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

261–270 of 596 posts

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#261

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

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…

> learn the web tech stack from the ground up

Ouch. Should have stayed in legacy C++.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#263

Post by sramsay »

surprisetalk wrote: post #240
taude wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Honestly, I just thought it was hilarious -- a sort of parodic counterpoint to the Story of Mel.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#264

Post by shrimp_emoji »

bluGill wrote: post #170
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone working with low-level C++ for HFT can face similar fate. Most of skills gained at such job seem very transferable. The article seems to be more about jobs where 95% of work consists in implementing CRUD in accordance with very specific business logic of the company. The only reason to change such job I can imagine is to sit out your non-compete package. But I am not in this industry so maybe I’m…

Yeah, I find it amazing someone would transfer to standard web CRUD development from that. Sure you can have enough of all the custom stuff, but there are plenty of companies that will hire you for your current salary for non-web work. (you can probably guess how little I like web work)

Same! The poster's pivot reads like horror to me. Like they lost their mind and joined a cult where they worship Memnon with sermons of JavaScript.

> It never sat well with me. Colocated systems saw latencies no mom-and-pop investor could ever dream to achieve. That is one of the reasons why the second company I joined was a non-profit that built systems to help track human rights violations, enforce labor rights, monitor democratic elections etc. Third job was in the food industry and the last one, in housing / property management. So I'd like to think I've made sufficient amends.

Ah, nevermind. Turns out they were worshipping Memnon with C++ and renounced that cult with web tech! :p

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#265

Post by dxuh »

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…

Hard to do if most of your life is work. I find it very hard to find space for an actual life after subtracting a full-time job, exercise, personal hygiene, nutrition, etc. from my waking hours. It's essentially ~2h a day + the weekend, which often also consists of getting stuff done you didn't manage during the week.

I hate the thought of my life starting in retirement. Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is the legal retirement age, where I live.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#266

Post by sumtechguy »

bluGill wrote: post #190
PurpleRamen wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought so at first too, but the planned "street performance and dumpster diving" tells a different story.

I know people who enjoy street performance and dumpster diving. Bringing your juggling balls (or guitar) to a street corner and trying to make money gives some pressure that makes it fun - and that you don't need the money means if people don't like you enough to pay it doesn't matter. Likewise people throw away a lot of treasures that you can fix up and sell/give away. If he needs to be a street performer and dumpst…

I worked with a guy who made easy into the 200k range in the early 2000s two separate pension plans. Total dumpster diver. He loved the thrill of finding stuff. Wore complete rags at work. Drove a car from the early 70s. Ate simple homemade leftovers ever day for lunch. He loved the idea of racking up a high score.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#267

Post by hgomersall »

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…

Engineering is one of a few special disciplines where peoples' hobbies align easily with ability to earn money at most levels of professional performance; being mediocre is still a recipe for a generally acceptable standard of life. Compare it to things like sports or acting or music. It's possible to make a living at the lower echelons (read: everything below elite level), but it's hard work or mundane and often not well compensated.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#268

Post by lovecg »

bflesch wrote: post #238
weregiraffe wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For me it was the profound perspective shift from being a leaf node of a tree so to speak to becoming just one link in a long chain. It tends to relax the do-or-die drive quite a bit.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#269

Post by surprisetalk »

dxuh wrote: post #265
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…

Hard to do if most of your life is work. I find it very hard to find space for an actual life after subtracting a full-time job, exercise, personal hygiene, nutrition, etc. from my waking hours. It's essentially ~2h a day + the weekend, which often also consists of getting stuff done you didn't manage during the week. I hate the thought of my life starting in retirement. Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is…

https://taylor.town/10-minutes

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#270

Post by JustLurking2022 »

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…

You could easily solve all of this without HFTs - you might introduce a few seconds of latency but virtually no real investors care about that level of latency and it would save them billions per year.
Post reply on HN