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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

#111

Post by thumbuddy »

jebarker wrote: post #75
sneak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Perhaps his aspirations had nothing to do with his day job?

Wait you mean life isn't a video game where my position in a company completely defines me as a person, and if I don't destroy all my colleagues (read: competitors)with cruelty and cunning schemes I still have value?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#112

Post by bla3 »

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…

Sounds like your old place had a good idea what's good about c++. It's not the STL and certainly not boost.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#113

Post by hliyan »

bboygravity wrote: post #79
hliyan wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Unfortunately, yes. It never sat well with me. Colocated systems saw latencies no mom-and-pop investor could ever dream to achieve. That is one of the reasons why the second company I joined was a non-profit that built systems to help track human rights violations, enforce labor rights, monitor democratic elections etc. Third job was in the food industry and the last one, in housing / property management. So I'd like to think I've made sufficient amends.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#114

Post by steve1977 »

morelisp wrote: post #96
arexxbifs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was sufficiently good at programming: > Westbrook once touched legacy code without ending the company.

This strategy doesn't work, I did this twice and then got "promoted" to Architect so now I sit in meetings >24 hours a week.

As long as it's not >24 hours a day, there is still room to grow.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#115

Post by yaky »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #43

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.

Most developers see and work with crap code because good code runs well and rarely needs to be touched. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#116

Post by [deleted] »

morelisp wrote: post #96
arexxbifs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was sufficiently good at programming: > Westbrook once touched legacy code without ending the company.

This strategy doesn't work, I did this twice and then got "promoted" to Architect so now I sit in meetings >24 hours a week.

[deleted]

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#117

Post by jstx1 »

ourmandave wrote: post #45

His manager noted, “Arthur had a knack for working hard without learning transferrable skills." ^^^This! Arthur was lucky to retire at 58. He probably made fat bank which turned out to be golden handcuffs. If he ever got downsized, he had been f*d.

> He probably made fat bank which turned out to be golden handcuffs.

This is a big assumption, not everyone in this field is a high earner - plenty of people make okay-ish salaries without being anywhere near highly paid.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#118

Post by 0x008 »

morelisp wrote: post #96
arexxbifs wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

He was sufficiently good at programming: > Westbrook once touched legacy code without ending the company.

This strategy doesn't work, I did this twice and then got "promoted" to Architect so now I sit in meetings >24 hours a week.

usually "architects" are just people there to keep the communication rolling and make sure devs or teams don't work in silos all their life.

probably your communication skills were too good for management to passt up the opportunity of promoting you.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#119

Post by weinzierl »

Everyone can build something new and shiny on the green field. If it doesn't work out you can always find someone or something to blame, because what you set out build was an awesome, highly innovative[1] endeavor anyway. Moving on to something else new and shiny after a while is not only ok, it is expected.

Sticking to something, through good and bad times, on the other hand, that's not something many people can do, and while it is by no means sufficient in most cases it seems to be necessary for sustainable success.

Examples: Guido van Rossum[2], Linus Torvalds, Daniel Stenberg

[1] You wouldn't even have to put the "high risk" nature of it in the fine print, because it's readily understood.

[2] I could not find the source but I remember him saying in an interview when asked about Pythons's breakthrough, that it never had one but that it constantly and steadily grew.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#120

Post by markus_zhang »

hliyan wrote: post #98
gnfargbl wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Absolutely 100% positive. I was largely an individual contributor all that time, and only did some unstructured, untrained, unguided people & project management. Perhaps because it was such a niche, engineer-dominated environment. Several years after leaving that company, I quickly learned to effectively manage people and projects, architect systems using more mainstream/open source tech and eventually reached exec l…

That's really some fields I'd love to get into -- less need to talk to people and more need to talk to the machine. What a dream! Alas I only scratched the surface of C++.
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