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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

#191

Post by cto_of_antifa »

lordnacho wrote: post #141
bboygravity wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

[dead]

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#192

Post by baz00 »

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...."

You kids sitting there. All you do is change your EC2 instance size and restart it. Back in my day I had to go and install the RAM by hand. And you know 128Mb of RAM then took up a whole suitcase and weighed more than your laptop

The I fall asleep at my desk, periodically waking up shouting "STOP-A!" and hallucinating about being bitten by thick ethernet vampires.

Going to make myself a coffin...

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#193

Post by bluGill »

mattbrewsbytes wrote: post #159

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…

Learning new things is how you keep your mind working. People who sit around doing nothing in retirement tend do die sooner than those who keep busy. What you keep busy with doesn't matter, just do something challenging.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#195

Post by baz00 »

lusus_naturae wrote: post #183
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.

I mostly had my kids because I was drunk.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#196

Post by pantulis »

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 have a pretty similar story. I spent 7 years working as a subcontractor for a big telco with CORBA, pthreads and the ACE reactor library. First week, I halted a whole contact center service by adding a sleep call to the codebase (it was on UAT environment). Fast forward several years and I could effortlessly debug cores with thousands of threads, reason about semaphores, reentrancy and even tell the difference between the POA and the BOA Orbix adaptors. I began to become the mythical guy who knew what everything did not because I was technically good, it was because I understood the business and how it mapped to the different architecture elements.

Then I felt like I could spend my whole career there and decided there was a whole world out there in the web, began to learn PHP in 2004 until the mythical "blog in 5 minutes" Rails demo appeared. I switched jobs in 2007 and I have never looked back.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#197

Post by bayindirh »

foobarian wrote: post #173
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"... 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...."

I for one do not mind that part of computing getting abstracted away by the cloud, whatever its other failings. :-)

Working on the hardware directly is more than half of the fun.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#198

Post by SanderNL »

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.

Now that I'm older this sort of comment actually makes me laugh. Thanks for that. Good code.. oh, sweet sweet summer child.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#199

Post by mytailorisrich »

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.

That's not how it works. Those who've been there 20 years and who would have difficulties finding another job are those who get low salary increases. On the other hand they've been there for so long without looking elsewhere that they probably have no idea that their pay is low.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#200

Post by ants_everywhere »

This is quality satire :) it also works somewhat for larger codebases, even non-crappy ones.

> Arthur had a knack for working hard without learning transferrable skills. He will be dearly missed

When I was at Google during the pandemic, I noticed more and more people saying they needed to learn open source tooling so they can have skills that transfer to the outside world.

That company is full of brilliant engineers who have mastered (part of) a great code base but have to start at the beginning with popular non-Google tools.

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