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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

#151

Post by oaiey »

In our company we do medical devices. It is a hard SDLC business. Once a colleague of us left and shifted over to another (much bigger) medical device company. I met him some years later and he told me, retroperspectively, our company is a high-performing, super agile group. His new employer needs a year for a two line code change without really changing but only adding something. And that despite him pushing and pushing.

To be fair: to modify blood dialysis systems is no joke business.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#153

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#155

Post by chrisweekly »

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.

> "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"

I disagree; working on a legacy PHP project isn't just opportunity cost (failing to sharpen your knife), it's actively harmful (leaving the knife in salt water, accelerating the rust).

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#156

Post by firesteelrain »

ourmandave wrote: post #146
jstx1 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

That's what Dan did at my old job. Retired at 50. We would go on per diem travel and he would bring food from the hotel. We called them 'Dan-wiches'. He was smart and frugal. Now living his best life.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#157

Post by mabbo »

whoisthemachine wrote: post #14

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

There is though.

It's 2023 and today companies will quite happily lay you off the moment you aren't profitable to them.

This fictional person made it all the way to retirement and good for him. But the guy who followed this strategy for 15 years and now is job hunting because the company needed to cut 18% of its staff? He's got a huge gap in useful skills and decades left before he can retire.

That guy is in real trouble.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#158

Post by CrazyStat »

scns wrote: post #129
kypro wrote: post #91

I swear this guy exists at every company I've ever worked. 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.

Easy to love?

"Hard not to X" is not the same as "Easy to X". It may be easy to do something but also easy not to do it. It would be easy for me to yell "Elephant!" right now, for example, but also easy not to do it.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#159

Post by mattbrewsbytes »

Retiring at 58 would be awesome. Some people live to work and others work to live. I like what I do but I also have hobbies which I really enjoy.

I get that the post is satire but at some point in your career there are diminishing returns on learning new things. If you are somewhat specialized say in backend systems involving scaling, message queues, clustering, etc. it probably isn't a good time investment to learn whatever is new in the frontend world. And by learn I mean to become proficient professionally and get a job doing it, not just a "hello world" learning. Doing "hello world" learning on a technology is like learning how the yolk and rudders work in an airplane, you're not going to be flying professionally anytime soon.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#160

Post by intelVISA »

sumtechguy wrote: post #147
intelVISA wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 com…

Yeh it's a rough but rewarding life; I spend most of my hours on problems that aren't on Google, or any LLM, so I'm kinda used to it now. (Stockholm)

Would love to know of more spaces which require this level of programming - usually I feel kinda underworked at most shops.

Though, true enlightenment is combining the urge to NIH with some, light, sensible borrowing from those smarter than us :) very much a key skill unto itself.

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