In times of turbulence, the first reaction of many companies is to “cut” the bones, and most often the most expensive specialists fall under the knife. However, Mykhailo Zborovskiy cosmobet beneficiary in the past, and now an expert in the strategic development of iGaming products, considers such a strategy as “financial self-deception”. In the gambling industry, firing a key engineer is not just minus one salary in the statement. It is the loss of a person who knows where the crutches are hidden in the system and why a certain function works exactly the way it does. When such people leave, they leave behind a shadow, which over time turns into an insurmountable technical debt.
People are the main capital for overcoming a crisis
Imagine that your program code is a restaurant kitchen. If you constantly cook, but do not have time to clean up, sooner or later you will not be able to cook even scrambled eggs. Mykhailo Zborovsky explains: when architects and senior developers leave the team in a crisis, the rest of the team begins to follow the path of quick solutions in order to somehow support the product. These temporary patches are the technical debt. Over time, there are so many of them that any system update risks crashing the entire product.
Ethics in management here acts not as charity, but as a pragmatic calculation. Mykhailo Zborovsky emphasizes using the example of cosmobet: preserving a team of engineers in a crisis is the best investment in stability. When people feel supported, they are ready to work on complex challenges, without leaving problems behind. This allows the company to not rake up piles of errors after the crisis, but to immediately scale up in the market.
Negative consequences of staff reductions
When key cogs disappear from the IT structure, the mechanism begins to « creak » at every stage. Mykhailo Zborovsky, having past experience at cosmobet, highlights the biggest problems that a product experiences after mass layoffs. These factors have a cumulative effect: at first you don’t notice them, and then they become the reason for the entire business to stop. Here’s what management should pay attention to:
- Junior developers without senior supervision write confusing code that is almost impossible to maintain or update.
- Security and automation systems become obsolete without regular maintenance by specialists, which opens the way for hacker attacks.
- What used to be done in a week now takes a month, because no one knows how to make changes without breaking everything else.
- The loss of people who created the architecture makes the company dependent on third-party consultants.
- Moral exhaustion of the remnants of the team, which leads to new mistakes and mass burnout.
In the modern iGaming business, competition is extremely tight, sometimes the smallest details decide the fate of leadership. Therefore, retaining engineering staff is a matter of business security for any technology brand.