Ask HN: Rant, Am I bad or is this a company with a poor tech culture?

For next time: it's really easy to accidentally ruffle feathers if you come in and start proposing tooling or process changes. People get attached to their project if they've worked on it for a while, and can take observations from an outsider as judgemental or an attack, regardless of how valid those observations are (many of yours seem valid to me). You coming from big tech can make people even more sensitive to this (if you're triggering their latent impostor syndrome or whatever as someone from a prestigious company). The way you summarize your manager's feedback makes me think that you either rubbed him the wrong way or offended some more tenured people who complained. Kind of hard to undo that now, but helpful to keep in mind for the future. If you demonstrate that you can hack it on tickets as you ramp up and establish some trust with your teammates over a few months, you'll typically have an easier time with this type of stuff.

(I would normally add a caveat that another good reason to wait a bit before bringing stuff up is that you might be missing the bigger picture, and that can help you ensure that you're actually arguing for useful change. I omit it for you because "we should have any observability at all for our production application" seems pretty uncontroversial to me and doesn't make me think you're out of touch or focused on unimportant things)

1) "they are incrementally migrating from Angular 1 to React" - Did they actually learn React? Because the worst React apps I've see is from teams who just took their habits from another platform and re-coded their comfort zone in React.

2) "I should not attempt to make contributions outside of the tickets I am assigned, and I am expected to raise 1 PR per day" - Did you get hired as a junior? Because they are treating you like one. I would not accept such little autonomy if I had over a decade of experience.

Aside from that, they are clearly not working in full modernized practices. This is not necessarily a bad thing. If they perform well and have a smooth-running shop, being a bit behind the curve is fine. But if their lack of modern practices is causing the other friction, then it is a problem. But there isn't an inherent correlation between "behind-the-time" and "bad team"

The most important question isn't any of this, though. Are you happy there? If you hate it there, that is all you need to know.

But, having been in a somewhat similar situation, I can tell you that some companies and teams are just dysfunctional and "cliquey". It has nothing to do with anything rational or logical or something you did or didn't do, it's just broken beyond repair. My guess would also be that they have had a number of people come and go probably due to the same reasons.

That manager also sounds like they shouldn't be managing at all. Besides that silly metric(did they also specify how many lines of code they want per day? ridiculous), it would've been more useful if they explain why your changes were turned down at least. There might be a good reason that you're not aware of. A sane manager would choose to guide you to make sure your valuable contributions benefit the business and align with any strategy as opposed to talking to you like a child and going "do it because I said so". Your teammates may have been having a bad week or feel threatened but I blame your manager. They should know better.

I recommend you plan your exit as nothing good will come out of you staying.

Some startups are run by cowboys/cowgirls. They don't care about anything other than features until everything falls apart or they rebuild in a nightmare sprint.

I've been at one of these. You will fail to change them even if you stay for 3 years. You risk getting fired if the CEO realizes the mess and hires in someone to fix it. Your manager is already thinking about firing you.

I think basically, yes, it's just a poor tech culture, and that's how they like it - they're not interested in any process improvements, they just want you to be a ticket taker. Find some other better project if you can, rather than trying to "fix" this one.

2. Expectation from you is to raise PR until you 'know' how it's done. By showing up from bigtech and by suggesting solutions, you are basically telling them you've seen it done better, and that's a bitter pill to swallow.

3. The startup has been around for 10 years, and tech changes fast; things might have been built rapidly and to a paying customer's corner case, and now the product looks terrible from an external observer's perspective.

4. Even bigtech products evolve into terrible things and nobody has time to go fix on a haunch from someone, however insightful it is. If you claim to have tech skills, why not come up with metrics to prove your point and how much money it can save or bring in.

5. You can't convince people from your pedigree, but from your insights AND backing it with data (latency, resource usage ==> revenue).

6. Startups don't have money laying around so if features don't have $$$ printed on them, they get canned.

good luck!

Poltics goes a long way in this. You need to make others happy first and build up some goodwill first. If you want to tough it out here, do this first, make some allies, and then slowly suggest changes.

Don't suggest to everyone at once, try to build consensus for your changes one engineer at a time. Ideally you'd make friends with the lead or others you can pitch to first privately.

Apply for new jobs immediately. In the meantime do 1 pr a day.

Big tech expects you to suggest and solve problems late stage startups just want someone to not rock the boat. You want an early startup where you know the ceo and eat lunch with them or back to big tech . You are in a get paycheck and use extra time on oss project.

Use the constraints provided to build the best solutions you can given the horrific situation.

You complete your ticket in a way that’s simple, maintainable, and extend.

I always found it fun to write cleaner interfaces on top of shit code and eventually there’s a point where you just sorta flip the switch to the better implementation without issues.

It sounds like doing tickets is what needs doing.

And “you’re doing it wrong” ain’t doing what needs doing.

How you handle that will determine how you grow as an engineer.

How you behave will determine whether people want to work with you again.

My advice: roll up your sleeves, spit on your hands, and grab an ax.

The pile of wood ain’t gonna chop itself.

Good luck.