this post was submitted on 19 Feb 2026
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A good strategy, if you work in software development, is to carve out a software fiefdom by writing a system so arcane that only you understand it and now you can’t be fired.
You can use management priorities against them.
Justify the arcane coding practices as prioritizing feature development over tech debt. Let that tech debt GROW.
Spaghetti other systems with integrations with your framework, like a worm. This makes it too expensive to replace your shitty code.
Use a mix of technologies in the name of being agile. A bit of python here. Some Go. You can easily fit 3 JavaScript web frameworks into this.
You can even increase your salary by implementing an “on-call” roster.
The best places to look are internal document management, assets management, invoicing, something process-heavy, compliance-heavy, some place they simply can’t cut costs on and which is far enough away from customers that your stakeholders are all internals who don’t really give a shit.
Ideally you’re attached to a non-tech department so they think you’re a wizard who is solving all their problems, and you always have a smile and helpful attitude. You’re always clocking in late nights to fix their problems (because you didn’t do anything during the day), and they don’t know what SCRUM is so you just have to answer their support tickets. Attitude is everything. You’re their best friend.
I already made such a framework and it was a glorious mess but everyone had a dependency on it. Ran that con for 4 years until the lead engineer said it has no value now all the users are sitting on a rotting codebase that our leads refuse to support. Now the thing is they didnt axe support because they were intelligent and saw i was inventing work they did it cos they legit dont understand the job we do. Outcome was the same I suppose so it doesnt matter. Now im part of a different wider spaghetti mess effect hundreds of people that im not allowed to do anything to but watch burn while getting flogged for not adding features to it fast enough while they say no to me fixing anything ever.
The fixing is supposedly the responsibility of our outsourced support team who doesnt actually do anything but sit on incident tickets for months then get us to unfuck it. Or if theyre bored break things on purpose.