> I’ve made the difficult decision to reduce our team by approximately 3,200 ... This will include approximately 1,600 role eliminations today
> we are establishing a Chief Operating Officer with end-to-end P&L responsibility across content, hardware, platform, and services. Helen Chiang has been promoted to this role and will report directly to me
Seems tone deaf to do both of these messages at the same time.
The worst tech team you've ever seen and yet they are generating 20 million a year? I think you should give them the respect they deserve and understand the limitations they have been under.
My thoughts:
* Get the code in source control straight away
* Get the infrastructure stable and up to date if it's not
* Get CI pipelines set up. As part of this, make sure the code is running through a static analyser. This will give you a backlog of things to work on.
* Organize an external penetration test to be carried out
* Investigate updating and/or consolidating the software libraries used (Jquery etc)
* Choose a page/feature to update on its own. Bring it up to date.
At this point, you should be in a much better state and you will have learned a lot.