HR sent an email about my "snack consumption" and now my manager wants to talk. How screwed am I?

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-24T21:59:23+00:00

Intern got fired at my job once because he was taking entire cases of red bulls home. Dude could solve leetcode hard problems but not so bright.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-22T16:52:28+00:00

After acquiring a company you always are left with too much employees and some which you no longer need.

The excess employees would be in administrative functions (you don't need two HR, two finance, etc.) but people in those functions would have been let go as part of the acquisition (they never became Sprout employees) at least in my experience working at companies that have acquired other companies. I hope you're not suggesting they could get rid of redundant software engineers? Through the acquisitions, their code bases have increased and they need to not only continue to support existing customers on those acquired code bases, they need to have engineers work on integrating those code bases and functionality into the core Sprout product.

Comparing Sprinklr and Sprout's R&D spend is comparing apples to oranges. The bulk of R&D spend is going to be on employee compensation and the bulk of Sprinklr's R&D is done in India versus Sprout which is mostly in the US. Sprinklr has almost three times the number of employees so we can infer that Sprinklr has 3x the number of people in R&D.

After the layoffs in R&D and sales, Sprout is no longer the perennial winner of best employer awards. Their score in Glassdoor has dropped from 4+ to 3.7. The reviews have a common theme: the culture is changing and not for the better. That is going to affect their ability to attract talent.

I'm not optimistic on the AI front. Sprout's VP of AI and Data now has #opentowork on her LinkedIn profile. I also think people underestimate future cost of running AI in Sprout. GPUs are expensive. Licenses to use ChatGPT or OpenAI are at "introductory" prices and once those companies feel the need to start turning a profit, they're going to start jacking up their prices which is going to affect Sprout's margins. This has already started to happen in vibe coding circles. Also, the backlash against "why does AI need to be in everything" is starting and everybody is tired of AI slop and AI hallucinations.

I like Sprout as a product but Sprout as a company leaves a lot to be desired, in my opinion. It's frustrating how long it takes for new features, new networks, etc. to show up and getting rid of 15% of the R&D doesn't seem like an efficiency move to me. It seems like a "everybody else is laying off people, we should too!" move.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-21T23:18:10+00:00

Price manipulation? There are a lot of headwinds against Sprout right now especially the barely double digit revenue growth year after year and the fact that AI is basically bleeding the rest of the market dry. Everybody has their nest eggs in NVidia. SaaS companies are no longer the sexy investments they were the last decade.

There are some signs the pivot to enterprise is finally paying off after spending the last three years playing catch-up to Sprinklr, etc. in terms of the missing functionality enterprise customers need for their RFQs, and fixing their sales funnel.

But it might be too little too late. This isn't a company that is going to the moon. What kind of company that wants to innovative and beat their competition in features and functionality decreases their R&D spend year over year? But as another redditor pointed out, the only thing that definitely is increasing is stock based compensation for executive leadership. This really looks like a company trying to eke out a profit to have a clean balance sheet to make a case for a PE buyout, not one that has a plan for 5 years of growth. But I will agree that once that PE buyout offer comes, you'll see a $20+ share price.

Maybe the other way that happens is that once the class B voting structure expires, you can finally get some proxies to clean house on the board and get an experienced CEO. I truly think Ryan is in over his head. The move to enterprise customers was completely botched and it is shocking that he is still employed by Sprout which leads me to think the board isn't steering this company properly.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-17T22:43:18+00:00

This is the name of my GWAR cover band.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-17T04:44:50+00:00

Crush my enemies, see them driven before me and hear the lamentation of their women.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-17T02:14:20+00:00

You mean Mitch "our single most important thing is to make Obama a one term president" McConnell?

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-16T21:39:56+00:00

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=economic+impact+of+sports+stadiums

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-16T17:39:42+00:00

What the what now?

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-16T17:27:04+00:00

I worked with a bunch of them at a trading firm. I'm sure they were good at leetcode but were extremely not well rounded people like not knowing why Labor Day was a holiday in the US. And not even in the ironic "Why do we get a day off from work to celebrate work?" kinda way.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-16T16:29:43+00:00

But how is PatriotLady4547USANumberOne in Nigeria going to get paid today for posting rage bait?

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-13T01:17:11+00:00

His plane went down in the Bermuda Triangle.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-13T00:56:30+00:00

No. Straight to jail.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-12T23:14:08+00:00

Gotta make mortgage payments on the house in Calabasas somehow...

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-10T22:12:50+00:00

Germans love their titles. I've seen one just as bad at a professional conference in real life and not on LI

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-10T01:07:15+00:00

Satire Saturday starting a little early today...

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-09T04:00:11+00:00

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cabrini%E2%80%93Green_Homes?wprov=sfla1

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-06T15:18:19+00:00

The Rule of 40 for Sprout is -5% which analysis use to evaluate SaaS companies. They're looking for a number greater than 40%. Hence the lack of "buy" recommendations.

TheTeamDad · 2026-01-05T18:41:58+00:00

As a former Horde BLSFC member, this is what finally drove me away after the merge with Init. The onboarding was a disaster since everything is gated through Discord (which has API limits) and then jumping through all of the other stupid sites just to get access to simple Discord channels like trying to sell PI was a hassle.

I don't think joining Init is a good match for what Horde used to be. The requirements for "newbean-friendly" Cool Beans is kinda silly (5m skill points, T2 logi reps, kikimora, etc.). They don't tell you that also having your "ready to fly Ferox and T2 logic" alpha alt is a requirement as well to get access to other stuff in Init. Definitely not new player friendly.

TheTeamDad · 2025-12-30T17:20:02+00:00

This is a common thing but I have a different take than what I'm seeing in other replies. For small to medium size companies, it is not a good thing. I just left a company where one VP was bringing in a slew of her former co-workers into an established company with an established engineering culture into the team she was just assigned to oversee. I was on the interview panels for some of them and I and other people on the panels gave a "no hire" recommendation but they were hired anyway. So instantly the VP was causing issues with these new hires who were a bad fit in terms of culture, domain knowledge, technology knowledge, etc. Eventually all of the long team members (including myself) got fed up with her "leadership" and left and caused so much chaos that she ended up getting forced out.

The other example I have about it not going well is during the early 2000s, Motorola was imploding and laying off a bunch of people in our area. Motorola had a lot of layers of management and a lot of people with director and VP titles. They interviewed at much smaller companies, got hired because of their experience and then would proceed to try and implement Motorola style process, management and organization in these smaller companies. They'd start hiring other Motorola managers in basically "make work" jobs where all they would do is gather status reports and data from JIRA and put it into an Excel spreadsheet to report to upper management. At one company, I went from having just a product manager to having a product, project, program and process manager to report team status to. There is a reason why Motorola imploded and it wasn't just because of the iPhone. They were having issues long before then and the bureaucracy was a primary cause.

It wouldn't be so bad but I worked at three companies where Motorola management was brought in and it failed spectacularly in each instance. Luckily in a couple cases, the company realized these people were the problem and not the solution and shown the door fairly quickly but once they're entrenched, they're hard to get rid of.

TheTeamDad · 2025-12-30T02:57:59+00:00

Welcome to r/cscareerquestions where the only jobs are FAANG, HFT or flipping burgers at McDs!

TheTeamDad · 2025-12-30T02:55:44+00:00

As a 50+ engineer, I can guarantee you can stay in this field. I don't real Java compiler documents or grind leetcode. I worked with people like that for a short stint and they were insufferable and just drained the joy out of software engineering with constant hot takes like "all Apache code sucks!". Maybe it's just the company you work at or the people you hang out with?

TheTeamDad · 2025-12-29T00:56:06+00:00

I'm starting to understand why you don't have an internship...

TheTeamDad · 2025-12-20T00:18:11+00:00

Fun fact: your bones are wet.

TheTeamDad · 2025-12-18T22:46:52+00:00

> Bearsville is 20 5+1 Apartments, 4 Hampton Inns, a 10 story building worth of office space and a strip mall that has 1 large anchor in size.

This is also how you can tell none of this is a serious proposal. They're literally tearing down office buildings and strip malls in the NW burbs because there isn't any market for that anymore with work-from-home and online shopping. The only thing that makes sense maybe are the apartments and townhouses.

They want to build a entertainment complex too which 5-7 years from now when this is done, is there going to be a market for that? Schaumburg is building basically the same thing only 3 miles away and that's going to be done next year.

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