91–100 of 596 posts
He's the guy you go to when you find some legacy code which you have no idea how the hell it works and end up getting a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects.
They're hard not to love.
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
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Does somebody work 35 years in same company, it is usually 2-5 years -> new company grind rather than working at same company.
I've seen it. Some people are weird and just want a stable job that pays them alright so they can focus on their family and other things they care about. A few times in my career I've seen people with a decade-plus experience leave companies they would have stayed at for another two decades if it were within their control. It's sad. They struggle a bit because they often realise that they've over fit their skillsets…
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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.
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.
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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.
Naive question: is this like creating fancy tech that is helping rich people to front-run the poor and middle-class? Because that's what a lot of people think online. Maybe it's more nuanced. I'm curious how someone from that carreer sees it?
It is to help the super-rich who own hedge funds to frontrun the rich upper-middle-class people with significant disposable income.
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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.
True but often enough great code is not needed just working code will do just fine.