It does sound like communication with the manager was poor, though. The manager should have been more empathetic to their situation (depends heavily on how comfortable the employee was with giving out this information).

This is a poor assumption to make. Any data coming into your application should be assumed to be malicious. This would be the same as a server just accepting any data made to its API calls without any validation.

Yes and no. Whenever we move to a higher level of abstraction, we (almost?) always lose control. Even in C, there are some behaviors that require coding in assembly to squeeze out every last bit of performance, or using `unsafe` in various languages to break out of a managed environment. In both of these cases, they are code smells. Is it possible you have a valid reason for writing assembly by hand? Absolutely. But you better have a good reason for doing so, because it sacrifices readability.

The same applies to these “drag-and-drop” feature builders. The key is adding in hooks to create custom behavior easily. For Deja Vu, this is by creating your own concepts.

I think the biggest issue here is the target audience. We haven’t found a large enough group of people that enjoys working at this level of abstraction to help grow the community. Anecdotally, developers I know tend stick to their level of abstraction. C devs hate JS and vice-versa, arguing over control vs simplicity.

The tips I learned helped me plan a negotiation strategy during a new job offer. it's not perfect, but it helped remove a lot of doubt from the process.