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Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

221–230 of 596 posts

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#221
post #103
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Being good at C++ is very much a transferable skill. I'm sure he could learn STL (standard C++ library) in a fraction of time it would take someone else to become proficient in C++ in general.

It is a transferable skill. But not one many people want to pay for except in very niche areas these days. So if you are out of a job expect to grind for awhile trying to find someone to hire for C++. Unless you have network connections then you might be ok. Being good at C++ only goes so far, you have to have skills in techs people are willing to pay for. Not many companies are willing to wait while you skill up in their stack unless you are willing to work jr but they will not hire you anyway because 'you will jump ship'. Its not great.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Estimates > 3m $60k double your daily active users

3 months is ~60 work days assuming a 5 day work week.

I think you are correct. It seems like all of the other prices align with the weekly rate as 5 days. It also makes the daily rate seem more reasonable, at a yearly rate of $240,000. In a better interpretation of this, I could have maybe also assumed that this is just a fun way of stating something like "hiring to work on doubling users costs this much, but there isn't actually a guarantee that the userbase will be doubled."

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#223
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.

It's funny, startups turn over so fast that I've managed to become that guy while staying at a company less than two years.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#224
post #123
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.

Fair point. The web stack is the one thing I actively avoid doing anything significant with for exactly the reasons you've just described.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Making things better and applying modern techniques don’t map to a feature story. In the environments being discussed you’ll have to wait for a cadre of architects and program managers to convince the C levels to commit to a multi year, millions of dollar effort to have any hope of improving a code base.

You don't have to rewrite everything, to start fixing things.

Must be nice to live in your world of being treated as a professional.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can only assume it's because HN is full of young, inexperienced people whose main wish is to stay on the cutting edge of technology rather than sinking into a stable profession

You may be right, but I don't think experience is what makes people prioritize stability over anything else. I'd be so depressed at a real job like the one described, it would be irrelevant that it was stable and gave me extra time. Some people are ambitious, some just like variety.

The scope of ambition is larger than your job. Very ambitious people use a job as just the means to an end.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#227

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…

I don’t even know where to begin with this comment. It’s a gross mischaracterization of what was being said for starters.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#228

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…

[deleted]

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#229
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

I explained that. It doesn't matter whether it's a computer doing it or a guy in a jacket, but once one guy gets a computer all the market makers need it.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#230
post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Every moment without them is also unique.

Everything is unique, but some are more unique than others.
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