Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase • Hacker News Board

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#251

Post by actionfromafar » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:08 PM UTC

blantonl wrote: post #244

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.

...these OS/2 machines were once interconnected by a networking technology called 'token ring'.. no joke. It was basically an entire network where if one single node on the network misbehaved it would bring down the entire network - they didn't self recover either! you had to reboot them all. I remember once when I misconfigured a token ring card on a PC and it brought down the mainframe! It shut down the bank for 30…

To be fair, in those days you could sink Ethernet (broadcast hubs, no switches!) with a faulty or malicious PC spamming the network, too.

Didn’t have to reboot the others, though.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#252

Post by saiya-jin » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:09 PM UTC

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #93

Don't live to work, work to live. I bet Arthur partied his ass off back in the day, stumbled into work without sleep, napped during retros and refinement. He might be the least useful dev but he's a king at Burning Man. Now with his flush 401k, he can finally retire to make little wooden figurines to sell at the farmers market, where he really just wants to regale people with stories of the biggest fish he ever caugh…

Yes that would be great and I do hope for mr A the reality is some variant of this.

More often than not though, its not so rosy. Arthur would be overweight, riddled with medical issues, solitary guy with unhealthy attachment to XYZ (anime, gaming etc).

But if he had kid(s) and raised them well, well as a parent too I do have tons of respect for him for that alone, rest are details when looking back.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#253

Post by bayindirh » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:10 PM UTC

foobarian wrote: post #243

bayindirh wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

An old IBM tech told me that hard drives failed when power cycling equipment could be temporarily resuscitated by placing the drive on the floor, twisting it hard by hand, then as quickly as possible connecting it back into the machine and powering on. Apparently getting the platters to spin helped them get around a worn out motor that couldn't make the initial spin-up.

I would believe them. I have heard a similar story. A data center had to go through a planned power cycle event.

All systems were working when they shut down, but ~40% of the disks failed to spin up due to worn down motors.

That's a lot of disks.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#254

Post by Spinnaker_ » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:11 PM UTC

brnt wrote: post #216

lordnacho wrote: post #141

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...

Markets were possible. But what about the current offering of ETFs and similar products? Despite all the fancy talk, many HFT firms are just market makers for the products that enable average joes to invest well and cheaply.

You don't have to be that old to remember how terrible the experience used to be, and how easily even sophisticated individuals were ripped off at every point of the process.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#255

Post by actionfromafar » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

lordnacho wrote: post #229

brnt wrote: post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So take away the computers. Or more realistically, batch run all orders once an hour.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#256

Post by coffeebeqn » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:12 PM UTC

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’ve seen a few of those. Some are worth their weight in gold. Most are set in their ways from the trauma of trying to make everything not fall apart for so long. Almost all have stagnated and are incapable of bringing in new ideas. Almost all are husks of human beings from putting up and personalizing so much of company dysfunction

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#257

Post by fsociety » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

0x445442 wrote: post #219

oars wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It’s not just the Bay Area experiencing this.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#258

Post by sumtechguy » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

Double_a_92 wrote: post #101

ModernMech wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean… he’s eating cat food. Do you know many happy people who eat cat food?

Cat food is relatively expensive though... I don't undertand why people do (or claim to) eat that.

It was from when there was a time when cat/dog food was wildy cheap. So people would eat it. It is just a leftover from the 60s/70s.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#259

Post by sh4rks » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

FrustratedMonky wrote: post #150

prepend wrote: post #130

This is like the programmer equivalent of WH Auden’s poem, The Unknown Citizen [0]. When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that w…

Also : Sisyphus. The concept of life as meaningless, to be happy with the drudgery, or repetition, instead to be happy with the 'journey', to be in each moment. Very common throughout literature/history. I'd like to think we are somehow different, that modern man with technology is reaching some new level, to find some purpose. But now, not so sure, it's still just day-in-day-out, then you die. https://en.wikipedia.o…

I'd argue that modern technology takes us out of the moment more than anything.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#260

Post by DoingIsLearning » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 1:13 PM UTC

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…

> No there aren’t.

You underestimate the odds of talent in a population of 8 billion humans.

> 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!

There are neurosurgery robots operating with my code running in the background for several years now. I am now working on ophthalmic surgery software for sub-retinal operations. I would think that is actually kind of pretty "cool!".

However, I still know full well that I am a cog in a big machine. I still know full well that my impact is not world shattering. And I still very much think "fuck you pay me!".

My self worth is pinned by family and friends. Work is fun but it's a side quest. If you think differently that is ok, and so am I.