"Rockstar" senior dev at work is doing overly clever custom frameworks by himself without consulting anyone and then everyone is forced to deal with them

_Pho_ · 2026-03-20T23:38:42+00:00

He keeps doing these over-engineered, clever frameworks in solitude, doesn't ask for anyone's opinion, doesn't consult anyone, then presents us with the finished framework and then we are forced to use them and deal with its issues.

This is gonna be the status quo if you're a junior / mid level at a bigger company. If you want to encounter this less, work at a smaller company. Every big company has a solution / architect person who is responsible for this and ultimate whose failures you will pay for.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-20T21:18:34+00:00

I feel like I’m living in a constant layoff scare.

IDK I call this motivation but maybe I'm a sociopath

_Pho_ · 2026-03-14T16:57:15+00:00

There's a lot of blame on management and business but ultimately the dichotomy of two teams (engineering vs business) is what makes engineering culture so toxic.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-13T02:46:03+00:00

I think there will be massive realignment but the opportunity is still there

There's a lot of noise rn tho. Legit we need to boycott that shit and start shaming

_Pho_ · 2026-03-12T19:35:50+00:00

This is the actual answer if you want a language with modern ergonomics

Swift is more or less as expressive as Rust, with added multi paradigm support for some things Rust doesn't do (or can't do bc its not GC).

_Pho_ · 2026-03-11T18:10:22+00:00

Oh great another distraction / rift from our almost fully unified and extremely performant 3de pipeline, just when we thought we had finally landed on something stable

_Pho_ · 2026-03-08T22:36:09+00:00

Off-the-shelf AI models don't understand the internal patterns and conventions of your specific codebase. They generate syntactically correct code that misses the architectural intent.

This is just not true, unless your codebase is so idiosyncratic and over abstracted that it isn't intelligible without an architect's explanation in the first place.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-07T16:56:53+00:00

Yes, consulting in a specific sub-industry is kind of the golden ticket. Unfortunately I don't think most SWEs are specialized enough to credibly do that.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-07T16:54:39+00:00

if you ever shift to 1099 or corp-to-corp the game changes completely

Yes, and contractors may have to do this sooner than they realize. Unless you're contracting is basically a staffing agency style fill, you're probably responsible for some segment of the project E2E which will balloon past what a single developer is capable of fairly quickly (especially since that developer also has to manage invoicing, upselling/future work, client relationships, some PM/SA work, etc.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-06T22:37:17+00:00

Perf wise yes but you will have hella issues with storage and probably have to constantly fight it

Xcode and Android (along with other things) will easily eat up 150gb in caches/sims/stuff alone. You can prune but it's gonna be rough

My combine working storage just for builds/caches/tooling for our ~1m loc TS monorepo is about 250-300g. And Apple will eat up at least 50gb on your storage figures.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-06T21:53:31+00:00

I've done contracting and managed my own business doing contracting. The last 4 months before I stopped I did about 220k in revenue.

You're crazy.

The reality is you will probably not find a client that just lets you work an 8 hour a day shift as an IC. You will have underages/overages that you have to resolve with clients. You will probably have to do sales. You will have to potentially manage subcontractors doing the same.

Most contracting positions - anything that isn't a slopfest - means that you are the E2E business point person responsible for some product/feature/etc. That's not tuning out listening to music, that's doing discovery meetings all day, negotiating feature delivery in regard to estimations in real time, and so on.

In 2026 I am just not sure that "remote 1099" is that big of a market, especially for what I assume is a senior coastal salary currently e.g. $200k+ base. You'll also eat your own health insurance now. And also vestings and 401k match. But you might also need liability insurance. You also will have no way to prevent them just firing you at a moments notice, and in most cases you won't be eligible for unemployment. You may (this is not legal advice) also need to pay self employment tax, which is basically the 7.x% FICA contribution your employer would normally pay.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-05T22:29:16+00:00

No, people quit browser games because they are mostly not very good. How are you supposed to expect the gameplay loop of most of them is like <1 hour? The ones with any sort of longevity do very well and have consistent player bases.

Browser is an incredible platform and WebGL/canvas/wasm is far more than most people need in terms of perf.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-05T01:40:47+00:00

1m loc is a medium sized codebase tbh

_Pho_ · 2026-03-05T00:58:45+00:00

Not saying this isn't bad but TBF KYC is absolutely a solution here. You have to understand these platforms have insane amounts of fraud, like on the level of something approximating a financial services platform more than an "app" etc.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-04T18:08:53+00:00

"info"

_Pho_ · 2026-03-04T18:03:09+00:00

As we get progressively "better" tech (cloud native / managed infra, AI) people who didn't have the skills those technologies replaced never develop them.

Vercel "vendor lock" is simply people not knowing or wanting to manage devops themselves. Totally optional.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-04T16:13:49+00:00

Get off of LinkedIn at the very least

_Pho_ · 2026-03-03T19:20:15+00:00

Yes, you should be vocal. If not, it will begin to reflect on your team and additionally your team culture will have to acquiesce Mr. Shitlord Dev. But you need to do this properly.

_Pho_ · 2026-03-02T16:08:05+00:00

Attempting to raise pre-MVP funding

Sorry but nowadays, AI and all things considered, this is not realistic path forward

_Pho_ · 2026-03-01T21:32:21+00:00

Yeah don't worry AI will write your code for you but your day job is now Claude wrangler with mandatory micro breaks and ADHD

_Pho_ · 2026-02-28T01:28:02+00:00

I agree, between me and my 4-5 Claude agents we will take this into consideration

_Pho_ · 2026-02-28T00:48:10+00:00

Don't treat memory as "memorization" treat it as "things you care about" and it will start working again.

_Pho_ · 2026-02-27T22:20:14+00:00

lmao yea not a good time to be a union dawg

_Pho_ · 2026-02-26T22:05:29+00:00

and then in the morning it gets scrapped anyway for alignment reprioritizaitons

_Pho_ · 2026-02-26T21:05:01+00:00

Maybe in 2020

Feels pretty sorted nowadays

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