I got hired as a backend "rockstar" a few years ago. Didn't work well. 1. I made some mistakes (my general response to said mistakes was to work to ensure th

I got hired as a backend "rockstar" a few years ago. Didn't work well. 1. I made some mistakes (my general response to said mistakes was to work to ensure the CI tool guaranteed said mistakes couldn't be repeated. Included kicking up CI into the process in the first place by fixing their test rot and enabling someone else to bring jenkins into the mix). One of those mistakes did cause a recoverable partial outage. 2. The extensive unfucking of the backend I performed still hasn't been applied, despite pretty clear demonstration of the safety of said changes . One of which if eventually applied will reduce their AWS bill by 10-20% - I produced a demo that this was safe bug-for-bug. A spectacular security hole that was there is gone, so that's a plus. I got retrenched (made redundant with a small payout once I pointed out that was what was needed). I went into the conversation to say "I'm going to need more money and we need to work out a process where my work gets applied", but the retrenced bit happened really early, so I never got to propose that :) . I had an offer within an hour of being retrenched. Currently I unfuck code at a similar scale for a larger concern and get reasonable career development opportunities. The place I was working for has been hiring junior devs like crazy, so I do worry about the health of their codebase - having said that when in their comfort zone the senior guys there are pretty good. I think the problem was that I was getting the senior guys out of their comfort zone, and I didn't take a sufficiently gentle approach. However I learned heaps, so all good. Can't imagine I'll be going back their though.