Ask HN: Efficiency of 10x engineer while refactoring legacy/messed up code base? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Efficiency of 10x engineer while refactoring legacy/messed up code base?

#21

Post by gregjor » Sat, Apr 22, 2017, 3:56 AM UTC

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #17

gregjor wrote: post #3

Disclaimer: I don't call myself 10X anything but I do work through 10X Management. I only work on legacy code, that's my specialty. My opinions are my own and don't represent 10X Management. First off not all legacy code is "shitty." The main reason I am 10 or 100 or 1000 times more effective with legacy code is that I'm usually the only programmer the customer has talked to who will work with it. Everyone else has o…

The ROI of maintaining and enhancing is probably under-represented in the freelance space. It may make more financial sense for freelancers to bid on greenfield projects but I wonder, aloud here, if there is some business model for a network of freelancers that are experts in maintaining , with price tiers of one-time fix, small-medium sized project and retainer based services.

I think the ROI is underrepresented. There's a lot of maintenance and enhancement work available and less competition for it. I mostly work on retainer at rates equal to or higher than green fields developers. And my chances of success are much higher.

http://typicalprogrammer.com/the-joys-of-maintenance-program...

Re: Ask HN: Efficiency of 10x engineer while refactoring legacy/messed up code base?

#22

Post by bjourne » Sun, Apr 23, 2017, 6:42 PM UTC

Absolutely! But the efficiency gain will come from knowing what to do, not from doing it ten times faster.

For example, if the shitty code base doesn't have unit tests a 10x programmer might decide to put everything else on hold and write a unit test suite. A 1x programmer would perhaps not understand the long term benefits of testing, and instead spend his or her time patching bug after bug.

Another trap a 10x programmer would not fall into is deciding to rewrite the whole system from scratch because the code is hard to understand. But sometimes the only way forward is to rewrite it all. It boils down to being a judgement call and the more experienced you are the better judgement calls you make.

Re: Ask HN: Efficiency of 10x engineer while refactoring legacy/messed up code base?

#23

Post by atomical » Tue, May 02, 2017, 6:35 PM UTC

Nerdenator wrote: post #18

Well, depends. For example, we had a 10x guy recommend that we re-write our health insurance web app back-end in Golang, but then, we realized that meant we couldn't cover generic prescriptions. In that case, he wouldn't have remained 10x over the older Python/Django code.

Golang doesn't support generic prescriptions?