The new job uses .NET on the backend and VueJS on the frontend. I’m not a pro at .NET but I’m familiar with the design patterns and I can read the code and understand it, and I’ve been able to make contributions in the weeks I’ve been here. Other than engineering themselves into a special kind of microservice hell, the code is workable.
The front-end code is infuriating. I’ve never seen anything so fragmented and modularized, and I don’t mean in a good way. I’ve never run into any project that I couldn’t work with until now. It’s only Javascript, I should be able to grasp what they have going on, but there are several problems that stump me:
1. They always use the most terse and clever syntax possible; without any comments or documents, I’m having a hell of a hard time figuring out what they were thinking when some code was written.
2. The frontend guys are somewhat hostile. If I ask a question, it’s always “simple” or “easy” and I get a terse answer that doesn’t really take the details into consideration. I feel like they don’t want me around and it’s nigh impossible to get someone to actually jump on a screenshare and pair on something.
3. DRY is a religion here, to the point where everything is fragmented to hell. I have a hard time explaining but I feel like there’s a tradeoff where things can be split apart into their own modules to a degree that becomes counter-productive. Am I wrong about that?
In a nutshell, am I a bad programmer? Am I an asshole? Am I just getting old? Time to quit? Feeling burned out already and I need to figure something out.
This is why engineering leadership is crucial. You need an architect who's been burned by convoluted code before, who can push for objective measures of code quality and simplicity and (true) modularity (not just DRY-style thoughtless consolidation).
But we've seen a race to the bottom lately. Everyone is trying to do more with only junior developers, or senior developers who code like junior developers (just 3x faster and more convoluted).
And if you're at a startup, congratulations, your coworkers have all worked at other startups previously, where the determining factor as to wether the company succeeded or not was mostly on the business side (product/market fit) and they never got to see an unchecked engineering team slowly cripple a company from the inside.
There are three stages that almost every developer goes through. 1. Just code the shit up. Get it done and don't worry about structure. 2. Modularize everything! Design patterns, code reuse, code components, refactoring, getters & setters (cause attribute access is "harmful"), pointless doc strings, useless const declarations, and (shudder) microservices. 3. Nirvana. The stage where you realize what matters and what doesn't. You do not spend a month refactoring a bash script that will only be run once, for example.
I don't know you so I can't tell if you are in stage 1 or 3. Your colleagues definitely seem to be stuck in stage 2.
In my experience, you can't really teach people in stage 2 that what they are doing is wrong. They don't know that stage 3 exists so if you tell them that they are overdoing it, they'll think that you're a stage 1 scrub and/or sloppy. They have to realize themselves that they are wasting their time and that simple solutions almost always are better.
I did this at a previous job, where the application code base had some very unique (I hope) characteristics. I haven't read my notes recently but it's comforting to know that I have a record of it.
I think you should step back from the code and talk to the people. Ask them why they did something like this or like that. Show them that you value their work but that it is a shame that you can't fully enjoy it.
Do not start a situation in which it is them vs you.
But that's okay, know is half the battle. Maybe programming isn't your thing.
It took me a while, but I finally figured out I was disenfranchised programmer!
Now I write stock/options/futures algorithm and I'm super happy! (Oh and I don't care if my code is good or not as long as it makes money!)
I'm going through exactly the same thing as you, and asking myself the same questions. You're obviously more experienced than me, so it's actually reassuring that this happens to more senior people.