RS Components Redundancies
3rd Jan - 2025In November 2024, RS Group’s senior leadership announced a wave of redundancies across engineering. While our newly appointed, well-connected CIO chose to deliver more favourable updates in a separate meeting for those unaffected, my teammates and I faced the reality that not just our roles, but our friendships and teams, were now at risk. The announcement brought a wave of stress and upset during what should have been a season of celebration.
RS Group, formerly RS Components and once known for it’s catalogue, is one of the oldest e-commerce giants. They joined the game exceeding early and cemented themselves, rightfully so, as one of the giants. Elements of the catalogue still flow through our codebases today. Combining the drop-shipping for it’s own “RS Pro” brand, and moving to a buy-not-build model, it’s losing its key differentiator and marring its brand.
During my tenure there, I built some of my best relationships with some of the most rigorous engineers that I’ve ever worked with. I learned more there than I had at any other job., and even took a step back in my career to join.
I helped break away from the monolith, designing and building software that was more available than AWS’ S3. Software built to scale, and scale it did. I was the best SRE I could have been, and I’m sad that it’s gone.
The “leadership” there have broken any form of trust that they thought they had, dodging any questions and making the process as bumpy as possible. Their idea of help was a few web links, and a 3 hour vanity presentation about their “new role”.
Local leadership, however, were full of love, and I’ll always remember this. Gillian, Russell, I’ll forever be thankful.
My heart goes out to everybody, those that have left, and those that are safe. The best people I’ve worked with shouldn’t have learned about the changes in that way, and it certainly shouldn’t have happened at Christmas.