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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

#61

Post by zelphirkalt »

whoisthemachine wrote: post #39
mawadev wrote: post #12

My boss straight up told me a couple of juniors could do my job the other day

Most coding is pretty mechanical... and most juniors can pick that up easily. In spite of the mysticism surrounding software development, higher level languages are actually intended to be easy to pick up. If you have good problem solving skills, those are harder to replace with a couple of juniors (or ChatGPT).

If coding is mechanical, then the code will often turn out to be overheady, uninspired suboptimal solutions á la everything is a class, not well extensible and maintainable, or the task at hand truly not fit for the skill of a good developer.

Coding is a craft. There is an art aspect to it and there is a lot of room for inspiration and ideas to improve things.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#62

Post by michaelteter »

hliyan wrote: post #52
bowsamic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it would you like to avoid? I don't understand the fears that people have in this thread. To me this sounds like the Platonic ideal of a programming job. EDIT: I'll reply to my replier here because /u/Dang rate limited me (again), though I must commend him for letting me have one more comment than usual before he pushes the button ;) > I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable…

I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable to support yourself in your old age because you invested decades of your brainpower into a highly specialised, non-transferrable skill.

I should think that years of specialized C++ work in hft environments would have come with impressively high pay… in which case one could retire early and self study anything for fun, not hope to find a job for financial reasons.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#63

Post by eamonnsullivan »

hliyan wrote: post #46
Aloha wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Bloomberg? Comdb? If not, sounds very similar, anyway. Been there, done that!

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#66

Post by gnfargbl »

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…

I know it's not all about the money, but over the course of your entire career, do you think that move was financially positive or negative?

I'm very roughly estimating that you could probably have worked in the HFT job for around two-thirds the time you're going to have spent working on generic web tech, and still been better off.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#69

Post by benoliver999 »

Howdy, that's almost me! AMA!

I've spent 10 years as the lone dev at a small medical facility, writing database software and dealing with lab hardware etc.

I guess I've touched 100% of the codebase because I wrote it all, but I always wonder if my skillset is so niche that I'll always be at small companies.

Here's the deal though, work isn't everything and I'm at a job that recognises that.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#70

Post by LudwigNagasena »

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…

I don’t think anyone working with low-level C++ for HFT can face similar fate. Most of skills gained at such job seem very transferable. The article seems to be more about jobs where 95% of work consists in implementing CRUD in accordance with very specific business logic of the company.

The only reason to change such job I can imagine is to sit out your non-compete package. But I am not in this industry so maybe I’m missing something.

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