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Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

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Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#41

Post by mikrl »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #9
bjord wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's supposed to be a "real" article about a real person, I think it's art (that speaks to some of our fears) do you believe that something has to be purely "productive" to be deserving of space on the internet?

There’s too much crap on the internet now. So yes.

Most of it exists to sell you stuff and make people money

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#42

Post by the_lonely_road »

antupis wrote: post #15
bjord wrote: post #3

I'm worried this will be me someday. I suppose that's the point.

Does somebody work 35 years in same company, it is usually 2-5 years -> new company grind rather than working at same company.

That’s a common story on HN but not at all a reflection of real life. Be careful letting the internet convince you of something without doing your research. There are lots of us with deep tenure at a single employer. It would not surprise me to find it’s still the majority of professionals.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#43

Post by zelphirkalt »

Life is too short for working with crap code. Unfortunately there is more crap code out there, than there are opportunities of working on beautiful code. At least in most jobs there will at minimum be compromise and part of the job will be dealing with ugly code.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#46

Post by hliyan »

Aloha wrote: post #37
hliyan wrote: post #24

For ten years, I worked on codebases written in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL -- we needed faster, thread safe versions of strings and maps which were not available at the time; Boost? What's that?), its own custom messaging middleware built directly on sockets, its on distributed process management system built with unix syscalls (obviously). There was not a single line of HTML, Java…

Was it something that ran in an embedded environment?

High frequency algorithmic trading. Often ran on colocated hardware within the exchange / trading system data centers. Started with stuff like Sun SPARC, Solaris and Oracle and we slowly made our way to Suse, Intel and... surprise, our own database optimised for fast writes.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#48

Post by sneak »

Otek wrote: post #26
whoisthemachine wrote: post #14

Funny, but there's nothing wrong with that if Arthur was/is happy (which isn't mentioned).

Exactly this. Guy had a comfortable stable job for years. Probably knew codebase and technology enough to have lots of time for family/friends/hobbies. More than this story scares me how HN reacted

Having a comfortable, stable job for many years sounds like the worst version of hell one could possibly invent for people who live like I do.

There are better things to aspire to than predictability whilst making someone else rich.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#49

Post by coldcode »

bjord wrote: post #3

I'm worried this will be me someday. I suppose that's the point.

I had about 15 jobs over 40 years, not including 9 years at the two companies I started. But some were short term contracts, and several (in a row, sadly) ended in my employer going out of business, mass layoffs, etc. I always found doing something new was revitalizing. Also found that sometimes something new was awful. Being comfortable changing what technologies you are expected to use helps, taking advantage of new tech being new, and not many people knowing it, is good too. At my last job before retiring I stayed for 5.5 years, and could still be working there today, except it was enough of a career.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#50

Post by version_five »

bowsamic wrote: post #34
Otek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Guy had a comfortable stable job for years. Probably knew codebase and technology enough to have lots of time for family/friends/hobbies. More than this story scares me how HN reacted

I can only assume it's because HN is full of young, inexperienced people whose main wish is to stay on the cutting edge of technology rather than sinking into a stable profession

You may be right, but I don't think experience is what makes people prioritize stability over anything else. I'd be so depressed at a real job like the one described, it would be irrelevant that it was stable and gave me extra time. Some people are ambitious, some just like variety.
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