Ask HN: Seeking Advice on Next Career Move

I wonder how many engineers out there are truly aligned with their company’s leadership. In my experience (more than 10 years of experience), I have experienced the following stages:

- junior engineer: I really didn’t know leadership even existed back then. I was just too focused on my Jira issues and PRs. I was enjoying the tech

- “medior” engineer. Got to knew leadership and a bunch other inflated titles. Didn’t bother because I was getting better at my tech skills and I could ask for more salary and raises. I was still enjoying the tech and started to appreciate soft skills

- senior engineer. Got more involved with upper management, but never really talked to any C level executive besides intro chattings… but didn’t care either. I didn’t care because I was finally making real money and playing politics was never my thing. Felt entitled to earn that much money because I sweat blood to get my bachelor and master’s degree in CS plus I have read all the tech books “a software engineer should read”. Still enjoying tech, but giving personal opinions about tech was becoming more and more painful

- “staff” engineer. I only enjoy working on personal projects. I try to share my limited knowledge with younger colleagues. Don’t enjoy making tech decisions with other senior engineers (because everyone has their own preferences). Too late to start getting interested in what leadership has in mind… my plan is now to work on my own projects and try to be self dependent (in the meantime, “staff engineer” money doesn’t hurt)

20+ as a developer. I reached your point 5+ years ago and I decided to stay and became a little bitter with the entire team. I took my department and moved to a different part of the org when a chance arose under different senior leadership. There were new challenges I couldn't fully put my heart in because part of me was still with the other team. The place closed shortly after.

Those feelings followed me to my new role where I had to do some serious reflection. In the end who cares if they changed it and made it worse. New VPs come and go often bringing new ways to make things worse. What do you want to do next?

I would use the opportunity to pickup a new language. Take that modern language and use it to open doors that you will find closed in your older language. Maybe pivot into another role in 2 or 3 years in the new language.

Your domain experience will add bonus points if you apply in the same industry and will be slightly positive, neutral or negative in others.

If you want to start a business do it while you are fulltime. Your technical skills are the least important aspect for success. If you can get people to give you money then go for it. If you think your perfect codebase backend solution will make it a success over a stapled together website you've already failed

There are a few things that come to mind when I read this:

1) Don't go build a competitor. That is a road where your motivation is driven by bitterness. It will come out in the work and the culture and you won't really have moved on -- you'll just be hanging on to the reasons you left and trying to prove that you were right. If you want to build something new, go for it -- but solve a different problem.

2) If the business is happy and the customers are happy and everyone other than you is happy... it might be worth trying to understand their perspective. It sounds like you are the type of coder who wants the solution to be ideal, surrounded by pragmatists that just want it to work. I find that a healthy balance is needed to truly succeed, but if you are the sole idealist, you won't be happy. So if you cannot adjust to what everyone else wants, you probably are correct to leave.

I'd recommend either looking at what other tech your customers use and seeing if any of those companies are hiring, or find a new problem in the same industry and try to solve it.

But if you choose to leave this company.... really leave it. Close the chapter, be grateful for what you got from it, and move on.

Clean code == elegance > complex in my books. I'm unsure what your definition of elegance is, but for me it's simple and clean. Any complex things should be slimmed down to simple thing or a small combination of simple things. If it's faster, than it's even better, if something is both cleaner and faster, I can't think of a scenario that I'll not side with that.

Premature optimization is root of all evil. It seems the new system is coping fine with demand, are they at the risk of falling over? If not, then there's no point in trying to prematurely optimize it, especially if change made it slower. Even if optimization is necessary, a good optimization strategy should not have made anything slower to the point that it is noticeable.

All in all, it seems like a successful rewrite story, which is not easy. Many times rewrite makes things worse and not cleaner and simpler.

I'm not very qualified for personal advice, but try greener fields either in org or elsewhere, as software engineers we are valued for the ability to create, and should not get too tied up to our existing creations.

"but I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't know how to take my knowledge and transfer it elsewhere or what my future career looks like"

Don't think like this. You learned how to build resilient software over a decade. That can be applied to any company with complex software needs. Fashion industry experience is not relevant and doesn't mean you cannot work in another industry.

Focus on your strengths. Make a list of your achievements. You probably haven't done this for a long time if at all. If you can solve problems, you can find a job at a company that could use your skills.

"should I take my opinions and start a company where I solve this company's needs in my own way and offer it to other companies as a SaaS"

That is a whole another discussion to have. Starting a company is no joke (I run one). Also be careful about starting in same industry as your current employer because there could be potential legal issues that you should be careful about.

Do you have a stake in the company – options, RSUs, golden handcuffs that you'd be walking away from, or whose value these decisions may be jeopardizing? If not, what are you getting out of staying?

It sounds like you're not aligned with leadership or the business on technical direction/prioritization, and the process of coming to the current technical direction has left you feeling underappreciated and judged for prior choices. It sounds like you're also an IC not in leadership and not embedded with the in group, so not likely to change much (especially if the business views this work as successful). I can't tell whether I'd agree with you on which direction would have made sense here, but it seems like you're just setting yourself up for frustration or worse by staying.

You have the luxury of time. Use it.

Start working your network. Not for a job, but just to catch up. Ask anyone who you worked with to coffee (real or virtual) and ask about what they are working on. You'll start to get a feel for what is happening in their world, and my guess is something will catch your eye. May be webdev, may be fashion, whatever.

My guess is that someone from your network will try to hire you if you indicate you're looking. While the layoffs have impacted the market, senior folks are still getting jobs.

If you want to start a SaaS, make sure you have a lawyer review your employment agreement.

> leading to a lot of rewrites that I personally think are a disaster

Rewrites usually are a disaster, doesn't really matter what the from's and to's are technically speaking.

> the people who did their best under impossible standards are now being treated like punching bags

GTFO then (find a new job, then leave). If leadership can't recognize that existing implementations are a product of past trade-offs/prioritizations (where feature/product work typically took priority in early days to win deals) then they aren't likely to be making good decisions themselves and might be a little too full of ego.

It sounds as if your understanding of the problems differs from those of your new colleagues; have you considered whether your resistance to the changes is properly calibrated against the needs of the business?

"I'm not sure where to go from here. I don't know how to take my knowledge and transfer it elsewhere or what my future career looks like. I feel like I played my hand wrong and missed an opportunity."

I feel the exact same way, but I spent my 10 years in finance dev. My plan is to just stick it out because I don't have any transferable skills.