I agree that these things suck. I had a very similar experience in a few startups/scaleups. They were incredibly successful despite the horrible tech and horr

I agree that these things suck. I had a very similar experience in a few startups/scaleups. They were incredibly successful despite the horrible tech and horrible environment for development. IME the reasons for that are often due a culture problem stemming from the top, so there's no way to really fix the problems as an employee. One of those companies still has one of the founders in a "tech director" or something like that. Really great guy, great person, but he must be writing his 3th or 4th ORM now, and I'm not even joking. The first few iterations were in PHP but the new one was going to be in Java. Each time the backend needed a new feature that was difficult to implement on top of the previous ORM, he would retreat to design a new version of the backend (including a homegrown ORM) and gets green light from the CTO. He and the team are clearly not really good at producing a good design, and also not good at finishing, considering the messes left behind on every rewrite-everything implementation. When I worked there there were three "official" ways of talking to the DB. The frontend framework was replaced a couple times (jQuery, Vue, another one which I won't mention since nobody uses it), even though the home page didn't really change for a few years. It was an e-commerce-like site but not even the items in the homepage would change (it started changing while I was there, though!). The dev headcount was >400 IIRC, so it's not surprising that they had so many rewrites. I got burnout pretty fast from all that. Adding a single button to a page was a two-to-four-weeks ordeal. My manager was a bit of an asshole, who said the problem was me and I should go back doing therapy and taking antidepressants (like I disclosed I had done a few years ago) instead of looking for a less stressful job. Kinda saddens me because it's a company I liked, although I couldn't stand the tech culture.