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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

#211

Post by ncann »

seanthemon wrote: post #181
armitron wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It's hyperbolic but it's a common sentiment that I tend to agree with. The web dev world changes too fast and too often, many stacks involve absurd complexity for dubious performance and maintainability and other metrics.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#212

Post by zafka »

This is quite funny in a painful way. I identify on a few different vectors. I started my "professional" career in telecom. There I really did become an expert on some very small percentage of code. It was exhilarating to do patches in 286 assembler for an obscure language (CHILL). Now many years later, I work in NPD at one of the small divisions of a giant Medical device company. I wrote 90% of the legacy code. It is embedded and I have not needed to update any of it in 10 years. With changing management styles, the new push is to buy new products from smaller companies, and just to the required paperwork for regulatory approval.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#213

Post by SanderNL »

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.

You're being negged into oblivion, but you have a point.

There is "I'm OK with my pedestrian job but I still try to do my best and actually like the people there" and "my job sucks all joy out of my life and provides me with nothing of value except money".

I have kids, but I somehow skipped the "I want to be the best"-phase and went straight to "I'll make do with whatever you give me" so nothing really changed. I actually work a bit harder now so my kids can see work is good - also to pay for their fancy shit.

Even stupid jobs can be sources of relative joy if you let them. Don't put up with abuse of any kind, though.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#214

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

throwaway2990 wrote: post #74
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a Dilbert once (no longer available, for some reason), where Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, curses Dilbert to select one of two choices: 1) You will be paid well, but your code will be destroyed every night. 2) You will be poorly paid, but your code will be useful and appreciated. Dilbert says "Hey! They're both better than what I have now! Wally, you should come and get some of this!"

Why do people get stuck on these soulless jobs?

Lots of reasons. Many folks are afraid of the unknown, so it's the devil you know, kind of thing.

That's why most folks aren't entrepreneurs. There's a ton of risk, involved in that kind of stuff, and most folks are risk-averse.

In my case, my job was sort of soulless, but only in parts. Many folks here, would say that it was a horror show, but I also worked for a company that gave me business cards that would open doors, I worked with some of the finest engineers and scientists in the world, enjoyed considerable trust, and had great stability.

Nothing comes for free. There's pluses and minuses to everything. I find it doesn't do me a whole lot of good to judge others on the choices they made, and, in the aggregate, there's not much in my life that I regret, and that's worth more than money.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#215

Post by josephg »

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…

> There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small.

No there aren’t. For every Jonathan Blow, Salvatore Sanfilippo (redis) or Mike Pall (LuaJIT) there are probably thousands of run of the mill developers working at feature factories. You don’t build amazing software by being lucky. Your boss at GenericCo will never go out of their way to ask you to build that thing you’ve always been dreaming of making.

You choose to work on software you find interesting. Or, for any of 1000 totally valid reasons, you choose to be small.

If you think you’re all that, don’t blame your company for “not getting the opportunity”. Please. You already have all the tools you need to code. Make something cool!

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#216

Post by brnt »

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…

Ah, the ol' liquidity spiel. One wonders how markets were even possible before HFT...

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#217

Post by hiAndrewQuinn »

bayindirh wrote: post #206
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…

I recently put a little modal on my phone that just says "Compete against yourself" every 30 minutes, and I'm finding it remarkably helpful at focusing my efforts back to what I want to see in the world.

I like the mindset of trying to be just a little better than you were, every day. It feels... correctly scaled, somehow.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#219

Post by 0x445442 »

oars wrote: post #92
Otek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Arthur was also able to purchase his large family home in the 1990s for $90,000 which is now worth $2.3 million.

Nothing in the article said Arthur lived in the Bay Area.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#220

Post by brnt »

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?

HFT is still CRUD, CRUD for the extremely wealthy.

If you want interesting, go to HPC large scale simulation.

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