throwaway98988

Apologies for the wrong thread title. I meant "Have you ever". Sometimes I read stuff over and over and over and still reads fine but is wrong. Oh well, sorry.

That's exactly one of the problems that I have. Somehow people are okay with things taking 2 years rather than 3 months though so there isn't a lot of pressure to change.

I'm at a point where I don't know if sticking around can have a positive influence on my career, maybe I'll learn to be more zen? How will that help if I change jobs? Or, will I become used to bad engineering and sabotage myself in the future? These are the kind of questions I'm having.

Assuming I have a good set of skills and enough experience, when faced with a challenging situation like this, I should try to be a positive force and bring improvements. However, I'm failing at that constantly and I just think it could have a negative impact on myself (burnout is a fact at this point).

Really trying to find the silver lining in all of this.

There's a certain disdain for metrics so we're not tracking a lot of things proactively (think latency/rate, for example). That means every new change is based on a feeling of how it'll impact the systems. We also don't have a dev/test environment so changes to production are what I'd call, "faith based". There's a lot of apply to production, revert cycles. Or worse: no changes at all for fear of breaking things.

But there are more mundane things like not using a code linter because $linter enforces some rule that someone doesn't like, so discussions stall. There are literally hundreds of JIRA tickets about some proposed idea that fails to reach consensus.

I think isolating myself from the craziness is a good idea but I'm having trouble with how it would be received. Say I push a code change that fixes a bunch of things that $linter complained about, including stylistic changes. Now that has to be reviewed by someone and...? Should I just keep pushing the envelope like that? Someone will probably contribute some piece of code full of violations and then... I fix it and cause an incident with teammates?

One possible outcome is to just accept things and let go. I see this a lot in people that have been here for many years. They are also not people I would aspire to be so... I kind of have to accept defeat but that's demoralizing. I'm coming to a point where I'm asking myself where I could be and I don't have a good answer. Should I stick around and keep trying to change things? Back to the swimming against the current question.

Thanks for all the feedback.

Unfortunately, I have to agree. I've been hired into an informal "staff/principal" role for my part of the organization and it's simply impossible to work. The other staff/principal engineers I see here are exactly how you describe. They are against anything that will make their roles as "the oracle" less important.

Documentation is such a mess because of that and the onboarding process specifically says there are a lot of "oral history" newcomers have to learn before doing anything meaningful.

What should a staff/principal engineer do if company culture is against change?

Posted a related question here, if that's a better place to discuss this question: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19130451