I work in a startup founded about a year and a half ago by someone that I knew personally (friend of a friend). I like and respect this individual, and started working for the company which was, at the time, under his management.
Everything has been going well, and, based on my reviews, I'm doing well at the company. I feel a sense of loyalty to the founder, who has invested in my education and trusted me. I want to stay at the company.
We recently merged with another company, a small team have joined our team, and though my manager remains a shareholder, has moved away from management, leaving the other company's manager in charge.
We recently met and reviewed the products of the other team, where it seems that two employees have seemingly been given license to build their own products with complete technical autonomy. Without going into specifics, these projects have been running for multiple years.
My concerns are thus:
- There seems to be a complete lack of supervision and accountability on these projects
- There is no process of review
- No unit tests that I have seen
- No CI/CD
- Seemingly no project management, certainly not on a daily basis, or from a technical side
- No version control (no knowledge of git at all)
- Products have not been developed in an incremental way, and seem in a half-baked state
I also have concerns about the personalities of the two heads of the departments. The egos during our first meeting were staggering, and they either responded emotionally (in a completely unstructured, blabbering way) or aggressively to questions about the projects.
All of this has seemingly been accepted by our new manager, who - to some extent - defended this in a debrief, afterwards.
My question is, as a developer, should I talk to my old manager (who remains a shareholder) and express my concerns?
Specifically:
- Is this professional?
- Could there be repercussions for me?
- Should I accept that he already knows much of this?
- If I should tell him, should I be active in my approach?