by moron4hire | 2025-07-18 04:07:07+00:00
I don't agree.

Some of the worst bugs I've hit have been in libraries written by very large companies, supposedly "the best and brightest" (Meta, Google, Microsoft, in that order) but it takes forever for them to respond to issues.

Some issues go on for years. I've spent months working in issue trackers discussing PRs and whether or not we can convince some rules-lawyer it doesn't warrant a spec change (HINT: you never convince him), chasing that "it's faster/cheaper/easier to use a 3rd party package" dragon, only to eventually give up, write my own solution, fix the core issue, and do it in less time than I've already wasted. And probably improve overall performance while I'm at it.

I think a lot of it depends on the exact field you're working in. If you're working in anything sniffing close to consulting, work is a constant deluge of cockamamie requests from clients who don't understand they aren't paying you enough to throw together a PhD research thesis in a month with a revolving crew of junior developers you can't grow and keep because the consulting firm won't hire enough people with any amount of experience to give the small handful of senior developers they keep dragging into every God damned meeting in the building so we can have a chance to come up for air every once in a while.

I'm at a point where I have enough confidence in my skills as a software developer that I know pretty much for certain whether I can develop a given solution. There are very few I can't. I'm not going to try to train an AI model on my own. I won't try to make my own browser. A relational database with all the ACID trimmings, no.

But I'll definitely bang out my own agentic system running off of local inference engines. I'll for sure implement an offline HTML rendering engine for the specific reports I'm trying export to an image. I'll build a fugging graph database from scratch because apparently nobody can make one that I can convince anyone to pay for (budget: $0) that doesn't shit the bed once a week.

Most of the time, the clients say they want innovation, but what they really want is risk reduction. They wouldn't hire a consultant if it wasn't about risk, they'd put together their own team and drive forward. Being broadly capable and well-studied, while I may not be quite as fast at building that graph database example as an expert in Neo4j or whatever, we're also not getting that person and have no idea when they are showing up. If they even exist in the company, they're busy on other projects in a completely different business unit (probably not even doing that, probably stuck in meetings).

But I know I can get it done in a way that fits the schedule. Spending time reading the worst documentation known to mankind (Google's) because some drive-by said they did this once and used a Google product to do it is probably going to end in wasting you a lot of time only to realize that said drive-by didn't spend long enough actually listening to the meeting to understand the nuance of the problem. Time that you could have spent building your own and hitting your schedule with certainty.

Sorry, it's late and I'm tired from a full quarter of 12 hour days trying to rescue a project that the previous team did nothing on for the previous quarter because... IDK why. No adults in the room.