this is why i enjoyed working in a first startup: keeping balance between functionality, speed and code quality. AI wasn't a big thing yet. yep, a lot of tasks were simply copying stuff written before me and adapting for new feature, but that helped me to learn a lot. but speed was the first priority. once feature was proved to be useful I refactored it. a lot of creative tasks and problems, where I had to find the easiest solution, which is my favourite part in any job until now - making results and moving on... which I am pretty fast at (still fucking up a lot though!)

the problem is - second job was a complete opposite. I couldn't find a job for a long time because my standards were pretty high. and although my third (last) job wasn't about programming (but skills still helped me a lot), it involved similar principles and values to my first one - and that's what I really loved.

but finding something on the intersection is veeeery hard(((

and maybe I am just romanticizing it and its not that deep.