Navigating a Broken Dev Culture

(Disclaimer: Not here to trash my company, just sharing my experience.)

I work on the AI team at my current job, meaning I get to play with cutting-edge generative AI tech. I’ve built some pretty cool things: • Designed an end-to-end image generation pipeline for a virtual friend app. • Implemented self-hosted Stable Diffusion with Automatic1111, adding sentiment-based image optimization & image retrieval. • Used Vicuna (uncensored) + VLLM for serving our text model.

Sounds exciting, right? That’s about where the good part ends.

The Bad: A Tech Culture Stuck in the Stone Age

The engineering practices at my company are, to put it mildly, nonexistent: • Testing? None. Even revenue-generating products (~$200K/yr) are tested manually. • Deployments? Manual SSH into the server, copy the build, and pray. • CI/CD? What’s that? • Docker/Kubernetes? Not in our vocabulary. • Code Quality? Negative.

I’ve tried pushing for better practices—heck, I even gave a Docker session to the team—but there’s no buy-in.

The New Obsession: AI is Eating Our Jobs

Management (none of whom are engineers) has fully bought into the “AI replaces devs” hype. Our CTO literally said:

“Use GPT to write code. This is a one-day task; it shouldn’t take more than that.”

They genuinely believe AI can replace skilled developers overnight. Meanwhile, they’ve never used GPT to write production code themselves. They just read the PR spin and assume it’s magic.

Despite this chaos, I’ve refused to let the environment affect my growth. WFH helped me stay sane, but now that we’re back in the office, I know it’s time to move on.

I never had a formal AI background, but I self-learned everything while on the job. Along the way: • Cleared GSoC and worked on Intel’s ML toolkit OpenVINO (JS bindings). • Discovered OpenTensor (decentralized intelligence), cold-emailed a contributor, and worked part-time on his startup. • Got my Rust PR accepted into Docify (used by Polkadot). • Built a Rust + HTMX startup backend using Rocket (signed an NDA, so can’t share details).

What’s Next?

I’m scrambling to find a new job. Ideally, I’d love to work on FOSS full-time rather than jumping into another corporate dev job. The problem? Finding an opportunity that matches my current compensation in India.

I recently worked a contract gig for $17.35/hr—if I had a year-long commitment at that rate, I’d have left my job yesterday.

I know going full-time into FOSS isn’t easy, but if you have advice—or know FOSS projects that need contributors—I’d love to connect.

My stack: • Frontend: React / Next.js / TypeScript • Backend: Node.js / FastAPI / Flask • GenAI: LangChain, RAG, Stable Diffusion, Tool-Calling • DevOps: (Self-learning)

I’m in a phase where I can afford to push myself to maximize my learning, but I also need to be practical. If you’ve been through something similar or have insights on making a sustainable career in FOSS, I’d love to hear from you.

Thanks for reading—I appreciate any thoughts, advice, or connections!

Your CTO is an idiot but you can't change that. My first idea would be to write a good resume and start finding another job. The whole description confirms that. I have worked for a lot of companies from the smallest to the biggest and it's always the same scenario. If everything is THAT bad, your only chance is to leave. It would take years to change that company, and you would have to accept a lot of refusal before anything changes.

Also don't focus too much on AI, there are a lot of good jobs unrelated to that topic.

I'm not an AI guy, but I would focus on what you don't know now and which may be useful in the future. Maybe Docker for the Devops and GitLab/GitHub for the pipelines (always useful), and some Python/uv/Ruff which seems missing from your description (AI scientists seem to love their Python).

You could add unit-tests and code coverage in JS or Python, and maybe a compiled language like Java/C++ or a functional language to get a broader view of other languages.

But all my pieces of advice are for what you would do at your next job. I tried to change companies before but I became bitter and found better elsewhere.

Last but not least, the skill that I lacked the most was the ability to talk to actual users or clients, and make sure that their demands/specs were well written and handled. It makes a lot of difference.

PS: GHA Deployments, CI/CD, PR Reviews, Gazillions of tests

It sounds like you need to find your way into a company that isn't broken. Just start interviewing?

Or figure out how to make your current environment less broken. Improbable if it's as you describe, but I don't know you. Things like testing and CI aren't stuff you necessarily need to "push for", it's stuff you just do. Just set it up and get a group of likeminded fellows to use it. Consensus starts with a small conspiracy of engineers.