're just young and don't know what working in a large org is like."
Meanwhile, infra continues to rot. There are systems in place that are complete mysteries. Servers whose functions are unknown. You want to try to figure it out? Ok, we can discuss 3 months from now and we'll railroad you in our planning meetings.
When it finally falls over, it's going to be breathtaking. All because the fixtures of the org won't admit that they haven't kept up on tech at all and have no desire to actually do their fucking job and lead change.
> Meetings upon meetings upon meetings because we are so top heavy that if they weren't constantly in meetings, I honestly don't know what leadership would do all day.
Hah, at a previous employer (and we were only ~300 people), we went through three or four rounds of layoffs in the space of a year (and two were fairly sizeable), ending up with ~200. But the "leadership team" of about 12-15 always somehow found it necessary to have an offsite after each round to ... tell themselves that they'd made the right choice, and we were better positioned for success and whatever other BS. And there was never really any official posting about this on company Slack, etc. (I wonder why?) but some of the C-suite liked to post about them on their LI, and a lot of very nice locations, even international.
Just burning those VC bucks.
> You have to go through a change committee to do basic maintenance. Director levels gatekeep core tools and tech. Lower levels are blamed when projects faceplant because of decades of technical debt.
I had a "post-final round" "quick chat" with a CEO at another company. His first question (literally), as he multitasked coordinating some wine deliveries for Christmas, was "Your engineers come to you wanting to do a rewrite, mentioning tech debt. How do you respond?" Huh, that's an eye-opening question. Especially since I'm being hired as a PM...
They are completely stuck in the 90s. Almost nothing is automated. Everyone clicks buttons on their grossly outdated tools.
Meetings upon meetings upon meetings because we are so top heavy that if they weren't constantly in meetings, I honestly don't know what leadership would do all day.
You have to go through a change committee to do basic maintenance. Director levels gatekeep core tools and tech. Lower levels are blamed when projects faceplant because of decades of technical debt. No one will admit it because it (rightly) shows all of leadership is completely out of touch and is just trying their damnedest to coast to retirement.
The younger people that come into the org all leave within 1-2 years because no one will believe them when they (rightly) sound the whistle saying "what the fuck are we doing here?" "Oh, you're just young and don't know what working in a large org is like."
Meanwhile, infra continues to rot. There are systems in place that are complete mysteries. Servers whose functions are unknown. You want to try to figure it out? Ok, we can discuss 3 months from now and we'll railroad you in our planning meetings.
When it finally falls over, it's going to be breathtaking. All because the fixtures of the org won't admit that they haven't kept up on tech at all and have no desire to actually do their fucking job and lead change.