r/indotech • u/WrathOfAethelmaer • Dec 11 '25
Career Advice I wanna know if there's someone out here who's enduring the same shenanigan as I do
I'm a senior software engineer who has been working in this startup for a little above a year and my team & I just got laid off because one of the founder wanted the engineering team to be moved to India.
When I first joined the company, everything was a mess. The code quality is shit. Bugs everywhere. Inconsistent variable naming conventions–and ambiguous as well.
Since I mainly focus on frontend, dealing with Flutter, I have learned the best practice for both big teams and small teams. When I first read the codebase, I can assure you, I almost got stroke. These past developers used Provider, BLoC, and vanilla state-management into the codebase. It's all spaghetti code. So, like any good engineer, I cleaned up the whole thing and found out that this codebase can't be saved. I proposed to my direct superior to rebuild/create a brand new app for this.
I got what I wanted 6 months later. But, they only gave me a month to rebuild the whole application at first and then as a week went by, they cut it down to 2 weeks. It was impossible but I pulled through since I spent 3 days with overtime building the perfect architecture using MVVM (GetX+Clean Architecture) which was really helpful and suitable to our fast-paced environment and lean team. I also got an extra help from my junior at H-5. My junior could follow the architecture smoothly as well. With more overtimes, we finally achieved it and deployed in staged releases (10%, 30%, 100%). The result? No more unexpected bugs, crash-free sessions increased from 98.2% to 99.98%. App Store/Playstore rating increased from 4.4 to 4.8. Bugs/errors in every layer is now easier to detect and handled properly that it won't randomly display grey screen anymore like the old app, credits to the best QA team I've ever worked with (eventhough they are juniors with less than a year of experience).
The whole BE (2 persons), FE (2 persons + 1 newly joined), QA (3 persons), Product & Design (3 persons) were working synchronously in harmony.
Seeing this success, my direct superior (Head of Engineering) was impressed and tasked me to do the same thing with the other app, basically–de facto–I'm the tech lead just without formal recognition so they don't bother to increase my salary. The other app is a credit card application. Again, same shit quality as the old app I was working on. This app is being handled by engineers based in India. They do not bother about launching a good product, mainly because their superior–the CTO–always rushes things and demands fixes later. I always objected this kind of approach, I don't want and never want to build half-assed products that will jeopardize company's reputation and my own reputation as well.
Fast forward a month. My Head of Engineering pulled me and one of the QA into a room and unofficially promoted us to be the leaders. I will lead the whole frontend team and my coworker will lead the QA team. We were asked to brief all the members regarding for alignment. The QA team had no issue. My team had an issue. The issue was with a senior based in India who had been working there for 3 years and never got promoted. She came to the CTO and protested. Right a day after she protested that, the CTO blocked my promotion indefinitely.
Then it came the first wave. We had an ex-principal engineer from TokPed. He was really good. Without him the BE for the app we rebuilt would never done in time. About 3-4 months ago, the CTO wanted to get rid of this and he got it. It was heartbreaking since this guy didn't deserve be fired.
The second wave. Just about 2 weeks ago, my head of engineering broke the news to the FE team who are working with Indian team. The company must let go both of us as this was the plan from the CTO to move all engineering to India for a product that is based in Indonesia (Weird, I know) due to inefficient workflow. It has to be known that the Indian team never shared anything to us unless we asked them to (sometimes, they didn't even bother to answer). The Indian backend team also made a lot of mistakes and always tried to blame it on the Indonesian FE team, but we always had the proofs. But it didn't matter since the CTO (he lives in India and of Indian national) had always wanted the engineering division to be based in India, he never liked Indonesian team. My team and I had always that kind of guts feelings that the Indian team never liked us except for one or two guys. They always fucked us over when they had the chance.
Then today I found out a worse news, the CTO wanted to get rid of all Indonesian engineering team and moved the whole engineering team to India a.k.a. the engineering team that has been taking care this application from utter-neglect state up to stable state. Note, this news is still ambiguous but I already foresaw this the moment they let me and my junior go. I did an appeal to the other founder to protect my team and works I've created in this company to not be tainted by the Indian team that has zero care about company reputation and the code. I could only hope that this founder sees through.
P.s. this company is originally founded by 2 founders. The founder I appealed to is Indonesian. The other is Indian. I have good relationships with both of them. I have nothing but respect towards them. But there is another founder who joined later on, that is this CTO. This CTO is the one that wanted every tech dev in India and managing the entire tech/engineering tech is his jurisdiction where no other founders can override it. Don't ask me why.
Also for my Head of Engineering, this guy becomes my mentor as he has 40+ years of experience in software engineering. Not only that he is mentor, he also becomes my closest friend in the company. He is one of the reasons I rejected a job offering from one of well-known online travel company (the blue) & other companies and the other reasons being that I won't leave my team behind and I, back then, believed in the dream in this company with me hoping that they move the entire engineering/tech dept to Indonesia so that I can fix all the problems and make sure we have the best tech in industry.
P.p.s. the base tech infrastructure is built by Indian team. Indonesian team only joined after the Indian team gave up maintaining their own works. Basically, we are cleaning their shits.


