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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

#351

Post by bayindirh »

kayodelycaon wrote: post #349
enlyth wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You willingly turned on a notification every 30 minutes that tells you to compete against yourself? I cannot tell if this is parody or just Peak HN

I'd go with Peak HN. Everyone has their quirks. I've got my computer speaking the time every 15 minutes and everyone I know would be driven absolutely insane by that. It helps me keep track of time. Some people put a postit on their mirror or laptop screen.

This is a comic I love (titled: Weird): https://viruscomix.com/page500.html

I store a copy in my "life changing comics" folder.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#352

Post by sanderjd »

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.

This is actually something I've identified as a major con of working at startups (there are a lot of pros too, and I'm at a startup right now that I love): It is impossible to have these people, because the company is just too young. And also I think this kind of person doesn't usually join a startup for its first, like, decade.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#353

Post by bandyaboot »

hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #217
bayindirh wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

If you find yourself becoming desensitized to the notifications on your phone, I suggest training a parrot to stand on your shoulder to liven it up. Great for parties too.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#354

Post by vsareto »

gerbilly wrote: post #318

Wasn't this a bit of a self deprecating summary of his own career? Many of the comments seem to assume that it was written by his colleagues and that the description of his career is condescending or snarky. Personally, I find it really funny, and that it probably describes many of us, despite the fact that we think we are way too cool to ever be like the character described in the piece. Most of today's new tech wil…

This is how it should be on salary. If you're good enough then you can get time back from the job and work less per week. It starts to look crazy good when you are doing like 5-10 hours per week because you're so familiar with a code base and have a decent understanding of the business. If they aren't going to give meaningful raises for doing maintenance, then time is the only thing you can get more of.

If companies want people to work harder, they'll have to give more compensation that scales better with performance.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#355

Post by sidlls »

hliyan wrote: post #52
bowsamic wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What about it would you like to avoid? I don't understand the fears that people have in this thread. To me this sounds like the Platonic ideal of a programming job. EDIT: I'll reply to my replier here because /u/Dang rate limited me (again), though I must commend him for letting me have one more comment than usual before he pushes the button ;) > I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable…

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.

Most of my early programming work was with C and C++ (after I left academia, where it was mostly Fortran). I am, simply put, a better programmer for it, objectively so when compared to my peers who've never touched it, at basically every place I've worked at since (including a FAANG-level company, currently, where I'm mostly writing in go and python). At least, that's the feedback I get from them.

I think it's fair to say this skill difference is largely from that work in the C family, where I learned a number of different paradigms for design and development in that world, with all its footguns and low-level "gotchas". It has always been easier for me to parse and understand others' code, identify subtle bugs, to use debugging tools, and to identify some optimizations by examining the code that others might spend days using profilers to find.

Some of that would come with engineering experience in general, regardless of languages used, but not all of it, but I picked these skills up faster and earlier in my career, thanks to that early work. Skill with C++ is definitely transferrable, in at least some cases.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#358

Post by abnry »

enlyth wrote: post #324
hiAndrewQuinn wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

You willingly turned on a notification every 30 minutes that tells you to compete against yourself? I cannot tell if this is parody or just Peak HN

Yes, 30 minutes is a shockingly long time. I'd say 5 minutes makes a lot more sense.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#359

Post by smcameron »

baz00 wrote: post #336
arethuza wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"I had to go and install the RAM by hand" When the Sun 4/330 I used to have needed a RAM upgrade someone flew up from London to Edinburgh with the RAM and installed it. Fortunately we were in the Grassmarket about 10 minutes from the Castle so he had plenty of things for him to do to keep him amused until his return flight. Edit: I checked and the max the 4/330 could take was 96MB so I suspect the upgrade was an awes…

Yeah crazy money. My father used to import RAM when it was really really expensive in the 1980s. He used to take it on planes from Taiwan as hand luggage handcuffed to himself because it was that valuable.

I worked in a shop in the early 90s with a bunch of Suns, and we had hired this new sysadmin. One day we noticed that half the RAM was missing from a workstation, and few minutes later noticed half the RAM was missing from all the workstations. Turned out the new sysadmin was a cokehead and had stolen it.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#360

Post by kayodelycaon »

bayindirh wrote: post #351
kayodelycaon wrote: post #349

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd go with Peak HN. Everyone has their quirks. I've got my computer speaking the time every 15 minutes and everyone I know would be driven absolutely insane by that. It helps me keep track of time. Some people put a postit on their mirror or laptop screen.

This is a comic I love (titled: Weird): https://viruscomix.com/page500.html I store a copy in my "life changing comics" folder.

Ooooo... a peanut butter banana bacon sandwich sounds awesome.
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