I came in to work Monday morning, showed it off, and inadvertently triggered a firestorm. Later my boss told me not to do that again because it caused havoc with schedules and such.
So I quit and found a better job. Sometimes the new guy can make a better version themselves over the weekend, not because they’re a supergenius, but because they’re not hampered by 47 teams all trying to get their stamp on the project.
(In before “prime example of overconfidence!”: feel free to doubt. It was a CRUD app with a handful of models on a PostgreSQL backend. They were writing a new Python web framework to serve it, complete with their own ORM and forms library and validation library. Not because the existing ones wouldn’t work, mind you, but more out of not realizing that all these problems were already sufficiently solved for their requirements.)
1. Optimize things so that they work 10 000 times faster because it makes us look incompetent (must be done slowly to show gradual progress).
2. Brag about such optimization (to stakeholders) without first synchronizing this with them (so they can brag proportionally to their pay rate :) ).
The core principle is to always make those above you - your bosses, mentors, or superiors feel comfortably superior.
If you display your talents too aggressively, you risk triggering their deep-seated insecurities, which can lead them to sabotage your career or remove you from your position.
Galileo Galilei handled this really well. When he discovered the moons of Jupiter he strategically named them after the ruling Medici family.
By making the discovery about their greatness rather than his own intellect, he secured their lifelong patronage.
However, if your superior is a "fading star" or is clearly about to fall, you do not need to be merciful. In these cases, it may be strategic to outshine them to hasten their downfall and position yourself as the natural successor.
If you've spent any time in a large enough organization you realize quickly that hierarchies form based on status, power and influence & not necessarily technical merit. No it's not "the best person for the job" that rises up and tells you what to do.
Casually solving a problem that required a lot of resources and personnel has big implications in the power dynamics of the org. This is like setting off a nuke. You don't just do this unless you are prepared for the blow back or can easily consolidate attention & influence in the immediate aftermath.
Take a look at OpenAI's corporate politics for an example of how this works in practice. All the key talent that defined the company has left or was forced out and will likely languish in whatever ventures they start next, all because they don't understand how humans operate & how to drive change by aligning incentives.
Errr… Galileo was asked to write a book discussing both sides of the heliocentric / geocentric debate … and so wrote a book with two characters having a debate while walking in a garden - one named (I paraphrase for effect) “Galileo” and one named “Pope Simplehead”
Needless to say the next twenty years under house arrest gave him a lot of time to think about character names :-)
The requirements as they went out were much higher than they needed to be, because I decided telling them that we weren't stressing anything on the obsolete NT desktop repurposed as the test system might not please everyone.
"I made this x times better" is not relevant to _most peoples in any org_.
That's the dark secret. Nobody cares how good of an engineer you are _unless there is a fire to put out_. After which you get pat on the back and back to usual business.
There are situations where years of impeccable, high value diligent work is rewarded.
But what is more common is that the rewards go to those who are in politically expedient position to get the rewards. Favourites, culturally aligned folk, etc. And sometimes it's not even about you or your boss, but the politics in the organization at large. "You are not allowed to promote anyone due to budget" is a very common thing.
So I guess what I mean to say is if as an egineer you want to retain your sanity, when at work focus on maximizing business value. If you know a kick-ass solution that is 10000x better than industry standard go with it but know this - nobody will care! Nobody believes _someone in their org_ could have beaten _industry standard_ unless the org is very unique. What you get is small increase in your reputation - and sadly nobody recognizes how hard that was. Maybe you will meet some other engineer at some point who has tackled that same issue - and then you can bond over the solution.
A large part of software ecosystems is about business, politics, and the large scale impact of technology.
Saying this as an IC whose previous tasks at previous employer could have employed _teams_ but since we were allowed to deal with them smartly it was just me.
So if you know a 10000x solution to a problem many people have - that's a good opportunity to consider can it be productized!
And on the other hand, the complexifier (you know the type) ships rude goldberg gizmos just waiting to go off-kilter - and then they come in and save the day - and get rewarded. This creates a very strong "emperor has no clothes" syndrome until reality hits the organization really hard in the face. More often than not these horrible solutions are "good enough" and the show just goes on.
Don't take it too seriously! That's what people are like!
Basically build vs buy. The problem is on the 'buy' portion of looking at things the company failed. So they took who they had on hand and built something. It took a fresh perspective to say 'hey have you tried this' and looks like they did not want to hear it. I would say the right choice was made to move on.
This is wildly common. At that point they were committed to the wrong path at 'above my pay grade levels'. Once you get that buy in you better do it that way. Most companies will not pivot unless the champion for whatever is going on is removed in some way.
At 'my paygrade' I can prototype tech but I better make a good case why I need everyone else to do it too. If I dont I will be summerly ignored at best, at worst 'the guy with the lets rewrite the system hahahaha' guy. I might even be right about it. But the probelm is a jr level guy is not going to have the political cover to make it happen. Even if they are right.
But if you can get 'the higher ups' to buy in. Then it is quite dramatic how much better somethings putting that sort of tech in. Then other times it can be a total disaster. So you have to pick your hill to die on.
3 engineers arrived - fashionably late. We explained them the situation and all we wanted from them was some GCP offering that would cure our woes and one that would cut our bills. The senior consultant - and presumably the only tech guy (rest seemed to be salesy) wasted our time like a used car salesman - he didn't even understand Google's own product portfolio and recommended us to use something like Spanner - which was totally not the solution to the problem, not to mention, expensive.
My boss and I left the meeting pissed off and he told me - "Neya, you probably know more about the product portfolio than these guys. Let's leave". That weekend, I went with my tried and trusted favorite Db - PostgreSQL - CloudSQL with a custom Elixir middleware based an old CMS I wrote a decade ago. After some trial and error, the solution worked flawlessly (and still does till date on auto-pilot). My client still has the lowest cost in the region - 1/3rd the cost of their competitors...7 years later. Back then, there was no vibe-coding, no AI, no auto-completion. Just pure thinking and experimentation.
All this just to say I agree that the new guy sometimes can make the best solutions to a problem and not always screw up. I always listen to new hires these days (now I'm a fractional / CTO) because you never know who could pull off that 1/3rd cost cutting framework move.
Sometimes those complex solutions are the right tool for the job. And other times, you just need to glue some stuff together, call it good, and start making money.
Experience helps a good engineer know when each approach is appropriate.
This video by Sasa Juric is still the gold standard (imo) of Elixir demos for anyone who hasn't seen it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvBT4XBdoUE
Did you talk to anyone about your plans before you brought in the demo or let them know they were solved problems? Often these sorts of reactions come down to your boss not wanting their team to lose their jobs because of the perception that it can all be handled by one person who's happy to work weekends.
Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, for a Django CRUD app. It was a 4 person-week project turned into a major ordeal. No one should have lost their job; they should have been put to work doing the thousand other more productive things they could’ve been doing instead.
I think that's exactly why you should have talked to your peers and let them know they were solved problems, unless the overengineering was intentional.
I got a green light to do an integration in a week alone, which was planned for a team of 5 for half a year. We knew that it cannot be that much. So I delivered…
It was never used. It was purely political. The integration didn’t happen because it was “half a year”, but because middle management didn’t like the idea of integration for political reasons.
Over the years I’ve come to realize that what people call politics at times is just having interpersonal skills.
That did not go down well, even though it was a great product, styled etc. had all the bells and whistles.
I don't get it.
On the other hand, programmers are happy to work with AI, which is incredibly limited and a pale shadow compared to the real "I" in educated and experienced meat brains.
Also, networking - in both space and time (among the living, the latter with the dead, one way from them to us) - is THE gigantic advantage of humans. Not to want to bother with it is an equally gigantic mistake, if you want to use being human to more than a tiny fraction of its potential.
If you are interested in creating solutions and useful systems, "politics", human networking, should be THE number one priority. Long before anything technical.
Important scientists and engineers were great networkers and communicators. They also knew which connections where worth making. Just like in the brain, fewer good connections are better than wildly cross-connecting everything.
Occasionally though, I do get thrust into it, mostly during a company pivot about something I wasn't hired to do. All the personalities to manage, I 100% fumble, but still deliver.
The bosses - hell management's job leading into organizational culture - is to stop politics from derailing good engineering and customer satisfaction.
It's not too tough for me. Now that you know where I stand the other side better get it's act together.
Drowning in politics helps nobody including the boss. It's a net loser.
Now I'm practical and empathetic: a surprise can bring heat. But then you breath and get a grip. Cool. But thereafter the right things better get done. Politics for a day - np - politics sapping know how making cynical SE'S think twice? Never.
In a lot of cases the "new guy" thinks its an easy software and does it on his free time and thinks he did a great job.
In reality the specs are never 100% done correctly. The "new guy" misses some edge cases everybody but him knew because its just company knowledge. A lot of info in the specs was missing since they are not complete and so on.
This over the weekend never works in the long run. The ORM worked for all the happy path and written down cases but then you have cases were the ORM just is not good enough or fast. So you start to add strange code to work around the ORM. The same for the web framework or the validation lib.
To me the author of this comment sounds like the typical "Freelancer" coming in into a company knowing everything better then all the people and then leaving after a few months and now everybody else has to deal with his code.
Turns out it's a lot easier to build on top of a common framework than do everything from scratch.
Its something different coming in and changing things here and there but rewriting the hole thing on a weekend is something different.
We only know what OP wrote and he doesn't sell himself as a genius but as someone who was competing with really, really bad ideas.
In 99.9% of cases what seems to be "the better" version is better only for the "new guy" or rather his ego.
Those 47 teams hampering doesn't necessarily mean a bad thing, and more often than not actually well justified "stamps".
You only understand those things when you turn from the "supergenius" into an owner who have to take care not only of numbers on screen, but also security, interfacing, management and so on.
Or you don't turn into.
The examples are legion, and they always seem to have NIH and baroque requirements, and be rather over- than underspecified. I would go so far as to say that these projects are almost never successful (and definitely never on time and budget).
I don't intentionally make my work hard for anyone else to maintain. I comment and write tests pretty thoroughly in case someone else comes along. Or in case I get woken up at 6am with a bad hangover.
But I don't think Claude Code is going to prevent an org that thinks they can prompt their way to a replacement for all their SaaS from having internal political bickering that makes them end up with a extra-shitty mega-compromise to try to make all the internal stakeholders happy.
If you've got no vision and no taste, you need to find a vendor who will protect you from screwing up your internal processes and tools.
Internal tools teams have rarely cared much about UX or the day-to-day experience of their poor users. The quick-and-dirty internal-prompt-based one is likely to similarly be unimaginative and unintuitive.
I don't doubt you at all.
I once worked on a project that was a new sign-up process for a large retailer (~90k employees at the time, four figures worth of outlets, quite a few billions in turnover).
There were about 60 people across, I can't even remember, maybe 10 teams that I knew about. One of the managers there assured me that the true participant figure was closer to 160. I was agog.
This project took months, and it had been going for months before I joined. And, as you can imagine, with that many people involved over that sort of timescale, there was turnover: people, sometimes key people, would leave and be replaced - sometimes by others who'd already worked on the project, but sometimes by new people - with the expected disruption that causes.
It was two web pages, plus some back end plumbing across multiple systems.
But, in the grand scheme of things, nothing that complex. I reckon it was a handful of thousands lines of code total across the full stack. I was mostly on the database side and, IIRC, I wrote a few hundred lines of SQL in a couple of stored procedures (wouldn't have been my preferred solution building from scracth but, you know, we weren't, and we had to integrate with a legacy systems that had to keep working as expected).
Overall it took 8 or 9 months from kick off to shipping and I was involved for perhaps 3 months of that towards the end. I was on the call with dozens of other people whilst me and one of the other guys hooked the final pieces together and tested it end to end for the first time... and it worked. There was actual cheering.
Large enterprises are genuinely ridiculous.
Maybe it's just something that happens to many in web development world, not-invented-here and all...
Fortunately it was limited to a small isolated service but I can imagine the damage on the long term if you continue that route on what becomes a huge monolith after a few years.
It has its edge cases, but Alchemy is the greatest thing in the world when you need its exact features.
But yes, I’ve used that line plenty of times: “we’re not in the X-writing business”. I mean, sometimes you can’t help it, but those should be exceedingly rare cases.
Big corpo may be too big to fail, not so sure about their whole cohort of partners and fakers.
