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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

#181

Post by seanthemon »

armitron wrote: post #54
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…

So you left a job that paid 2x and exposed you to hard problems that require reliable solutions for a job inside the horror clusterfuck that's the modern web where nothing really "works" and there's no real engineering to speak of besides monkeys throwing crap in a shared pile and shovelling it out the door ASAP. Good for you I guess?

Tell me you know nothing about web dev without telling me you know nothing about web dev

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#182

Post by [deleted] »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #107
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.

"... And the AIX machines were a real beast. We had 20 of those things, and each had its own 20 amp circuit. Had a tendency for the grounding to the steel case to fail. If you wanted to upgrade it you'd first need to grab a pair of thick leather gloves...."

[deleted]

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#183

Post by lusus_naturae »

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…

You're just going to off load your lost potential and lack of ambition on to your kids, and so on and so forth. It's the main reason why people have them.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#184

Post by KnobbleMcKnees »

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.

They are hard not to love.

They also hate each and every one of you.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#185

Post by a_c »

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…

Have kids really bring things into perspective. Every moment with them is unique.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#188

Post by TheRealDunkirk »

rqtwteye wrote: post #145

There will be a lot of these people maintaining the currently fashionable microservice/multiple languages/use as many AWS services as possible/scalable systems in a few years.

I have a friend who just started a job working with AS400's, learning RPG. He's not much of a programmer, but I am, and this made me think, hmm... maybe I should learn it too. There's going to be some serious job security in that field, once AI is writing all the CRUD web apps from scratch in Nodejs.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#189

Post by Namari »

Einstein once said "Once you stop learning, you start dying". I feel like in IT it's the case for most what people are thinking. In my case I have been switching tech because I felt I wasn't learning anything new or simply because it's was dying. I feel like these guys like him are probably too confortable in their confort zone or too lazy to learn anything new (the less you do the less you've got motivation + you can't teach old dog new tricks).

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#190

Post by bluGill »

PurpleRamen wrote: post #60
time0ut wrote: post #25

There is something to be said for stability. Since our protagonist retired early, the pay must not have been bad. The glass is half full, or so I tell myself.

I thought so at first too, but the planned "street performance and dumpster diving" tells a different story.

I know people who enjoy street performance and dumpster diving. Bringing your juggling balls (or guitar) to a street corner and trying to make money gives some pressure that makes it fun - and that you don't need the money means if people don't like you enough to pay it doesn't matter. Likewise people throw away a lot of treasures that you can fix up and sell/give away.

If he needs to be a street performer and dumpster diver to make ends meet that isn't good. However people do those things as a hobby all the time.

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