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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

#231

Post by gorjusborg »

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?

The arrogance you are showing is disgusting.

Even if the decision he made was a bad one, you don't know anything about why it made sense for him at the time.

People aren't algorithms running in complete isolation and silence. They live in nuanced circumstances you can't possibly understand by his short history in a comment.

I hope you can find understanding and peace in the future.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#232

Post by sumtechguy »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #179
0x445442 wrote: post #124

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.

'So your story ran over again help me understand where we can improve your work flow'.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#233

Post by MattPalmer1086 »

josephg wrote: post #215
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…

The truth is almost certainly between those extremes. People who never put themselves in a place where they can do something amazing are obviously much less likely to do so.

Equally, there are many, many talented people out there who never achieve recognition for what they do or were capable of.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#235

Post by hliyan »

pantulis wrote: post #196
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 betw…

Interesting. I've used semaphores with pthreads (only once -- after that I realised plain old mutexes will do). Like your sleep call, I once brought an entire service to a grinding halt by adding a simple `fsync` call (to fix a recovery failure because once a sequenced message we thought we had written to disk before a crash had actually got lost in the buffer). Understanding things at that level makes any new tech fairly easy to grok.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#236

Post by overthemoon »

benoliver999 wrote: post #69

Howdy, that's almost me! AMA! I've spent 10 years as the lone dev at a small medical facility, writing database software and dealing with lab hardware etc. I guess I've touched 100% of the codebase because I wrote it all, but I always wonder if my skillset is so niche that I'll always be at small companies. Here's the deal though, work isn't everything and I'm at a job that recognises that.

You wrote it all? By yourself? That sounds ideal to me. The horrible part of this to me is that he inherited a mess and left without having done much to it, evidently being unable to do so for whatever reason. The headline says he "mastered" it, so clearly other forces were at work than his skill. That's the depressing part to me, pulling my hair out to try and understand someone else's antediluvian code base which was built under duress.

I think devs imagine someone else out there is having a better time at their computer than they are. I definitely do.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#237

Post by nightski »

josephg wrote: post #215
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…

Redis will bit rot. LuaJIT will bit rot. Jonathan Blow did make some fantastic games, but even then it's in a sea of games that are pretty great. Everyone is pretty small in the long run.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#238

Post by bflesch »

weregiraffe wrote: post #201
a_c wrote: 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.

Having kids is such a traumatic, life-changing event. I mean this in the most positive way. I can see why so many people see this as the before/after watershed moment of their lives and ambitions. However, it's understandable that not everyone needs to have kids to come to this realization.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#239

Post by jojobas »

Otek wrote: post #26
whoisthemachine wrote: post #14

Funny, but there's nothing wrong with that if Arthur was/is happy (which isn't mentioned).

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

>More than this story scares me how HN reacted

Projections, my dear Watson.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#240

Post by surprisetalk »

taude wrote: post #164
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…

Agree with you. I don't understand the point of this article other than some sort of tongue and cheek snobbery. Hope it maybe made the OP feel better about themselves.

Author here!

For context, I recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to coast in large companies.

[0] https://taylor.town/corporate-camouflage

That got me thinking about what happens when people, especially engineers, coast too much, or fail to plan out their careers.

I know plenty of smart people that are enchanted by comfort, then chain themselves to companies that take advantage of them.

If you've developed transferrable skills, this parable probably isn't for you :)

I personally think it's okay to be ambitious, and it's also okay to chill.

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