I stayed at a place that was decades old, in part to decipher how they’d managed to get away with not only terrible engineering discipline but two rewrites without going out of business. I figured it would be good for me to stick around at a place that was defying my predictions for once instead of fleeing at the first signs of smoke. I’ve hired onto places that failed before my old employer did at least twice and I feel a bit silly about that.

I wasted a lot of my time and came away barely the wiser, because the company is spiraling and has been for a while. Near as I can figure, the secret sauce was entirely outside of engineering. If I had to guess, they used to have amazing salespeople and whoever was responsible for that fact eventually left, and their replacement’s replacement couldn’t deliver. Last I heard they got bought by a competitor, and I wonder how much of my code is still serving customers.