danjac

Whether you rewrite or refactor the code is not so much the point of my comment - it's more that you should first determine what you actually need, in consultation with the project stakeholders, get rid of whatever you don't need, and then you can decide whether you need to rewrite or refactor. Cutting away the bloat will give you a better perspective on that decision.

Personally, I would lean towards refactoring - a rewrite is the "declare bankrupcy" stage of technical debt and should only be considered in extremis. For example, the original codebase was written in ColdFusion and in 2025 you can't find any ColdFusion developers (or anyone in their right mind who wants to become a ColdFusion developer). But in any case, rewriting a trimmed down codebase is easier than trying to replicate features you don't need any more.

Often the problem with companies running the Feature Factory production treadmill too long is you have code supporting unused features and business logic, but nobody knows any more which features can be dropped or simplified (particularly after lots of employee churn and lack of documentation). So the problem is not so much technical debt, but product debt.

You can refactor, but you're also wasting time optimizing code you don't need. A better approach is to sit down with rest of the company and start cutting away the bloat, and then refactor what's left.

The problem is that once you take the VC coin, you are pushed towards hyper-scale. If you don't take the VC coin it's a much harder and longer path to self-sustainability, unless you have some way to fund yourself e.g. consulting. 37 Signals is the model here, but they are super-exceptional (they created Rails, after all).

Then having got there, a VC-funded competitor will just roll over you as they'll have better connections and funding.

They are great for throwaway hobbyist side projects where you don't want to worry about AWS billing horror stories or more expensive offerings like Digital Ocean or Linode.

I would not recommend them for a serious, money-on-the-table business.

Normally I hate timesheets, but there is some satisfaction in putting "Company meeting: 4 hours" into a timesheet and knowing the managers will have a mild heart attack when those 4 hours are multiplied for every person across the company when they look at the end of the month report.

You would terminate someone for...having an opinion? They didn't mention the company they worked for (if indeed it is their company and not some made-up example).

Little secret: outside of self-proclaimed "leaders" in the Linkedin bubble, most normal people think like the writer, if not put so eloquently. They have jobs to do, and know how to do them, and do not appreciate being dragged into a 4 hour meeting to listen to bullshit. Of course they'll do it if they are told to. But if you are a "leader" you would be conscious of their time and not waste it on self-congratulatory claptrap.

I have seen so many React code bases that are the polar opposite to "clean, manageable code" that I would strongly disagree with this premise.

That's not to say React is to blame, per se, but good code is the result of good developer practices rather than some framework.

hype

Honestly, what is the market for these SAAS starters these days? Is anyone making serious money, or even a modest side income, with some web app? It seems the low-hanging fruit is well and truly picked at this point and building something that will earn you decent money requires a lot of time and money investment in a vertical niche, not yet-another-project-management-tool you can put together in a week.

Then you have to rely on getting the job by other means than sending your CV. In other words networking.

Personally I don't apply to public job listings any more, even when I match all requirements. They are a waste of everyone's time. But networking has its limits.

Only if you were in right place and time. As a junior dev back then I was earning about the same as any other junior office worker.

Everyone laid off will be hanging their consulting nail. Whether there are enough gigs for them is another matter.

What evidence is this?

Depends on your circle. Most of my peers have families and mortgages, and don't have inherited wealth or sufficient savings. They are fiscally responsible but bootstrapping a company requires more resources than just being sensible with your money.

That's funny, as I apply to Django jobs with plenty of experience and just get ghosted, to the point I'm moving away from Django as it feels more and more like a dead end (though what in tech other than buzzword-du-jour is not a dead end at this point?)

I would agree. Applying to every public job posting out there is a waste of time.

Either the postings are fake (there for legal reasons, or to make the company look like they are healthy and growing) or they will be spammed by so many applicants that even if your resume is a perfect match it will just get lost in the noise.

Same here. However I do not believe things will recover, at least in a reasonable time frame for my own career. My thinking is now if this current job ends I need to think about exiting the industry and doing something else.

Oh well, tech is a nice hobby at least.

I have zero faith that it is going to pick up again. There is no evidence this is going to be the case. Your time would be better spent retraining for another industry, if that is practical for you.

This is definitely why I am thinking about leaving the industry, if and when current gig ends.

Even with a resume tailored exactly to requirements, crickets.

Some copium going around - "it's just interest rates", "thinks will pick up soon". Nope. This is what the end of the industry looks like, at least for a great many developers.

I mean Mastodon exists, each instance requiring just a small amount of funding to keep the lights on. There is also Tildes, which I think is a nonprofit registered in Canada.

It depends on what your aim is. Had Ello followed a proper nonprofit structure from the start, they could have continued indefinitely with a small staff and volunteers maintaining an open source code base and handling moderation. It would not necessarily be easy, but it would be doable.

They didn't though, and the fact that the original CEO later got into into NFTs and now something-AI maybe shows he was something of a bandwagon-jumper. Back then everyone wanted to be the next Facebook, so that was what he jumped into.

How much profit does Amazon make these days again?

Only 700 new IT jobs created in the last year for the whole of the US:

https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/08/700_it_jobs_us/

The blood-letting is still ongoing (Pixar and Discord, just talking about today).

I think the overall reason is that a lot of startups and services have been unprofitable for a while, and the zero-interest-rate environment of the past decade was the high tide that covered a lot of people swimming naked, as Buffett once put it. There might be other reasons for example SAAS platforms being consolidated into fewer and fewer big players. Long term AI will play its part - perhaps creating lots of junk code, but CEOs don't really care about long term quality these days, just short term earnings calls.

Of course there are going to be niches and things like payroll or flight booking programs that will need maintenance work from now until the end of time, and some programmers will be around in 10 years, just not as many.

Again, I would love to be proven wrong.

Only a very few people are in a position to found startups. For most of us we have to learn how to negotiate the workplace.

You can totally do this (within the bounds of your contract) but from a career point of view, it's not wise to burn bridges.

There's a lot of talk about "networking" to find jobs or opportunities (like your own startup or freelancing) but one thing networking means is building relationships with people you have worked with in the past. That doesn't mean sucking up, but just being known to be reliable and dependable makes you a safer bet if that person is in a position to hire or recommend you.

That manager or coworker you did a project with a few years ago might have moved on to another company and is someone you can reach out to. If you dropped out of a project mid-way without cause leaving them in the lurch, that's something they are going to remember.

Sometimes of course a job or project can be a nightmare and you want to have nothing to do with those people ever again, which is understandable. But otherwise I would try to be professional as possible and leave options open, and if that means giving your notice and coasting a few weeks, then do so.

I see very little evidence for it coming back. The economy in aggregate may be healthy (depending where you live) but that doesn't mean software developers will be in much demand.

I already pointed out there's going to be legacy work for a while, especially in certain specialisations.

Everything else "AI powered developers are going to startup all the things!!!" is just hype by some poster literally calling themselves (ironically I hope) ChatGPT.

They do so out of desperation. If that's the future of the tech industry, I would prefer to leave the industry.

Yep, like I said, whistling in the dark.

I would be happy to be proven wrong.

It's the end of an industry as we knew it.

There will be demand for developers in some very specific sectors and specialities, and some legacy code support for a while, but likely most of us will be out of work within the next few years.

Some people are claiming "things will pick up again Real Soon Now, you'll see" but they are whistling in the dark.