Readit Newsig0r0 commented on Ask HN: Doing well solo, struggling in team-centric engineering roles · Posted by u/ig0r0
I can relate. I started contracting, and the added sense of responsibility really helps me. I still work with teams within the organization and interface with them, but having some distance makes a difference. Wouldn’t it get lonely without a team?
I do not think it would get lonely. I am not a very sociable person. I worked at a remote company where daily meeting were held because people wanted to be in contact with each other but that was not me.
https://blog.kulman.sk — personal blog about software development, indie iOS apps, self-hosting, and productivity. English.
https://www.kulman.sk — personal homepage with projects and links (Slovak).
Working on Yomu, an indie iOS Japanese reader intended to make intermediate reading easier.
It started while I was studying for JLPT N4 — I wanted adaptive furigana that hides readings for kanji I already know, so I could focus on real text without constant lookups. That shaped the core architecture: level-based furigana, offline dictionary (JMDict), and custom tokenization logic with IPADic for accuracy.
Some interesting challenges have been furigana edge cases, Safari text paste quirks, and balancing offline performance with accuracy.
Yomu is live on the App Store now, and I’m writing about the problems that led me to build it on my blog: https://blog.kulman.sk/japanese-reading-problem/.
I’m working on Yomu, an iOS app for reading Japanese text with adjustable furigana.
I’m learning Japanese myself (recently took JLPT N4), and I noticed that full furigana makes me rely on readings instead of actually reading kanji. Yomu lets you hide furigana for kanji up to your level and keep it for harder ones.
It’s offline-first, supports importing text from anywhere, camera OCR, and a fast dictionary.
> I do fine when incentives, authorship, and responsibility are clear, but disengage when those are diffuse.
This suggests that in your case it might be about bad management too, rather than team vs solo work per se.
And let’s face it, good management and good managers is a much much rarer breed than good engineers.