Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 596 posts

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#201

Post by weregiraffe »

a_c wrote: post #185
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.

Every moment without them is also unique.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#202

Post by theteapot »

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.

I think they're called senior devs who've been there longer than you.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#203

Post by yonaguska »

lelanthran wrote: post #142
Double_a_92 wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ht…

I've got to disagree. not every contributor is making the code base better. I'm in a situation where we are such a small team that there really is no gatekeeper, and we only require one approve per pr...and I've come back from vacation to some monstrosities that I have to look at with no time to fix. After a pairing session with a a fellow developer, where I took the extra effort to refactor something along the way, probably an addition 15 minutes of effort...she quipped- no wonder it takes you so long to finish your stories sometimes. I mean, that's not why- I'm ADHD, so my lack of productivity sometimes is invariably due to a day where I forgot my meds or didn't get a full nights rest.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#204

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #161
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.

guys from that generation (with its past financial opportunities and real estate prices) and of a character required to even work like that - humbly and diligently maintaining a complex legacy code base, very rarely fall victim to financial issues when they retire. those men (and women) are usually very zen and collected. loneliness and suffering from a feeling like no longer being needed is probably the biggest (mental) threat. but the aforementioned personality traits will provide for developing new opportunities like voluntary work or maintaining some open source repo.

don't worry about them ... worry about yourself (if you are young and in IT) and especially about those poor junior devs put in place for this guy.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#205

Post by bob1029 »

hliyan wrote: post #123
DrBazza wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> so that I could learn the web tech stack from the ground up. It was all to avoid this fate. I'd like to think I've succeeded. I'm not sure if that's intentional humour or not.

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.

I was originally concerned about your parent comment regarding your new foray into web dev (that C++ path sounds amazing), but this comment has put my soul at ease.

If you walk into web dev with aggressive principles and a willingness to be controversial, you can get a lot of shit done and it will feel great. Watching others struggle under the various JS framework circuses has almost an opulent/aristocratic vibe in 2023.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#206

Post by bayindirh »

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…

> I used to be absolutely furious about being the best.

I found out that just being better than yourself takes you a long long way.

I have never competed, but just did my thing. Then found out that I've already know more and ahead of many people I'm inspired by.

Yet, this was not my aim, and still is not. I'm just one of the so-called dark developers. I just do my thing, try to do it better every time, and don't care about hall of fame of anything casual or serious.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#207

Post by dlisboa »

Namari wrote: post #189

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 ca…

To be fair you can learn outside your job. I wouldn't call him lazy just because he stuck with a company for a long time. Most jobs will only require a small percentage of a programmers' knowledge, so people supply their urges with outside endeavors. Hence reading books, doing Open Source, side projects, etc.

Lots of significant inventions in computer science began as a side project only the creator cared for initially and had to borrow his own time to do it.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#208

Post by fnordpiglet »

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 also tend to be brilliant engineers. It’s a heck of a lot easier to always be writing 1.0 of something. It’s a hellaciously difficult engineering task to improve a system that’s been improved upon for decades. These folks should be admired and respected, they’re by far the most crucial people at any company older than 30 years old. Instead we get condescending garbage like the linked article.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#209

Post by whoisthemachine »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #61
whoisthemachine wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most coding is pretty mechanical... and most juniors can pick that up easily. In spite of the mysticism surrounding software development, higher level languages are actually intended to be easy to pick up. If you have good problem solving skills, those are harder to replace with a couple of juniors (or ChatGPT).

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.

I don't disagree, but in my opinion code organization (which is what most of these things are) is mostly subjective, in other words, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Good organization certainly helps with maintainability and extensibility, but it's not a prerequisite, and it won't on its own solve tricky or vague problems.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#210

Post by Barrin92 »

hliyan wrote: post #52
bowsamic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it would you like to avoid? I don't understand the fears that people have in this thread. To me this sounds like the Platonic ideal of a programming job. EDIT: I'll reply to my replier here because /u/Dang rate limited me (again), though I must commend him for letting me have one more comment than usual before he pushes the button ;) > I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable…

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 part is a complete fiction. People who have a lot of experience in the embedded world or performant but esoteric codebases are highly thought after. Even if the literal job isn't transferable, the skills for sure are.

My mother was a COBOL developer and didn't work for 20 years because she stayed home. She recently returned to her old bank she worked for because they are dragging people out of retirement as they can't find anyone else. She earns more than I do now.

People are crazy to give a job like that up for generic web dev work.

Post reply on HN