How do I explain to friends that writing software takes time?
Posted by RoomDry7501@reddit | learnprogramming | View on Reddit | 49 comments
I have the CTO role in startup with friends and I do have experience in building and deployed full stack apps/mobile apps, and I do have a good amount of internship experience from college. CEO has a CS background but does not have much dev experience and cannot built things without cursor. I will be honest, while I am confident in my technical skills, I am not great at the communication part though I am trying to improve.
What happened recently was that my CEO got angry at how slow I was moving and decided to make a huge PR implementing a pretty major feature of the app. He said I was slow because in the past few days, I hadn't pushed much code to our GitHub repo. I do not think I was moving too slow, but I was spending a little more time on the database schema and backend stuff, and less time on the actual UI. I wanted to make sure I got backend stuff in a reasonably okay position before making any UI, and I guess he thought that the lack of "physical progress" meant no progress.
This huge PR he made pretty much touched more than half the files in an already large codebase and it was clear that everything was done using AI. He had just made the PR out of the blue without discussing it with me. It's now been a few weeks since this PR, and although I've been doing my absolute best to give actionable feedback and explain why I'm making so many comments, it's clear that he's learning nothing. Every time I request changes and see his new commits, it's almost as if I'm seeing a completely different PR because of how many changes there are.
Initially, I made an effort to not touch the files his PR was changing, but I gave up on doing this because of how many files there are. Merging the PR will be a huge pain because there are tons of conflicts, and he's probably gonna overwrite my work if he uses AI to fix them.
Anyways, a few days back, I told him that I plan implementing the feature from scratch because it's been in review for way too long, it's holding me back, and the code quality is great (the code is unmaintainable, and I do not want to even start trying to debug it).
To that, he told me sure, go ahead, but only if I can get it done by tomorrow. I was like, what?? His reasoning was that he got the entire feature done in 2 hours, so I should be able to. To be honest, I do kind of want to just go ahead and implement it, but then he's gonna make a huge fuss about wasting time on a feature that was already "perfectly" done.
So this is where I have a question: how do tell him nicely that 2 hours of vibe coding with cursor is not the same as writing maintainable code? I estimate it'll take be around 2–4 days to write this feature from scratch but he really does not want me to.
Also, how do I explain that just because there are no new screens, I am still being productive? I feel like he doesn't get that the app has an entire backend.
In general, I have been having issues with the rest of the team, where they expect a bit too much from me. They constantly say that I am not spending enough time on the startup, but at the same time, none of them are technical and I am finding it hard to talk to them. I guess I want to make it known that I am doing all I can, I am already going as fast as I can and leaving some minor things for later on. Despite having the title of CTO, I do not magically gain all the experience.
If you've reached here, thank you for reading all that! Sorry if my thoughts are super messy but It's been affecting me for a while that I am putting in pretty much all my time on this but my team does not seem to understand what I'm doing.
TLDR: CEO though I was going too slow, spends 2 hours vibe coding a feature that works with a specific set of test data, and wonders why I can't finish the app.
49 Comments
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