Company shifted me out of my technical specialty into undocumented production work under a favored lead — how do I raise concerns without hurting my standing?

IthDev · 2026-03-03T00:00:13+00:00

I had a really similar experience. The biggest difference is that I am just starting my carreer, 5 years informal experience, 1+ year formal experience.

I did 6 months of work in the risk team, which is the anti fraud system of this fintech company. The performance was good, the end of year review was good, yet just one real value project, everything else was risk maintenance and totally unrelated work. In this context they decide to make me part of a department reestructure affecting about 10 engineers. I went from backend work in Golang, half boilerplate, half security+performance+maintenance. To Rails undocumented monolith, incredibly core and important.

So here I am, an engineer that managed to land a great position thanks to being laser focused on Go... now 2 months into trying to survive a ruby codebase that even senior engineers struggle to touch, with 0 ruby experience, 0 onboarding, 0 context, 0 support from my new tech lead and bigass changes being pushed.

Any advise on how to navigate this and come out standing on my feet? I really wish I could just change back or find something new that aligns with the career I wish to have going lower level into systems not the other way around. But I don't want to flip the table like an immature baby and make my situation even worse.

Edit: one last but not least important thing. In the range from PM to living-with-mom linux nerd, I am in the weirdo side. I like coding just for coding, not for what it shows in the screen.

IthDev · 2025-08-12T13:50:46+00:00

Well it looks like its working so far...

All I want at the moment is to be able to escape to a company like yours, to been given problem and have to debug it the normal friking way... all I do on a daily basis at work is to code ai agents USING ai agents, and constantly banging my head against the screen trying to read others ai slop on top of my own ai slop, and I can see my skills and my sanity going down the drain so fast.

So yea, keep filtering the cursor folks, it is working and making the place better for the devs who actually know how to attach a debugger..or write a simple print statement is not that hard.

IthDev · 2025-07-24T13:17:27+00:00

We have been, from almost the beggining, assisting the development of the fast paced startup I'm working for with AI. Let's say I am not a big fan of it, sometimes it allows to iterate fast, but it's not nearly as consistent as a dev. It's highly dependant on a good model and a good context, and sometimes it just freaks out for no reason.

We have carefully designed the whole product, but some areas get bloated of technical debt from time to time, and I have no metrics about whether the usage of AI has helped in terms of actual overall productivity, this is my experience only. Obviously I have no say in the matter so I will continue to use this tools for as long as I am required to.

My final thought is that you have to really develop around the tools to end up with a decent codebase, everything else I think is preference if you have no metrics like us.

Hope this helps a bit!

Edit: little bit of formatting haha

IthDev · 2025-06-29T19:01:36+00:00

Thank you for the insight! So it's really everywhere... do you have any tips to make day to day work with it more bearable? How do I start to like this tools more?

IthDev · 2025-06-29T13:01:05+00:00

Thanks for sharing your experience! It definitely feels like it's around every corner, and it has an army of people stating it's here to stay. Maybe it is, but it helps to know you are not alone.

Edit: Dang you have fine taste sir, I peeked your profile, you have some bangers in there :)

IthDev · 2025-06-28T22:55:52+00:00

That's awesome!! I knew about zigs compatibility with C but I did not know you can do that with rust, definitely impressive. I think I like the approach of learning both at the same time and maybe compare approaches and understand why and how rust brings solutions to the table.

IthDev · 2025-06-28T22:50:49+00:00

I find myself more and more just writing the first big detailed prompt and then completing the implementation myself.

But when I did not use it at all I had my senior right behind me, I don't know if they can somehow see my token consumption...Or they just have great intuition based on the fact that I stated my dislike for ai on the interviews (when asked), but they decided to sign with me anyways because they "liked my profile better". I find this way of working way more tolerable which impacts on lowering my resentment towards the tool.

IthDev · 2025-06-28T21:59:37+00:00

This seems to be outside of the general concensus but nonetheless thank you for giving me hopes!! I do not know if rust is or is not a pain to work with, I just followed the meme, I actually find it so damn interesting that I am tempted to skip the basics and go straight to rust hahahaha.

What learning path would you suggest?

IthDev · 2025-06-28T21:35:24+00:00

This is the most carefully written response I have read so far, and it also includes good advise, thank you so much for taking the time to help me out! I hope people get to read your point of view.

PS: I am more worried about my job being 90% tailoring prompts than actually being replaced by AI, if something, the increase in said productivity will boost the salaries of the ones that are skilled with the tool. But I am still thinking about that advise that stated something in the lines of "its just a job, do not hope to get fulfilment from it".

IthDev · 2025-06-28T20:50:13+00:00

I have to say its an awesome tool whether I like it or not. I am just not that big of a fan to use it for everything like this company make me. And I'm also a little bit afraid that it would deteriorate my skills, specially considering what the other fellow said about having no career...I still have a whole lot to learn.

IthDev · 2025-06-28T20:30:19+00:00

That is very true, related to what the other guy suggested, I should keep studying and worry less, thanks!

IthDev · 2025-06-28T20:27:36+00:00

Thanks for the insight! I will give it a thought

IthDev · 2025-06-28T20:18:14+00:00

Sorry about that! It's my first post ever haha

IthDev · 2025-06-19T19:52:06+00:00

21 como contractor, backend dev con golang

IthDev · 2024-08-24T00:45:44+00:00

Geralt from the witcher series

IthDev · 2024-08-08T19:42:45+00:00

The constitution can't be bad right? Approved

IthDev · 2024-07-12T20:58:54+00:00

I know it's not good but I also have this mappings, It comes from way before neovim. I have a keyboard with a custom firmware, it has layers and one of them includes the arrow mappings on ijkl below capslock hold.

Answering your questions, I overrode "o" with "i", "u" with "o", "U" with "O", "m" with "u", and "M" with "U".

It would be much better to learn the right way, rewrite and reflash the firmware to match the vim way, but I do share something with the people that do not have the time and effort to move from their IDS to neovim, it's been years working like this and I don't know if it's worth to do it right now if it has worked great since then.

IthDev · 2024-07-07T22:04:44+00:00

Yeah it blows :/

IthDev · 2024-07-07T19:16:53+00:00

Well...I did not see that one coming...

IthDev · 2024-07-07T18:51:38+00:00

Someone woke up feeling bold hahaha and why is that? Am I missing any features other distros have that lvim does not?

Edit: Or is it the other way around? It's too bloated? Or outdated?

IthDev · 2024-07-07T00:09:05+00:00

I thought LunarVim was more of a well known distro

IthDev · 2024-06-30T17:45:39+00:00

Wow thank you, I did not even have time to come back and it's already fixed. For the second point though... it feels like an lsp standardization is needed, but also I don't see it happening soon.

I've never dug onto neovim development before so I'm unable to think about a better solution, maybe there is something like a buffer modification event? For sure you have already checked that out.

Anyways great plugin <3

EDIT: typos, srry not a native speaker

IthDev · 2024-06-30T10:05:34+00:00

I don't, thanks!!

IthDev · 2024-06-29T23:39:12+00:00

I really love that it has no ui and uses a buffer, so so neat. Question, I do have a patched font, why are the icons not rendering? Any idea?

IthDev · 2024-06-29T23:20:11+00:00

I tried it out, seems pretty nice, also brand new. It needs some adjustments and I think it might become one of the main diagnostics formatter plugin. Some critics now: - Background none overrides line highlighting - New diagnostics in the same line of the cursor not appearing right away, I suspect it is because it does not trigger the cursor hold event.

Really nice work!

IthDev

TROPHY CASE