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Ask HN: What to do about bad code culture

4 points by hotcarl ↗ HN
Five months ago I joined a medium-sized fast growing startup. One of the reasons I joined was because they were having scaling issues and I felt confident I could help them. Now I think their problem is a cultural one and I don’t know if I can help. Should I try to make it work or move to a company with a better culture?

Every engineer I’ve talked to agrees there are fundamental and pressing problems throughout our infrastructure. Despite that, prototypes of critical pieces of logic routinely get shipped.

I keep talking with anyone who will listen, asking how they think we can fix these issues and offering to help, but nothing gets done. Our infrastructure is completely unscalable and sometimes it feels like the people in power like it that way.

I’m ripping my hair out trying to work here. Is this a learning experience or am I just wasting my time?

p.s. I have four years of engineering experience and this is a senior position

4 comments

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xupybd
Sometimes technical debt is required to leverage growth. Sometimes it’s a bad idea. It’s hard to tell what is happening here. But is shipping this unfinished code keeping this startup a float? If so maybe it’s what’s needed right now.

That said if it’s not the way you want to work maybe moving on is not such a bad thing?

hotcarl
Thanks for your comment. I think the unfinished code might be a symptom of a lack of direction rather than a need to move fast. There are large organization changes happening and the chaos is making it hard to see what the next steps are.
gus_massa
You can get some ideas from https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/12/25/getting-things-don... but I'm not sure if they apply here.

Is it possible to isolate some part, a small part and fix it? Perhaps some new code. Perhaps some stand alone part that is easy to use like an internal library.

hotcarl
That’s a great guide! Thanks for sharing it.

I’ve tried a couple of these things so far. I moved teams to try and cut out some infrastructure improvements but got foiled when the other side of the company decided unilaterally to change cloud hosting providers (My boss left the company after that).