It is their loss, I cannot imagine letting a minor work quarrel live rent free in my head for over a decade. I feel bad enough when something is stuck in my mind for a week.

Sometimes I think there should be a list of sane and tested production configs: default rpc timeout, default backoff exponent, default initial backoff, default max backoff, health check frequency, health check timeout, process restart delay, process restart backoff, etc…

You kindof answered the question yourself. Humans write the tests and then go tell the AI to write the solution which passes the test.

I on the other hand spent 3 weeks optimizing our core service and reduced 2x the opex costs of the large complex 3 year migration.

In my yearly review my manager acknowledged my impact, but said I need to solve more complex problems to get to Staff Engineer. I protested saying that my 3 weeks of work had a larger impact than 20 engineers over 3 years, but he told me that is just how it works.

I think fundamentally it comes down to energy for me. I have very little energy in the morning so I am not going to harness the pre-work daylight hours to do something outside like taking my dog to the park, biking, or running. For me I don’t actually start feeling energized until maybe 9-10AM.

After work however, I have much more energy to do things outside with the daylight.