Hits way close to home

But as the “founding engineer” from this story, I made a lot of product level calls to avoid the layering of “urgent easy features” that would cost x100 in support down the road.

I also heavily protected my team against crunch and was the only one affected on the rare occasions it was required.

Learning how to say no constructively is a core engineering skill in startups.

You can bet the game is not “done” as Rockstar will be milking the the new GTA online for years to come.

But I agree that it really hurts their leverage.

Haven’t used YAMS

But having read the page, I’d say it’s much more pluggable.

There are dozens of community plugins to install other docker based tools with Saltbox.

Also, it’s a rewrite of an older project and has been in development for longer than YAMS. I’ve been using it for around 8 years or so.

Just use Saltbox

https://docs.saltbox.dev/saltbox/basics/basics/

It’s exactly what you’re trying to achieve but battle tested

So, cable with extra steps?

Just think about all those administrative tasks you’ve been neglecting which are piling up. And remember, a few even require you to phone a hotline.

You’ll get back to deep cleaning in no time.

Also, have assigned/labeled boxes for everything. And a big bag for whatever doesn’t belong to any of them. It’s way easier to deal with mess if your brain doesn’t need a lot to figure out where to put said items.

Here’s what I look for with software engineers II hire.

Pragmatism: pick the right solution for the right problem. And your work should create minimal work for others.

Thirst to learn: there is always something new and exciting and there’s always a better way to do it. Look for that. It also means being open to feedback.

Collaboration instead of execution: I need my team to challenge me. For that, they need to get as much of the bigger picture as they can. That means always being able to answer “why” you do things. It also means that I expect healthy conflict with my teams. If you go from being taught to teaching me, you immediately get a bump in my list of top teammates.

No excuse: we acknowledge problems and deal with them together. (Requires a good work environment though).

As you can see, nothing I wrote is purely code related. Only thing I ask tech wise is: know your shit, where to find it, who to ask.

Also, my top resource to get people started with what it means to become a software engineer is solidbook.io.