I’ve actively been told off at work on multiple occasions for putting too much effort into making my code reusable and extendable later down the line
(As of recently I’ve had to rewrite an entire project from last year because I gave up and just wrote a big blob of difficult to maintain code, then unsurprisingly the requirements changed)
A new job to you is an old job to others. You’re just facing others’ tech debt now.
Yeah but you get a nice ramp-up period where you’re allowed to be bewildered and unproductive. In that time, you can probably pick out two or three grandiose changes (ideally with hot new technologies) to throw on the pile before that period ends, and use them as resume padding and interview stories for the next job.
Unlike the old developers, you aren’t complicit in the mess until a few years go by.
A few jobs ago, everyone hated the tech stack. The people who had come up with it had long left. I talked to everyone, then came up with a plan to transition to a modern stack. Got buy-in from management.
Half the people (and all who had said they hated the status quo) threatened to quit if we made the change.
Fortunately, it was just in time to collect the 1-year retention bonus. Life’s too short. Walked away.
2 years? More like 3-6 months.