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Comment by conqrr | Hacker News Reader

If there is a place that is hiring and cares about Software Quality, I'll take a 70% paycut to work there.

You would have liked the last place I worked before retirement. Full-on software test team and everything. Private offices, too. Don't get me wrong, there were warts (oh, were there warts), but overall it was a good time. It wasn't a 70% pay cut, but the cut was considerable in comparison to what I was accustomed to. I didn't care, I was nearing retirement, and my "I'd take a pay cut if..." was the aforementioned private office.

But the company got sold to a conglomerate before I left, so I can't guarantee that culture is still there.

Why are people so reticent to name companies, even when they're praising them?

It can be seen as dark advertising. Because it is.

Because signaling is more important to them than helping

I've just accepted the fact that every tech company is just a dumpster fire.

Some are dumpster fires inside oil spill fires on top of a lethally radioactive surface. Once I had such a client from the depths of hell. Handling lower/middle-income people's wealth. Doing money math with floating point arithmetic. In Javascript. Minimum "function" line size of one hundred lines, with several four hundred line "functions". With "functional" idioms like map/filter etc. inside said functions, except hang on why is the mapping function making network calls? To a workflow orchestrator? Which is then calling out into... mongodb. To... do the money math based on a flag in the `meta` field of a user object. A flag that is being set and reset at least twice, directly in the four hundred line function I'm staring at with bleeding eyes, and, but I can't bear to jump to definitions and see where else it might be toggled from the calling code? Please don't make me do it.

Um, and this was just one aspect of their software organisation.

Four hundred line floating point dumpster fires, inside a gawdawful dog-slow software system, because, nearly a hundred "microservices" (about two per engineer, I counted), being somehow managed via an elaborate AI of calendar tetris, because everyone in the company was somehow fine with it, because they were mostly young and it was their first or second job and they probably didn't know any different, the poor sods.

Plot twist: Newly-hired head honcho of software was going to fix it all with Kubernetes. Peak transaction volumes of about ten per minute.

Once the project ended, I never looked back and wiped all but the essential lessons from memory.

I can't name them because my brain legit refuses to look up the name. I know it's there somewhere in the periphery. And even if it did pop back, it shall remain nameless, for harm could come to many innocents.

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