I'm hoping that I can either retire early, so that I still have time to enjoy programming on my own terms, or can somehow pivot to being a solo dev (which comes with its own pitfalls, of course).
I'm hoping that I can either retire early, so that I still have time to enjoy programming on my own terms, or can somehow pivot to being a solo dev (which comes with its own pitfalls, of course).
One thing that would help here is if new initiatives are new delivered artifacts rather than being tied to the CI/CD process of the established product. I haven't worked at a place that does this, but have worked at a place that didn't to its great detriment--instability of core product from changes made by new and slow new product development hindered by being in same monolith. Whenever I see a posting about a bank or other saying that we're big but have a small startup-mentality team, I don't buy it. Would love to find out I'm wrong on that.
I can't say for sure if any of those many startups where I did really cool stuff still runs those products. Possibly only in a sort of maintenance mode. What I'm working on now has more chance of being the foundation for something that lasts a lot longer, so taking a very long-term view makes it worthwhile.
I still do look fondly on the scrappy startup style of working in a small tight platform/API team where you can have a super technical discussion using so few words because you already know where the thoughts are headed.
I think my ideal is working on a project solo, but still having other folks (doing other projects) to bounce ideas off of.
Bonus if the task is purely debugging, like “get this to load faster” instead of making new features. Probably why a lot of apps get bloated with feature creep.