One of the most rewarding aspects of my previous career at a company spanning from a startup to an IPO and beyond was deleting bad code and replacing it in a massive Rails app that was touched by hundreds of devs in a high churn environment. I also took on fixing massive schema inefficiencies that had a lot of risk of breaking nearly every other team's flow. It took a lot of careful work and communication across multi-year goals that I managed, mostly alone. I was allowed to do this by a few early folks who believed I was doing a good service for the company in the long run but kept hinting it was a bad career choice for me personally. I believe I was eventually let go for making these massive improvements instead of adding that green button that the new Product guy wanted. No regrets.
I think I’ve taken some considerable career hits for that kind of attitude, but mostly no regrets here either. But I think I was affected by how, once you leave that company, your contribution to the effort can seem kind of gone, gone gone. That’s part of why I came back to trying to create a physical invention that someone might care about. Something for the grandkid to put on his mantlepiece and say “my granddaddy made this and patented it and (hopefully) it was the start of his big company.”
