Ask HN: Rant, Am I bad or is this a company with a poor tech culture?
A developer with over 13 years of experience joined a profitable startup a month ago and is questioning whether their frustration stems from being out of touch or from the company's poor technical practices. They observe numerous red flags including lack of testing, CI, observability, and resistance to security updates and tooling improvements. Despite raising concerns and proposing solutions, the developer was instructed to focus solely on assigned tickets and produce one PR per day, with job consequences implied for non-compliance.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Hey all, can you sanity check me? Am I a bad developer (always a possibility), or do I focus too much on unimportant things?I've got 13+ YoE and been working in big tech for about 4 years, joined an established start up (10 years old, profitable) a month ago, and wondering if I am out of touch after the meat-grinder that is competing for delivering "impact", stack ranking and so on.I don't know if I should stay at this company as I feel like I can't really do good work here and it feels like, if I stay, I'll be less experienced at the end of 5 years than when I started.-----SooI joined an established start up a month ago, they have a legacy app they are incrementally migrating from Angular 1 to React.Their "good" app is a super custom React implementation that's extremely difficult to…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Ycombinator.