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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

#161

Post by FrustratedMonky »

2-718-281-828 wrote: post #131

starts promising but ends unnecessarily snarky and condescending. why dumpster diving? and those guys cannot be replaced by any number of junior devs - that is exactly the problem with them retiring. they know the legacy stuff nobody wants to touch but everything depends on. so, from that angle this writing reflects very poorly on the author and his work experience. having said that - the title could fit just about a…

Maybe dumpster diving is extreme, to drive home a point.

But, there are a lot of old people that are hungry, and work as Wal-Mart greeters.

If you didn't save/plan well enough, and 30 years of cool software development ends as being a Wal-Mart greeter, that can seem equivalent to dumpster diving.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#162

Post by systems_glitch »

lifeinthevoid wrote: post #110

I don't get these threads, it's impossible for everyone to do a job that they love and that is meaningful ... it's the ultimate luxury. Try to find an alternative way to give meaning to your life. (I have not yet succeeded in doing that by the way ...)

It's just their minds screaming "oh no that's me in six months!"

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#164

Post by taude »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #139

There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. Anyone pegging their self-worth on that goal is setting themselves up for a lot of mental health struggles. My levels of ambition and relentlessness absolutely shifted after having kids, I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. Now I am very much "fuck you pay me" and my prior…

Agree with you. I don't understand the point of this article other than some sort of tongue and cheek snobbery. Hope it maybe made the OP feel better about themselves.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#166

Post by tambourine_man »

ticviking wrote: post #140
hliyan wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a massive advantage in being able to see the web tech stack for what it is and wielding it without over-engineering or fanaticism, while your competitors are spending 2-3x on monstrosities that essentially does the same thing, but slower.

The day a professor made me implement a simple http server was the day I achieved code enlightenment. At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

That was the web, yeah. Absurdly simple. Now all new protocols are binary and require reading several academic papers instead of a single RFC.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#167

Post by mawadev »

volkadav wrote: post #83
mawadev wrote: post #12

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

Danger, Will Robinson! Time for a new boss, possibly new company.

It only took me 2 years in this "new" old company to become irreplacable! I really have to hop.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#170

Post by bluGill »

LudwigNagasena wrote: post #70
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…

Yeah, I find it amazing someone would transfer to standard web CRUD development from that. Sure you can have enough of all the custom stuff, but there are plenty of companies that will hire you for your current salary for non-web work. (you can probably guess how little I like web work)
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