Web Development

I'm handing in my resignation notice next week! Signed the contract for my new job today :D

I wouldn't call my main project quite a sinking ship yet, but it's certainly getting there. Managers are foaming at the mouth to have all developers use as much AI as possible, so the codebase is generating technical debt at a record pace. The project is fully dependent on AWS (the customers, large players in one of Germany's essential public sectors, are getting more hesitant about that fact by the day) but there's no plan or even consideration to maybe look towards alternative cloud providers. And security issues and CVEs are piling up left right and center because npm libraries are just pulled in with no care in the world. Can't even keep up with opening enough tickets for all of them. I'm really surprised that the company had no major security incident yet, but it feels like we are due for one any day.

Honestly, it was fun while it lasted. I'm mainly just leaving because I haven't really gotten to build any new features in months now because I'm the only one who really cares enough to go in and fix CVEs. I feel like I'm just the janitor at this point 🤷

Like a rat! About 3/4 of my career hops were exactly that. Some I was aware of, some because my red flags were just the surface apparently.

As long as a job gives me enough of treasure we make AND I can meaningfully contribute I'm happy. Places going under tend to fail to do one or the other or both!

One time I was just super lucky. I wanted to move from ops to less stressful engineering, and only found out that my old employer lost the client I was fully interegrated with.

Yeah I've quit startups twice when they ran out of money. They were both transparent about it and not everyone quit. One of them got bought and is still alive. One of them found a bit of extra money...

But to be honest a big part of quitting was because the product obviously wasn't commercially successful enough, and I didn't really want to work on a doomed product.

I don't really understand what you're asking tbh. If you want to quit, quit! You don't owe them anything.

I have sometimes switched to "do the job I would stay for" mode, but it's a fine line between that and "burn bridges" mode. In the end it hasn't worked out; things kept going downhill, though it did help confirm my feeling and improve my day to day a little.

So I'd say trust your instincts — if it seems bad and you've raised concerns and have a way out, take it. The caveat there is to always be on the lookout for better options / do the occasional interview, since you won't have as high a bar once you absolutely have to get out.