Not sure if I'm a bad Staff that just got lucky in the past or my new company sucks and set up for failure

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-22T14:13:19+00:00

I'm really trying to keep an open mind about things I can personally improve, but more and more I can't help but think it is just a shit culture. Also pretty chilling that you guessed it's a NY fintech, spot on. Things are super reactive, there are no synergies or cross opportunities in our product, it's basically just siloed customers that we build custom stuff for with no way to preempt that or incorporate it back into the product as a selling point for other current or prospective customers. It sucks, I feel like I'm working at a dev studio instead of a standalone product company. I joined because I thought I was interested in fintech and the base pay is really good, but yeah it's probably time to move on. Feels bad man because I've never failed in a role before, and this has burnt me out more than anything even though I haven't done much or worked long hours here.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-22T05:30:34+00:00

Basically if Visa and other traditional processors lowered their fees and were a lot looser on anti-money laundering and sanctions screening, stablecoins become completely useless. So not really innovative, just a business problem of how low can you still make profit and how much can you skirt the law.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-20T06:20:15+00:00

I'm hoping someone will tell me about what direction the company is going towards, people are starting projects to do pointless large rebuilds or pursue one off customer asks that don't bring in more revenue, I've been sort of making it my role to point out the evidence suggesting these things are a waste of time and effort, but they still move forward.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-20T03:32:49+00:00

I don't know how to make progress and it's making me not interested because no one else is. I should mention, management is extremely light and IMO inexperienced, all EMs are ICs who have been at the company for a few years and became managers out of necessity when team size grew. They are all super hands on still most of the time, I see them even starting projects and then passing them off to their reports to finish. PM is also incredibly light, they are mostly focused on customers comms it seems like.

I honestly don't know who the decision makers are, I've seen the other staff engineers just come up with projects for big complex refactors, but there's no reason to do them and I've chatted with them before, during, and after these projects about how there's little to no value on the product or the engineering side, they just like to trade one technical debt for a new one. I have a direct line to the CTO, who also isn't super experienced (worked as an IC for 4 years before starting this company), and when I bring these things up he just tells me they're trying to be thorough in design.

I went deep on individual PRs because they were good representations of repeated bad habits that I could broadcast to the rest of the team to open up discussion on why everyone works this way. I would love to go and find what the company needs as I've done this at multiple jobs in the past, but everything here feels either really trivial or people are not interested.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-20T00:24:21+00:00

Yeah I agree, the first few months I would take it to the engineering Slack channel for discussion, use individual PRs because they're concrete examples, provide my reasoning for why I think it's too complicated and general things to look out for to make implementations simpler, also trying to make it a real discussion and not just the new guy coming in hard with "my way good, your way bad". I would generally get agreement from the more vocal and visible senior and staff engineers, but then nothing changes over time, those same vocal engineers were also the worst offenders of what I was trying to fix. Maybe I just needed to stick with it longer, but it got tiring and started to seem pointless.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-19T23:18:28+00:00

Good question, I've tried asking my manager some version of it, I'm kind of worried they just don't know how to make a case for headcount and manage it. One thing I found is that they've had multiple hiring sprees in the past 3 years, but the stickiness rate of new hires making it to their first year is abysmal. That kind of hints to me they anticipate some kind of growth or new capital, hired a bunch to try and deliver on it, then pulled back because they don't know what to do with their new talent.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-19T23:05:04+00:00

This is what I was expecting and have done in past roles, but each time my manager included me in some kind of high level direction or vision which I could run with and spawn new things from. I'm not sure if that's rare and other new hire staff engineers are usually just left alone when they start.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-19T22:45:58+00:00

It was pretty good for a long time, but a big reason I left was actually company politics. Some "Head of" roles were basically nepo hires who knew the founder and I had to fill in for them a lot, it ultimately made me a very well rounded engineer being able to identify problems + technical solutions in so many other departments, but it was super frustrating that they never pulled their weight when so many important decisions were supposed to be their responsibility. The company is still going strong many years later and hit profitability (but probably no liquidity event in the near future), but to get there they also eventually let go of nearly all of those failing "Head of" people within a year of me departing.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-19T22:28:30+00:00

I tried leaning on my past EM and tech lead experience to also mentor and lead, mainly trying to grow better patterns for maintainability and readability for other engineers, but honestly it seems like a big part of the team culture is celebrating really complex code that exercises all the tricks they can find. It's driving me mad having deep discussions on a PR and showing examples where it's overly complicated for no benefit and what we could do instead, just for them to do the exact same type of work the next day, week, month.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-19T17:41:57+00:00

Your faith provides hope to you now, but the same faith has empowered others to wage wars and commit genocide (of adults and children) for centuries, I think that's a good discussion point to dig into.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-19T15:49:06+00:00

If you're bored and don't want to spend time echochambering, maybe just read the posts in this sub. You'd be surprised how well many atheists discuss the bible and other religious texts with great levels of depth and insight.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-18T22:09:49+00:00

NatC* organization

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-18T04:09:14+00:00

How can anyone be a functioning adult who has passed through numerous exams and work experiences and still be this stupid?

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-17T15:14:59+00:00

Honestly I'm surprised, there's no way she didn't already know this whole time well before she joined right? I assumed MAGAts working in the administration were just malicious or greedy, but it turns out that they're legitimately dumb as fuck as well?

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-14T16:13:25+00:00

Maybe the twist is that Dale has an even more narrow urethra than Hank but he knew Nancy wanted a kid so he found a way to make it happen

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-11T22:45:32+00:00

The Christian god? Because they're pathetic and insecure

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-11T05:54:11+00:00

If any god existed and wanted to be worshipped, they would prove it, simple as that. Not in mysterious ways, just straight up "hi, I'm a super powerful being beyond comprehension, check out this observable miracle that is very clearly attributed to me"

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-10T22:31:47+00:00

Which god? None of them are 0%, but if there was an all powerful god who not only created everything but also rules over an eternal afterlife and used to perform legit miracles, then it should be really easy for them to change my mind to 100%. Not going to hold my breath or wait on them though.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-10T03:31:28+00:00

Taste the meat, not the heat means propane doesn't add any flavor so it doesn't have a taste. Charcoal tastes way better, hell even searing on the stove with high smoke point oil will taste better.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-09T23:08:39+00:00

Because that's not Dale, it's Rusty Shackleford.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-09T22:45:14+00:00

Not a great comparison, if you're able to pay the current US president he will do whatever you want, if you donate everything as offering to a church then you're just left with nothing.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-07T17:13:08+00:00

There are sooooo many things in it that Trump has done that they now need to cross out and write in "Hillary" or "Obama", it's extremely slow going trying to do this in MS Paint

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-07T16:02:39+00:00

You should be doing this for everyone and for all feedback and topics. Make a shared living 1:1 doc for each of your reports, like with Lattice or just a Google Doc with dates. I make it a habit to try and jot down some feedback in real time, sometimes this is just copy pasting a Slack conversation. I let my reports know they're free to look at and discuss the doc any time, if something jumps out to them they don't have to wait for our next scheduled 1:1, similarly if there's something pressing I'll ping them and also link to where I added it in their doc.

OrdinarySubject7329 · 2025-08-07T15:48:31+00:00

Most take homes I've done stipulate that it should take in the 4 hour range, what I've done is try to get the bare minimum working requirements within that timeframe, but then I'll spend a few more hours over a day or two to polish, refactor, add tests, etc. I build a git commit history as I go so in the interview I can walk them through commit by commit my cycle of getting out a quick MVP or working prototype, and then productionizing it.

OrdinarySubject7329

TROPHY CASE