
Ask HN: Hyper Conservative Dev Org - anon_rutabaga
Currently I work for a company in the northwest. We were bought out a year ago. Surprisingly I’ve been happier since we were bought out. Having been bought out has given me the opportunity to wave a big hammer to move towards more common standards that software orgs use but I still find myself feeling like I’m taking a crazy pill when attempting to float ideas to the senior devs.<p>The place I work at is a SaaS. I’m going to try and describe tech and see if I can relate it to the levels of conservatism that we have at work culturally speaking. These levels of conservatism are championed by the founding devs.<p>Senior management is entrenched in their ways. After working at the company for a few months, I was entrusted with a project to help improve the development processes that were being used. In that timeframe I proposed seemingly common sense, community standard solutions. What happened next was that decision after decision was turned down for clever alternatives that were home grown. After a long time we had working solutions when instead we could have spent a percentage of the time using pre-built solutions. What’s strange about this is that even sfter showing said solutions we still chose the other because of our belief system. For example take installing seemingly commmon &lt;language dep x&gt;  on a dev machine. That was a no go because we spoon feed our devs. Instead we decided to offload that elsewhere, which in turn created an even more complex and difficult to maintain solution.
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anon_rutabaga
Within that time we struggled to make a stable offering due to the “cool but
unconventional” solutions that were offered by principal engineers vs my
proposed solutions. Once we delivered said solution we dealt with the fallout
of having to build your own solution: we had to maintain and document as well
as update our dev training process. This of course took a lot of time and
effort. In the end I ended up being given the go ahead to utilize the
previously floated solutions I had proposed in order to reach stability. I
ended up having to spend even more time undoing all the work I was told to do
while moving to the more standard and easier to maintain solutions.

And yet I find myself fighting similar battles in my day to day. I just want
to focus on what’s right, instead of having to prove the seemingly obvious.
But not having the recognition that we wasted so much time seems to bother me,
because our company continues to make similar seemingly batshit types of
discussions. I feel as though not having that recognition damages my ability
to make arguments and be taken seriously to stop further bad decisions from
being made. I don’t like having reputation influence what ideas are adopted
but this dev org definitely listens to the few instead of letting the best or
most reasonable or commonly utilized ideas win.

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anon_rutabaga
What’s worse is that those key devs are stuck in their ways and it shows in
how the technical culture has been stunted. We’re stuck in the year 2006. They
also don’t have formal software development training (e.g. they don’t know
common design patterns, they believe that globals are a good idea, they think
that front end load balancers are simpler and that hot swapping variables in
the browser without having your customer refresh is a good idea) and they have
a strong impact on how the rest of the org is able to progress. What’s worse
is that they’re proud sbout these unconventional solutions and their
surrounding practices. I feel like their lists of pros and cons in favor of
their technical solutions are just thinly vieled arguments that cover up the
true root cause for defending their ways; they’re prideful about their work
and don’t want it to go away.

My spirit to continue to keep trying to make the dev org better has been
crushed by constantly having to prove fundamentals of designing web
applications. I want to help the org, but the sheer amount of effort to move
the right stakeholders makes me want to look elsewhere. I love my craft and
take pride in doing my best work, but now I just find myself wanting to work
with a handful of devs that don’t need me to explain how their ideas fly in
the face of seemingly obvious and fundamental concepts surrounding software
engineering and modern web apps. The only thing that keeps me going is a
handful of devs thst whisper encouragement along with the high numbers of
wtf/s from brand new hires that know whst the ass end of a web app is supposed
ro look like. That signals to me that I’m on to something, but for the life of
me the key stakeholders don’t see it.

Alas, the pay is good and the benefits are pretty great too. I can’t tell if
this is the burnout talking but I feel like I would be willing to take a $30k
pay cut to work in a similar environment with open minded and technically
capable devs.

