[HN Gopher] A love letter to my future employer (2020)
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A love letter to my future employer (2020)
Author : luu
Score : 54 points
Date : 2025-08-08 06:01 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (catzkorn.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (catzkorn.dev)
| globular-toast wrote:
| Sad that the blog posts stopped after getting employed. I was
| hoping for some interesting insights after five years of doing it
| professionally.
| zwnow wrote:
| Doing it professionally destroyed all the magic for me.
| Everything is slop, customer appointments are exhausting af,
| nobody is able to precisely communicate their needs and im
| supposed to be the people pleaser saying "sure can do" to every
| lunatic idea some person with enough money has. If you want to
| take responsibility and actually build a valuable product your
| only option is open source software as companies, no matter the
| size, do not care about the nuances a feature might have as
| long as its shippable. Big tech has embarked into
| enshittification for over two decades now. Imagine being paid
| for making a product worse. Fuck this industry, money is the
| only driver for me. Once that's gone, which surely will happen
| with companies trying to replace devs with AI, I'll hopefully
| find a way to keep my income stable in a different profession
| that is actually enjoyable.
| jama211 wrote:
| I sense just a touch of catastrophising going on here...
| zwnow wrote:
| Not really. No matter what enterprise dev I talked to their
| product is completely unsaveable. Too big for a rewrite and
| basically a Frankenstein monolith/microservice done wrong
| architecture. It's really painful to see how bad some stuff
| is millions of people depend on. If builders built houses
| like devs built software, we would have no houses.
| hampelm wrote:
| Check out the homebuilding subreddit. The amount of "bad"
| stuff that ends up under the surface of nice drywal is,
| in fact, _just fine_, is quite high! Here's a recent
| example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Homebuilding/comments/1
| mjxqin/is_th...
| zwnow wrote:
| Building with drywall is a concept ill never understand.
| Houses are made of brick walls where im from.
| gottorf wrote:
| I'm sure you know, but to clarify, drywall is not
| structural. Load is borne by lumber in most cases, though
| some homes in America are built with structural masonry;
| South Florida builds a lot of homes with concrete masonry
| units, for example. The drywall is just there as a
| pleasant skin to hide the structural underpinnings.
| There's nothing stopping someone from using drywall in
| the interior even in structural masonry buildings, and
| this happens pretty often, in fact.
|
| There's nothing wrong with wooden houses! They're a cost-
| effective method of building, and with proper care, such
| houses will last over a hundred years. Masonry buildings,
| of course, also need care to avoid falling apart, though
| probably less so than wooden buildings.
|
| I don't know where it is that you're from, but I'd wager
| that large parts of the US sees harsher climate
| conditions. Between hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes,
| and wildfires, American houses have to deal with a lot.
| Properly-constructed wooden houses handle what they need
| to.
|
| Sure, you could say that all else equal, a masonry
| structure is more durable than a wooden one. But as they
| say, anyone can build a bridge that stands, but only an
| engineer can build a bridge that barely stands. Cost is
| always an object in the real world.
| chownie wrote:
| If anything, we're not responding to this _enough_.
|
| If we were civil engineers it would be shocking for the
| public to learn that we are sometimes ordered build the
| bridges terribly on purpose, for something like the purpose
| that it influences people toward using toll roads -- when
| in the world of software engineering not only has this kind
| of anti-user (anti- _human_ ) behaviour become commonplace
| but actually it's increasingly the only novel work we do
| between gluing other people's code together.
| globular-toast wrote:
| Agreed. You don't even need to just include engineers.
| Even professionals like electricians or nurses etc stand
| to be struck off or even sent to prison for incompetence
| like mislabelling a fusebox or something. Meanwhile
| software engineers are being told to just fucking put a
| bolt in the fusebox, we haven't got time to do it
| properly.
| bcrl wrote:
| It really depends on the culture of the organization,
| personal and team goals. Very few places have everything in
| place to support engineers by making work low friction,
| productive and with the right support from the rest of the
| team combined with interesting tasks and goals. Once in a
| while a job like that comes along, but usually it ends up
| changing over time as priorities for the organization and
| individuals shift.
|
| But yeah, I'm pretty down on tech these days (and even
| telecom). Bullshit happens everywhere and drains virtually
| all the fun out of everything. There are loads of incumbents,
| pole owners and municipalities that don't even do the bare
| minimum required by responding to permits in a timely manner.
| It's depressing that it is refreshing to me when people do
| the bare minimum -- replying to emails on the next business
| day (making it possible to get to the real work of installing
| cables for a customer). Most days for me now are hounding
| people to do what they should have done weeks / months /
| years ago, or writing legal documents to try to address harm
| they're causing. <sigh>
| trollbridge wrote:
| She still posts to her Mastodon and LinkedIn, but I guess
| blogging is completely dead. For what it's worth, she quit her
| job at Edera 2 weeks ago.
| catzkorn wrote:
| Hi!
|
| I've been trying to write 'the next post' for the last 5 years
| - it's often something I think about that I've just left these
| posts in the ether with no conclusion. It wasn't a conscious
| decision not to continue, but I started interviewing then got
| hired at an early stage start up (Tailscale), and everything
| turned into a blur. When I went back to the draft I had going,
| it felt overwhelming to try condense the pace at which my
| skills and career was evolving and I'd close it pretty quickly.
| Surprisingly to me, it's been more than just how I write code
| thats evolved - I've discovered a lot about how I operate
| within a tech company and that I'm also extremely user focused.
|
| I'm not sure how my blog was found and posted here (but thank
| you for reading!), but last night I did open that draft and
| started working on it again. A complete coincidence, but it was
| the first time it felt like I'm in the right space to continue
| working on it and distilling the past 4.5 years of employment,
| the initial job search, etc. As someone mentioned, I left my
| previous role recently, but I'm starting the next adventure on
| Monday. Now seems like a good time to finish that post!
|
| Charlotte
| globular-toast wrote:
| Looking forward to it!
| ethan_smith wrote:
| Charlotte (the author) now shares technical content through
| Tailscale's blog and her GitHub contributions instead.
| Quizzical4230 wrote:
| I am currently at the stage from where I admire the software
| world from outside, trying to be competent one day at a time. The
| author is a badass for landing tailscale!
| dblohm7 wrote:
| Can confirm that catzkorn is a badass.
| HughG wrote:
| I'm sure you've changed lots in the last 5 years, but laughed
| (kindly) at the bit about feeling silly for leading your pairing
| partner down a garden path for a morning: I've been a
| professional (or, at least, paid) developer since 1996 and I
| still take a wrong turn at least once a month, if not more often,
| and will happily bring a pairing partner along for the ride!
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