In the sprawling metropolis of... wait, no. It was a Regency. A "Kabupaten." But in this specific coordinate of the map, there stood a Company. A Company with a capital C, a logo that commanded respect, and a reputation that whispered, "We know what we're doing."
Enter The Engineer.
He walked in on his first day expecting, if not Silicon Valley, at least a faint echo of modern civilization. What he found was an archaeological dig site.
"Where is the repository?" he asked, his voice trembling slightly.
"Repo-what?" they replied. "We just put the files in the shared folder. If Joni is editing index.php, you just wait until he shouts that he's done."
The Engineer died a little inside.
He introduced them to Git. He explained, with the patience of a kindergarten teacher explaining why we don't eat glue, that Version Control is not a suggestion it is a survival mechanism. He set up GitHub. He watched them stare at the command line like it was a rune from a forbidden tongue.
And the infrastructure? A masterpiece of abstract art. A shiny modern React frontend plastered over a decaying CodeIgniter 3 backend, all deployed via XAMPP on a Windows Server. He found View files packed with direct SQL queries, a sin so grave it made him physically recoil. It was beautiful in the same way a burning car crash is beautiful you just couldn't look away.
The Atlas Complex
The Company needed an ERP. A massive, sprawling Enterprise Resource Planning system to manage their many branches. A task for a team of ten.
They gave it to The Engineer.
Well, technically, there were others. But in the grand ecosystem of this IT department, they were decorative. Like plastic plants. They occupied space, but their main contribution was "Frankenstein-ing" the code.
They would solve problems by copying entire functions he wrote for completely different features. If he wrote a complex logic for Tax Calculation, he'd find it pasted into the Holiday Calendar module dragging along five unrelated utility functions they didn't even use. They didn't understand why it worked; they just hoped it would.
"Why is this taking so long?" Management would ask, checking their watches.
"Because," The Engineer would say, suppressing the urge to scream, "I am building a skyscraper with a plastic spoon while my colleagues are trying to figure out which end of the hammer hits the nail."
One colleague, let's call him The Idea Guy, was particularly special. The Idea Guy didn't write code. The Idea Guy wrote fantasies. He would breeze into meetings, gesture wildly, and say things like, "Why don't we just make it work like Popular App?" ignoring that they lacked the budget, the server capacity, and the logic. He would leave The Engineer to explain why they couldn't just "drag and drop" a complex feature.
"It's just a small change," The Idea Guy would say.
"It requires rewriting the entire data structure because you decided to add a 'Social Media' feature to an Accounting ERP!" The Engineer wanted to scream. "Using Ctrl+C is not engineering!"
The One Good Man
There was only one reason The Engineer didn't simply walk into the ocean. The Boss.
The Boss was an anomaly. He had empathy. He understood that The Engineer was carrying the weight of the entire digital infrastructure on his back. He said "thank you." In a sea of ineptitude, he was a lifeboat.
"Hang in there," The Boss would say.
And so, The Engineer hung.
The Exit Strategy
Promises were made. "Finish this," they said, "and you will be glorious. You will be Permanent. You will be King."
The Engineer finished it. He built the ERP. It worked. It was a miracle of engineering born from chaos.
But when the dust settled, the promises turned into fine print. "Well, you see... we need you to do this other thing first. And this other thing. And maybe fix the printer."
The Engineer was tired. He had a plan a bigger plan for his life that didn't involve patching XAMPP servers until he retired. He needed to secure his future.
"I'm leaving!" he said.
Panic ensued.
"You can't leave! The system! The plastic plants don't know how to water themselves!"
They begged. They pleaded. "Stay as a consultant," they said. "Remote. Whatever you want."
The Engineer, cursed with a functioning conscience, agreed. He knew the team would collapse without him. He pitied them. He agreed to help from afar as he moved to a new city to pursue his own path.
The Knife in the Back
Time passed. The Engineer moved on. But small towns talk, and corporate ladders are slippery with lies.
One day, a message arrived from a family friend. They had spoken to a Director at the Company. The Director had spun a tale so creative it belonged in a fiction novel.
Lie Number One: "We didn't renew him because the team is solid. They can handle it. We don't need him anymore."
The Truth:
The team was still messaging The Engineer asking how to center a <div> and why the database was crying.
Lie Number Two: "We gave him the highest salary! He asked for Work From Home, but he was secretly double-jobbing! He betrayed us!"
The Truth: His "highest salary" was a mathematical lie. He was paid a standard rate. The permanent staff the same ones copying and pasting his code actually took home significantly more once you added the bonuses and benefits he wasn't eligible for. He didn't demand WFH; he moved cities. They needed him, so they accepted the remote arrangement.
And the "double job"? This was the dagger. He was a consultant. That's literally the definition of the role. It wasn't betrayal; it was economics. But to them, loyalty meant ownership.
But the narrative was set. The Engineer was the villain. The greedy, disloyal deserter who took the money and ran.
The Punchline
The Engineer sat in his new room, reading the message. He thought about the weekends lost. The CodeIgniter view-queries he refactored. The Git workshops. The sheer, unadulterated effort he poured into saving a project that was destined to fail.
He realized then that Loyalty is a currency that only works one way. You pay it to the Company, but the Company pays you back in exposure and bad-mouth PR.
Somewhere, in a server room in a sleepy Regency, a React useEffect is probably caught in an infinite dependency loop written by someone who copy-pasted a StackOverflow answer they didn't understand frantically spamming requests to a legacy CodeIgniter 3 backend that time and maintenance forgot.