I am Mr. Westbrook. AMA.
Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
371–380 of 596 posts
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#372Earlier 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.
When I was in Korea in the 90s you could get LG RAM for about half what it would cost in the US. I had a scheme to buy a bunch of it to sell when I came home, but in retrospect it would have been the nerdiest case of "guy goes door to door trying to sell rapidly expiring meat".
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#373Bit of a threadbare post
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#374Earlier quoted context omitted.
You cannot fully appreciate your moments without kids until you have kids though.
Why do people feel they can make sweeping assertions about other people's experiences like this? You don't know anything about the lives of the billions of childless people out there. Many of us have livestyles that wouldn't be possible if we had children, and our "moments without kids" are totally, incomparably different from your moments without kids. The smugness of people with kids is just annoying.
People with kids have also been people without kids at some point in their life. So I'd guess they know both perspectives.
I didn't read their comment as smugness.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#375In our company we do medical devices. It is a hard SDLC business. Once a colleague of us left and shifted over to another (much bigger) medical device company. I met him some years later and he told me, retroperspectively, our company is a high-performing, super agile group. His new employer needs a year for a two line code change without really changing but only adding something. And that despite him pushing and pus…
AT&T 5ESS switch had a similar atmosphere back in the day (no idea about now). The rule was no function deletion so you delete the code in the function instead. I remember reading about a very talented guy from Bell Labs being on the 5ESS team and writing some ridiculously small number of lines of code in one year due to all the rules in place to prevent major telephone system issues.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#376Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great for the upside of growth - how do you change it for when you start to age and skills erode a little bit. That would be deeply frustrating. Need to change the model at that point! What to though?
Your skills don't age like your physical body does.
My existing skills don’t, but learning new ones sure takes more effort.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#377Earlier 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
Yes, 30 minutes is a shockingly long time. I'd say 5 minutes makes a lot more sense.
Those are rookie numbers. You need to get that down to 5 seconds.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#378There 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…
So true, I wish I had this perspective before having kids as well, I was so focused on the rat race and on "being the best", to the point of being hospitalized with intestinal problems. Now I have a great job, that gives me joy but the two things i care the most in life are my two little devils.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#379Earlier quoted context omitted.
"... And the AIX machines were a real beast. We had 20 of those things, and each had its own 20 amp circuit. Had a tendency for the grounding to the steel case to fail. If you wanted to upgrade it you'd first need to grab a pair of thick leather gloves...."
I for one do not mind that part of computing getting abstracted away by the cloud, whatever its other failings. :-)
Every Friday I had to take a bunch of magnetic tapes to the bank so they could look after our backups ( which was a good excuse to pop into the pub next door to the bank...)
Oh, and we never ever tested that the backups actually worked
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#380Everyone can build something new and shiny on the green field. If it doesn't work out you can always find someone or something to blame, because what you set out build was an awesome, highly innovative[1] endeavor anyway. Moving on to something else new and shiny after a while is not only ok, it is expected. Sticking to something, through good and bad times, on the other hand, that's not something many people can do,…
You're examples have very little to do with an average org's IT projects. Not in scope, definition of 'success', or definition of 'finished'.
If you're company is building a programming language or operating system you need to make sure that is what you love doing.