Ask HN: How I find a job where what is needed is solid code, not firefighting?

36 points by speeder 22 days ago | 8 comments

Today I saw that post about AI destroying the future of West software. I remembered I am having a similar struggle with my jobs.

Right now my life is like this: some company lost their senior, they hire me to replace. They expect me to produce code with same speed and same quality in 2 months.

Then they realize they are late actually (one company for example was 6 months late to deliver to clients) and want me to use AI to churn out code even faster.

Meanwhile I find out they lost all people that knew how things actually worked, there is no documentation, or worse, the documentation is outright wrong ( one project I worked had thousands of Jira tickets generated from a requisites document. After some months of politicking I got permission to see the requisites document and learned it was from another project entirely, they wasted years coding with the wrong requisites outright! )

Then as I get close to the end of probation period, the company tried some kind of hail Mary, one company thought maybe I would be more useful if they fired their DevOps and asked me to do the job of the senior engineer that had quit, the fired DevOps, and learn Go (I was hired as C dev, not even CPP) in 2 weeks. Then when the absurd hail mary fails I get fired.

For a while I have been trying again and again with always same results, tried to see what I was doing wrong, and now I concluded I am looking for a job in the wrong places.

Every time I got fired the same criticism happened: I spent too much time going into "rabbit holes" and figuring out details of legacy code or debugging or fixing things or refactoring, and not enough time just shipping code fast enough to appease clients. I keep trying to change this behavior and fail, maybe I should instead find a job where this behavior is something good instead of something bad, but I have no idea where to look.

sminchev 21 days ago |

Banking software. No place to hurry there.

Also, changing a job is two-side process. they need to like you and you need to like them. If you find that too many developers are going out, too many job offers from their side, that might mean that the company is toxic. Stable good companies, don't have a lot of job offers. They are not so aggressive searching for people ;)

Always ask why they hire, try to find out why people leave.

gus_massa 21 days ago | |

Does Medicine also work?

sminchev 21 days ago | | |

I don't know about the medicine. I have not been in any medicine related project, so far.

Regarding the banks, they can't use AI. This is a big security risk for them. They need to keep really, really high level of confidentiality. They need to cover all kind of audits: internal, government, external, etc. No audit will pass, if any of the documentation and implementation go to the cloud.

Highly regulated!

I guess, if the medicine follows the same high level of confidentiality, AI won't be used there as well.

No AI, no push to use it -> normal expectations of time and effort ;)

pants2 21 days ago |

Consider medical device software. Often embedded C code, needs to be rigorously documented and tested, has longer development cycles, and certainly no attitudes of "bugs are fine, ship it and we'll patch later."

austin-cheney 22 days ago |

My recommendation is to look at game companies. Those jobs are fewer, harder to get, sometimes pay more but usually less, and the work tends to be much harder. You will be writing code though. Game companies

Otherwise look towards jobs that require niche, less popular, languages or tend to require additional skills like an engineering, law, or medical background.

The ultimate goal is to find a work culture that values selflessness. Whether that means operations, product quality, or original problems to solve. When you are surrounded by self oriented people you will always get firefighting: that kind of environment where everything is an emergency and everything is tech debt and the primary goal is worship of some tool because all that matters is the tool user (the developers own desires) as opposed to the product users, the actual business target.

latexr 22 days ago |

What are the sizes of the companies you’ve been working at? I much prefer and recommend small teams, those where you have interacted with every other person. And I do mean every person, not every developer.

tacostakohashi 21 days ago |

A lot of what you talk about is just the bread and butter of software at BigCo, especially at a senior level. Unrealistic expectations, undocumented code, some firefighting, etc. are all just par for the course, and you need to have ways of dealing with that, staying cool and grounded, not letting it get to you, and not letting it stop you from showing some delivered results each week.

Figuring out, details, debugging, etc... yes, these need to happen, but you have to slot those in around delivering things, often without a complete picture.

chunpaiyang 21 days ago |

Companies like this don't deservce good enginners.