How good engineers write bad code at big companies

- never work FAANG or any bullshit company like that

- look for companies that are small (up to 100 SWEs max, preferably 1/2 that) that have solid business (20+ years, profitable)

- when you get hired volunteer to fix every problem everyone else is running away from (there will be plenty). you will work hard in the beginning to understand the nuts and bolts of everything

- along with nuts and bolts of the technology / stack / ... learn the domain as much possible (so much so that you could get a job tomorrow in that domain, e.g. if your company is providing software for automation of say state&local courts then you need to learn everything there is to learn about state&local courts so much so that you could legit get a job as a court administrator)

"soon" you will be the first that:

- fixes all the issues

- puts out production fires

- is in every meeting

- ...

there are other ways to do this but this 100% is one of them...

The arguably unproductive part of my brain craves to reach a day where I can say literally everything straight - if this would be a true description of the circumstances, then say exactly that.

Unfortunately, in addition to not only not being a “team player” this would also be really mean to people that had different time and resource pressures when they wrote the original flawed implementation. So both burning bridges and being kind of a dick.

At the same time, there’s sometimes people that develop stuff in such a way that I will never agree with them and a few people like that are enough for me not to want at a particular team/org even if it’s maybe like just 5 to 10% (and even then often it’s about them being inherently mean/nitpicky/whatever, rather than purely technical stuff).

Obviously the irony of the above isn’t lost on me so I just bite my tongue, focus on being professional and fixing the things I can and let the rest be without picking fights that will lead nowhere - otherwise I’d be a hypocrite and the situation couldn’t be described as anything other than “a bad culture fit” from an outside perspective.

But I’ve seen a lot of really shit code and it baffles me that alarm bells don’t go off more often and people just trudge along.

Then again, you do see a lot of drama in plenty of open source projects, so maybe that’s just human nature.

To be fair to me, I don't recall ever signing a contract through which I am directly responsible for the company's financial and customer-acquisition / retention efforts. I sign up as an individual contributor who helps advance the customer & product mission forward. I am NOT a cofounder.

So that shows, yet again, how myopic and egocentric managers are. Wise ones -- the all 2-3 I have met throughout a 20+ years of experience -- understand that they must enable you to produce the outcomes they care about.

Unsurprisingly, I worked fantastically well with those managers and we achieved near-miracles in some measly 4-5 months.

But all others? "I never gave you time to optimise cloud spend but now I am angry at you for not doing it in your sleep", more or less. Or "I pushed you to the brink of 12-hour workday regularly and started reaching into your weekends and you rushed that feature I pressured you for and it has one small performance regressions? You are fired!". Deal with it.

/rant.

Not directed at you, obviously. Got triggered a little.

I hear "thats something we can fix/improve/iterate on" when I'm criticizing code at ny company.

My retort is "why aren't we getting it right the first time?"