Ask HN: How to Follow the Bosses' Wants
by drekipus | 2026-01-23 23:09:15+00:00
Probably a pretty classic story.. keep in mind this is me being affected so there's no way I can give an impartial representation of what's happening, but I promise I'll try...

I've been working in a startup for 5 years now, and the startup is going through growing pains to make a more formal company structure. As they do.

We have a new boss of my product area, who is looking to deliver on their first quarter.

Our product area has a long-running issue design issue that we have been trying to find a way out. This has been multiple years of discussions and proposals, a real group effort of design and feedback, and finally we have reached a point where we've 've found a design that helps everyone, and so people are excited to get onto it. (It's just event sourcing).

I've personally been leading the design of this event sourcing solution, and we've had an implementation strategy and parallel verification strategy etc. That the CTO himself recommended I do, and everyone is on board. There's real excitement in the air.

Our new boss has come in, and over promised on Q1 deliverables, and has made a notion document ( experimenting a bit with AI to come up with a plan, as he says) - talking about little things like using DTO to abstract from the database.

All of the details of his plan are using keywords that don't fit together. Like he'll call it "immutable DTO (bitemporal) event sourcing live calculation model records" -- if I try to push on what this means, which part where, he says that the words all just mean the same thing and that if I want to be pedantic I can change the terminology.

His example source code of how this would look like is a snippet of our current code, but with "FooQueryset" replaced with the words "list[FooDTO]" and that's all.

Meanwhile the plan that I have been working on and people are getting excited about is the "alternative, second, backup" idea. He'll repeatedly say it won't work and we haven't sorted out those details and we need to make sure we add value. He's also brought in our product team (so it's not just me and him) - and he leads with his version first, meaning some others on the team have no clue what certain terms mean, and when they try to get clarification, he'll butt in with how it's just my alternative plan and that words mean the same things and we should refer to the code sample. Some seem fine with this explainer, and I'm being inadvertently aggressive when trying to ensure we're all speaking the same language.

He's talked to some other lead engineers about his plan, and he said they're happy for it, but I don't know if that's because they're assuming it's the original plan under the hood (that they've already been happy with) or if he's making sense and I'm actually the one who's confused here.

If I didn't have a grounding in reality I think I'd probably be in the ward ATM. How do I deal with this? Do I just ride out the inevitable year-of-pain and then bring us back to the original plan? Is this the way the corporate world works?

Last year, some heads-of-engineering have been happy with my work and told me they want me leading my own team. I feel like taking up that offer, but it will look like I'm just being a spoilt sport because I didn't get my way, and really I don't even know if I can argue against that.

What do I even do here?