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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

#141

Post by lordnacho »

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?

The whole business model is misunderstood by your average internet commentator.

When you have a market, you need someone to be there to provide liquidity. Imagine if you're a farmer and you show up to the market with your wheat, but all the bakers have gone home that day. Or the baker shows up and there's no farmer. The market maker stands around all day offering to buy and sell so that you don't have to wait for the guy you're really trading with. Of course this middle man wants to get paid for it, but your cost as an average Joe is next to nothing. This is trading in time.

Now imagine you want to cook a meal and your ideal meat is beef, but actually you're ok with pork, so long as the pork is cheap enough to make it worth it. How much cheaper should it be? Well your fellow who knows all the pork and beef people will be able to gauge where the balancing spread is, given the amount of interest. In fact he will from time to time do the trade when the spread is out of line. This is trading in space.

So why all the fancy tech? After all market makers used to stand around in a pit in a colored jacket, and they didn't have degrees. My first boss in the market was one of these guys.

Well, things have gotten very tech heavy because as soon as prices are out of line, there is money to be made. Or rather, lost. As a market maker, you are constantly out there with your prices, offering to buy or sell at a very small spread. If some news happens that affects prices in a big way, you can be sure that you will buy when it's going down and sell when it's going up. In order to both have tight prices and avoid this "adverse selection", you really want to be able to react as quickly as you can when your system decides that something's up.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#142

Post by lelanthran »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #88
hliyan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's mostly the guys fault and not the jobs fault. Even in a bad code base you can start making things better, apply modern techniques and learn new things. Also most of the skill you gain there is transferrable. E.g. just because you have to work with some legacy PHP project, it doesn't mean that you would suck at creating modern applications in JS. It would just take a couple of weeks to get use to it.

> Even in a bad code base you can start making things better, apply modern techniques and learn new things

All th bad codebase I've seen were a result of fossils who are still with the company gatekeeping anyone from fixing their code.

A few years ago, I had one architect stubbornly refuse to use source control, rejected all PRs that didn't use his homegrown buggy C++ libs for strings, refused to let anyone do the http server bits unless they used his C++ server and so on.

If there isn't a gatekeeper, you wouldn't have the bad codebase in the first place.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#143

Post by d-lisp »

dtx1 wrote: post #100
zelphirkalt wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> 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.

I honestly never found a private codebase in any of my jobs that was great and clean and arty.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#144

Post by FrustratedMonky »

quickthrower2 wrote: post #134

It is satire but I think people like this are heros. Not doing the flashy fancy stuff but keeping the world ticking over nicely.

I don't think it is satire. Or reality has become the satire. This seemed entirely real to me.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#146

Post by ourmandave »

jstx1 wrote: post #117
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.

He retired at 58 so I'd assumed. Maybe he's got a side hustle or embraced the super frugal lifestyle.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#147

Post by sumtechguy »

intelVISA wrote: post #126
bla3 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Legit, is that place hiring? Sounds like an ideal stack free from the tragedy of the commons.

Those stacks can be full of 'not invented here'. They are unique and have their own quirks. Quirks that you more than likely can not google for any sort of guidance as to what is going on. I wrote one of those stacks a few years ago. No std libs at all. Why? must fit in 32k and most of that space is needed to hold data. That means throwing a lot of those helper bits out or spend weeks figuring out how to bend the compiler to your will and not include everything. When it is easier just to roll your on CS version of whatever. But it sucks because you probably have odd edge cases.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#149

Post by noir_lord »

jebarker wrote: post #94
kypro wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why are people weird for wanting to "focus on their family and other things they care about."?

In the rest of the world they aren't, this is HN though.

Context is always important.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#150

Post by FrustratedMonky »

prepend wrote: post #130

This is like the programmer equivalent of WH Auden’s poem, The Unknown Citizen [0]. When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that w…

Also : Sisyphus.

The concept of life as meaningless, to be happy with the drudgery, or repetition, instead to be happy with the 'journey', to be in each moment.

Very common throughout literature/history.

I'd like to think we are somehow different, that modern man with technology is reaching some new level, to find some purpose. But now, not so sure, it's still just day-in-day-out, then you die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus

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