Ask HN: From your experience where is my current work situation headed?
1 comments
The bad news is, the situation is probably not heading anywhere good. Firstly, there is a "mafia" at this company. I don't mean it in a negative way, there is always a "mafia." The problem is, you're not in it. The second problem is, they are proceeding in ignorance. The probability they will encounter disaster is significant and there's no reason to think they wouldn't throw you under the bus. Be careful.
The good news is twofold.
"I feel like I played my hand wrong."
Firstly, there's not a lot you could have done, outside of Machiavellian maneuvering. The current situation is mostly the results of choices other people made.
Secondly, it sounds like you've built up your resume there and you're ready to leave. I'd recommend you let go of the past and start thinking about your future and what other opportunities you'd like to pursue.
The good news is twofold.
"I feel like I played my hand wrong."
Firstly, there's not a lot you could have done, outside of Machiavellian maneuvering. The current situation is mostly the results of choices other people made.
Secondly, it sounds like you've built up your resume there and you're ready to leave. I'd recommend you let go of the past and start thinking about your future and what other opportunities you'd like to pursue.
I've been with this company for ~10 years and I foolishly thought there was a path upwards before.
This is a long term company with strong fashion presence, last CTO left and a whole bunch of new CTO/SVP/VP/Directors/Engineers were hired very rapidly in the last years. While I am privileged that I can avoid most interactions with them, I sense hostility in terms of arrogance of "old solutions". The previous environment was glued together and built in realtime over the response to the market for a very old company rooted in retail, of course the implementation was not perfect looking back but at the time it was the best with the knowledge going forward.
There's a bunch of rewrites happening that I think are a disaster, basically the new guys are coming in and building new solutions that I personally think are unscalable and take a very narrow focus to a problem that is much more complex. In short, they seem disrespectful of the actual problem and think it's an easy thing to solve that a bunch of incompetent devs before couldn't do and did a bad job at.
Right now they are also struggling to scale up, and running into their own challenges with the application crashing and developers moving at a slow speed. The new codebase is "clean and modern", but it doesn't solve one of the problems in an "elegant" way in my opinion. It's like if you asked a high schooler to solve a problem and they got it done with a hammer. It works, business is happy, yes it's faster because new tech, but that's also because you handicapped the old tech, didn't upgrade, didn't invest, and now want to use people who did the best they could under impossible standards as punching bags.
I guess this turned into a rant of sorts because this is a company I have given a lot of years for, and I've learned a lot in the world of fashion ecommerce. I just don't know how to take my knowledge I've learned and transfer it elsewhere, or where my future career goes from here. I'm upset that there were such good ways of solving the problem if only the people who had been there long term had been asked. Instead we were all just shuffled to the side and asked to work under a whole bunch of new people. Yes we still have our jobs for now, but I'm not exactly happy after giving this many years to a company. I feel like I played my hand wrong.
EDIT: TO clarify, this was not 10 continuous years at one company. I did work with other smaller companies and other codebases/teams in between.