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Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

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Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#191

Post by bballer »

beaconstudios wrote: post #134
ConceptJunkie wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know about you, but I've rarely worked on a codebase that _wasn't_ awful in some way, and I am definitely not early in my career. I've come to the conclusion that most programmers are simply awful at their jobs, and the developers that can write clear, concise code are a small minority. I've known a few, but not many.

90% of developers think they're better than 90% of developers, but it's just an ego trip. Chances are, people have just had to compromise on design due to pressures from within the organisation. Or, as is often the case, they completed the exploratory coding phase of a new feature and the manager shipped it before they could refactor.

This so much. You talk with product managers etc about a new feature that could revolutionize a certain portion of your product so you start hacking away to get an alpha. The alpha is shown to some of the sales people and higher ups who start frothing at the mouth to put it into customers hands. The PM then says we need to ship this ASAP and into production goes code that was just feeling out whether or not the feature was even possible to begin with. Add a couple of months of no major refactor but tons of bug fixes plus additional features and you end up in a really fun place :]

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#192

Post by sethammons »

ashrk wrote: post #164
swerveonem wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to solve those problems like "it ain't no thing" is part of being a senior developer.

Sure, and man are the easy wins satisfying. Fixing shitty data access methods/patterns is one of the easiest ways to get a "WOW!" out of a client or product owner if you're stuck in the low-visibility silo of backend dev[0]. I've just been repeatedly surprised over the years at how very, very many people are making real money, and consistently finding work, yet don't seem to know which way is up. And I don't mean gre…

What are higher visibility pastures that is not web frontend?

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#193

Post by ohyes »

celdon25 wrote: post #131
kokokokoko wrote: post #62

I would be careful with some of the responses here. Over my career I've found that a significant subset of developers struggle with unfamiliar codebases. Sometimes this has to do with their experience being mostly with greenfield projects and other times it is because they have not seen a wide array of different work created by other people. But sometimes it is good old fashioned workplace politics. It is risky to ta…

> My number 1 red flag of working with a developer, unless they are very early in their career, is hearing them describe a codebase as awful. Most really are not that bad and are usually just using unfamiliar and less than ideal design patterns and coding practices. So, what if in reality, the codebase IS awful, and the product itself suffers from delays and setbacks even on seemingly simple tasks? Still a red flag i…

It’s always awful. That means it’s never worth it to discuss how awful it is. You’re probably working with people who helped produce the awfulness, and it pays to be empathetic towards your coworkers.

Code isn’t produced in a vacuum and there are always external pressures for why this was hacked in rather than done correctly. It just kind of makes you come off as tone deaf and inexperienced. “My code is perfect and everyone else’s is garbage.” (It isn’t).

There are always concrete things that can be done to mitigate some of the awfulness and improve a codebase. A good developer will identify the root causes and fix them. Discuss and identify actual problems and solutions rather than your considerable (and understandable) angst.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#194

Post by tpaschalis »

zem wrote: post #128
osrec wrote: post #122

Yes, most of it. Most (all?) code in a pressurised business environment eventually ends up in a bit of a bad state because technical perfection and maintainability are rarely what the devs are going for. They're just trying to "get it working, and now". How I've seen devs deal with it successfully: 1) Complain early and loudly about past mistakes from other devs, so that management know delays are not your fault. Onc…

"After me cometh a Builder. Tell him, I too have known." http://www.kiplingsociety.co.uk/poems_palace.htm

I've never particularly cared or been much knowledgeable about poetry, but thanks for introducing me to this beautiful one. :)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#195

Post by stillbourne »

We had a perl "guru" who wrote a number of management scripts for servers. They were located in inconsistent locations and were completely inscrutable because obfuscated in a manner that I think he thought was clever. Seriously, I don't think his code was obfuscated because he was malicious, incompetent, or "making himself too indispensable to fire." I think he thought writing tight compact perl code that was unreadable by anyone else was an imperative to being a good perl coder. I think it was like his philosophy of coding or something. I mean his documentation that he wrote for how to do stuff around the network was fantastic insightful and robust. But his fucking code was just awful. I basically had to run every perl script we could find though the debugger to understand what it was doing and rewrite it from scratch so it could be maintained in the future. These days I'm an actual software developer and when I write code I think of this dudes perl code whenever I write code and I think it has made me a better developer because I strive for maintainability and readability over almost everything else. Mainly because I feel like reading his code and rewriting it was akin to psychological torture and I nearly quit my job several times in the process.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#196

Post by krylon »

edw519 wrote: post #81

Oh yes, many times! I used to joke, "Why do I always inherit stuff like this?" and my mentor would respond, "Because companies with good code bases don't hire very often; their people are all so happy." How I have dealt with it: 1. Never complain. Never bad mouth any of my predecessors. Whatever they did wrong, I probably did somewhere else just as badly. We all have. 2. Never be bashful about what is wrong. Be objec…

> Rename variables EXACTLY what they are.

I have this coworker who has this terrible habit of giving the most meaningless names imaginable. Local variables are often just named "tmp". Or maybe tmpNum if it is a number. We are writing a program to implement various tasks as background threads, and the classes have names like "Process01", "Process02", etc. At one place, he declared five or six constants with SQL queries, named sql1, sql2, ...

The worst thing, in a way, is that I managed to convince him to let me rename the SQL constants, but he insists that naming a local variable "tmp" is actually a Good Thing so you can immediately tell it is a local variable. I kid you not. (For Great Cthulhu's sake, I wish I was kidding!)

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#197

Post by wolfgang42 »

thrower123 wrote: post #104
wolfgang42 wrote: post #78

I inherited a suite of .NET/WinForms applications that managed warehouse shipments to major purchasers. They had been written and modified by a succession of programmers with wildly different opinions of how to write a program (from copy-paste duplication to massively overarchitected inheritance trees; fully denormalized tables to 6th normal form; and everything in between). I was the only software developer at the c…

> - Buy ReSharper, and start doing mechanical refactorings on the codebase to fix the obvious and easy code smells. What the changes are doesn't really matter much; the point of this exercise is to start to get a feel of where everything is in the code. Since you're just using the ReSharper commands, there's no risk of breaking anything by doing this. I love ReSharper, and it has been worth every penny that I've ever…

This is true. Fortunately none of the code I worked with did anything like that, but it's definitely important to be aware of.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#198

Post by lostgame »

potta_coffee wrote: post #93
lostgame wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> Assume that zero institutional knowledge about the code / business have been passed on. Who is, in that case, using the software? They obviously understand the context by which the software is at least going to work, otherwise, why is the software being rewritten? Who is requesting the rewrite? Do they know what it is supposed to do? Is there an executable build of it that exists somewhere?

These are ecommerce systems. It's astonishing because no-one in the company truly has a complete understanding of the business, as far as I can tell. The code is running in production and serving customers. Rewrite is being pushed by certain parties because we're unable to meet feature requests quickly with the existing system, and it's being assumed that a rewrite will fix that problem. The team is barely functional…

Late reply, and I'm sure you're smart enough to know this already, and are hopefully already planning it - but get the hell out of there, fast.

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#199

Post by Balgair »

EpicEng wrote: post #159
Balgair wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you recommend any good biotech companies in image/optics? I just got my degree in BioEng. in bio-optics and have been pretty unsuccessful in getting any traction on the job market.

I was involved in the digital pathology sector. Leica (formerly Aperio) has an office in Vista and I hear it's still a good place to work after the acquisition. You may also try Epic Sciences, indica labs, or BioImagine. There are far more, but you could also try going to local conferences. I used to attend pathology Visions each year. Lots of industry representation and new tech. You probably know this already, bit…

> therwise you run the risk of developing software in a culture which inderstands nothing of software dev. Not fun.

Preaching to the choir. My thesis was a lot of that, haha.

Thanks a TON for the recommendations!

Re: Ask HN: Have you ever inherited a codebase nobody on the team could understand?

#200

Post by potta_coffee »

lostgame wrote: post #198
potta_coffee wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These are ecommerce systems. It's astonishing because no-one in the company truly has a complete understanding of the business, as far as I can tell. The code is running in production and serving customers. Rewrite is being pushed by certain parties because we're unable to meet feature requests quickly with the existing system, and it's being assumed that a rewrite will fix that problem. The team is barely functional…

Late reply, and I'm sure you're smart enough to know this already, and are hopefully already planning it - but get the hell out of there, fast.

I...yeah. The picture wasn't completely clear until very recently and now the anxiety has kicked in. I'm trying to stick around a little because I've been through too many jobs in too short a time and I think I need to show some "commitment" on my resume.
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