WhereDoesThisGo

Long story short, I'm sort of a 'useless inventor' and just trying to gauge how useless this idea is. So I have a lot of experience in ecommerce templates / designs, and I've seen a lot of UI patterns with modals, videos, grids, etc. There's also considerations like performance, responsiveness, and accessibility, and building these every time is a huge PITA.

I've done this work for the last ~8 years for a very large company, and let's just say I did I can do in 30 minutes with my framework what they will spend weeks building, repeated per project. I'm taking this further and creating a WYSIWYG for these web component. Using this WYSIWYG, you can insert demo templates and customize them to your desire. These forms are generated by reading the web components and knowing the props ahead of time, so I'm able to dynamically generate the fields needed for any combination of templates.

After that I'm thinking of allowing developers to make and save their own templates in a sort of gallery, and then anyone can browse any demos and create a page by mixing and editing any of these demo blocks.

Any thoughts on why AI makes this useless or why it's a complete waste of time and I should just go job hunting?

Thanks

Hi HN community,

I've been working as as senior web developer for about 10 years now, a lot of that time has been with a company in the fashion ecommerce industry on and off throughout those 10 years. Recently the hostile and arrogant attitude of the new CTO/SVP/VP/Directors/Engineers who were rapidly hired in the last few years is definitely contributing to my discomfort as they are replatforming and I don't agree with the new platform.

The company has a strong fashion presence and has been around for a long time, but it's currently going through a lot of changes. The previous CTO left and a bunch of new people were hired, leading to a lot of rewrites that I personally think are a disaster. The new solutions are unscalable and take a very narrow focus on a complex problem. I feel like the new developers are disrespectful of the actual problem and think it's an easy thing to solve that the previous developers couldn't handle.

The new codebase is "clean and modern", but it doesn't solve the problem in an elegant way. It's like if you asked a high schooler to solve a problem and they got it done with a hammer. It works, but it's not ideal. The business is happy because it's faster due to the new tech, but that's only because the old tech was handicapped, not upgraded, and the people who did their best under impossible standards are now being treated like punching bags.

I'm upset because I've given a lot of years to this company and learned a lot in the world of fashion ecommerce, 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. I feel like I played my hand wrong and missed an opportunity.

I'm seeking advice from the HN community on what to do next. Should I stay and try to work with the new team, or 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? Any advice or suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you.

I'm somewhere on the spectrum and workplace seems "off", but I don't know where to put my finger on it and it makes me upset now so I decided to ask HN what you think.

I've been with this company for ~10 years and I foolishly thought there was a path upwards before.

This is a long term company with strong fashion presence, last CTO left and a whole bunch of new CTO/SVP/VP/Directors/Engineers were hired very rapidly in the last years. While I am privileged that I can avoid most interactions with them, I sense hostility in terms of arrogance of "old solutions". The previous environment was glued together and built in realtime over the response to the market for a very old company rooted in retail, of course the implementation was not perfect looking back but at the time it was the best with the knowledge going forward.

There's a bunch of rewrites happening that I think are a disaster, basically the new guys are coming in and building new solutions that I personally think are unscalable and take a very narrow focus to a problem that is much more complex. In short, they seem disrespectful of the actual problem and think it's an easy thing to solve that a bunch of incompetent devs before couldn't do and did a bad job at.

Right now they are also struggling to scale up, and running into their own challenges with the application crashing and developers moving at a slow speed. The new codebase is "clean and modern", but it doesn't solve one of the problems in an "elegant" way in my opinion. It's like if you asked a high schooler to solve a problem and they got it done with a hammer. It works, business is happy, yes it's faster because new tech, but that's also because you handicapped the old tech, didn't upgrade, didn't invest, and now want to use people who did the best they could under impossible standards as punching bags.

I guess this turned into a rant of sorts because this is a company I have given a lot of years for, and I've learned a lot in the world of fashion ecommerce. I just don't know how to take my knowledge I've learned and transfer it elsewhere, or where my future career goes from here. I'm upset that there were such good ways of solving the problem if only the people who had been there long term had been asked. Instead we were all just shuffled to the side and asked to work under a whole bunch of new people. Yes we still have our jobs for now, but I'm not exactly happy after giving this many years to a company. I feel like I played my hand wrong.

EDIT: TO clarify, this was not 10 continuous years at one company. I did work with other smaller companies and other codebases/teams in between.