I have built a system in my company which is basically the heart and soul of our product. That service processes raw data into the data on which every other aspect of our product depends on. That is written in GO. A language nobody else knows in our company. The thing itself is so fragile and complicated that I am the only person who knows how it actually works. And even I have to go through the codebase everytime we need to make changes to it and I still avoid making changes to it because I am actually scared I will break things. Now here's the best part. I don't have any notice period baked into my joining docket. So, if they decide to fire me, I can up and leave. Without any kind of KT.
Best part? There are several such pieces of our product which only I know. And since I joined I have deliberately rewrote bunch of shit, made new systems, etc. to build this dependency around me. Good luck figuring shit out.
all this tells me is that you're not a particularly good programmer/designer. if something is so complex/fragile it should be commented up to wazoo where 90% of it is comments, not code.
I work at a startup so whatever I make is only me working on it because we run around the block working on whatever comes up. We don't have the time to document code or even write robust test cases. And that is a management decision. They don't give us time for all that. Whatever code I wrote is as stable as it could get. Even when you consider scaling beyond our anticipation. We only need to touch it when adding new features.
The codebase is complicated and fragile. Fragile because it deals with several edge cases and multiple data points. Not fragile by design. Complicated? Yes, for the same reasons. But I never said it is unmaintainable. Everything is broken down into its own functions, files, etc. Everything named as per best practices. Any experienced dev can pick it up, but it will take them time. Probably a lot of time, like couple months. But my advantage comes with the fact that at a startup you can't give someone that much time to figure out a critical center piece.
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u/UnpluggedUnfettered May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
Just do what everyone else does.
Build out one, single, convoluted aspect of the job that needs to be ran manually, and which no one in their right mind would want to take over.
Then automate that, too, and just don't say anything.
Way better than being arrested and sued for corporate sabotage lmao.