"Courage to quit" matters more for seniors, less for juniors

Sat, 29 Nov 2025 00:00:00 +0000

As a teenager first getting into computers in the late 2000s I spent a lot of time reading old revered tomes like ESR’s The Art of Unix Programming and SICP . If present-day me were to isekai back in time and lose all of the technical knowledge I had but retain my current instincts, however, I would have left all of this on the table and just built a terrible new automation tool for the surprisingly scriptable MMORPG I was into in PHP 5, with as much disregard for clean code and security practices that I could muster[^1]. Then I would have put that tool online, continued to add new features to the ball of mud, and kept it running for 5-10 years before my first post-college interview. And then the vibe that would come across is less “He’s an egghead, and we like that, but we really need someone who actually does things” and more “He’s a meathead, but inside of that meathead is an egghead waiting to be revealed. We need this kind of junior dev yesterday.” I would have done this even though an objectively far superior tool had already existed for quite some time, making this project “feel like” dead weight in the wide world of software! But why?

First-Job-Advice on Andrew Quinn's TILs

"Courage to quit" matters more for seniors, less for juniors