Earlier quoted context omitted.
Every moment without them is also unique.
You cannot fully appreciate your moments without kids until you have kids though.
Yes I can. That's why I don't have kids.
Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
391–400 of 596 posts
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#392Harsh.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#393Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe dumpster diving is extreme, to drive home a point. But, there are a lot of old people that are hungry, and work as Wal-Mart greeters. If you didn't save/plan well enough, and 30 years of cool software development ends as being a Wal-Mart greeter, that can seem equivalent to dumpster diving.
guys from that generation (with its past financial opportunities and real estate prices) and of a character required to even work like that - humbly and diligently maintaining a complex legacy code base, very rarely fall victim to financial issues when they retire. those men (and women) are usually very zen and collected. loneliness and suffering from a feeling like no longer being needed is probably the biggest (men…
Parent and great grandparent comments are correct. I'm sure the author of the blog had fun with that, but it's fiction. These kinds of pragmatic guys are not the ones you have to worry about, they will be ok. I think they included it to take the steam out of the obvious counter to their snark: Arthur got paid well for his work and did alright, so who cares about the sniping and denigration?
>It’ll take two junior devs and a Keurig to replace him.
Also out of touch. You can throw N juniors at this kind of codebase and without the mentorship of an Arthur type, they will get nowhere. They'll do a "rewrite" with 1/10 of the features.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#394Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#395Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
They know two perspectives. Both from their own point of view.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#396If this is a jab to supposedly mediocre programmers, it fails to be funny.
I have a friend, let's call him AP, who is a programmer in a local java shop. He's been working in the same place for 12 years since he graduated. He kind of fits the description on this article, but he is one of the happiest people I know.
He gets paid above average wage, and his work is easy and not very demanding. He knows the codebase inside out, and gets along well with his colleagues. Outside work he goes out cycling or for a beer with his friends or travels the world with his wife.
Different people have different priorities, and some are not obsessed with excelling at work.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#397Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe dumpster diving is extreme, to drive home a point. But, there are a lot of old people that are hungry, and work as Wal-Mart greeters. If you didn't save/plan well enough, and 30 years of cool software development ends as being a Wal-Mart greeter, that can seem equivalent to dumpster diving.
guys from that generation (with its past financial opportunities and real estate prices) and of a character required to even work like that - humbly and diligently maintaining a complex legacy code base, very rarely fall victim to financial issues when they retire. those men (and women) are usually very zen and collected. loneliness and suffering from a feeling like no longer being needed is probably the biggest (men…
I'm in medical device software. I'm mid-way through my career (15+ years). I've been on my current codebase (which is 20+ years old) for 5 years. I work with a coworker who's been with this code base for 20 years, but is 45 years into his career. I push back hard when it's suggested that we bring on a fresh college grad (who wasn't even born when this codebase was initiated) and it's suggested to give him/her one of the harder tasks with no supervision. Management: "They have a degree in computer science, why wouldn't that be enough qualification?" Me:"For the same reason you don't name a recent MBA graduate CEO of our fortune 500 company".
Note: I'm all for hiring recent college grads, but they need to be paired with a senior dev, and management needs to understand that you're not speeding up the project this month. Ideally, you're investing in the robustness of your team. The challenge I face is that so many junior engineers are job hopping the first ~5 years. That's not a smear on them. It's good for them. But it's not great for me...
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#398[deleted]
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#399Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
> in those days you could sink Ethernet with a faulty PC That is still possible in the modern era.
I used to work in a place where every office on the floor was connected to the same ethernet hub. We also tested a server product that became a DHCP server if you checked the wrong box, so periodically everything would stop working until the team lead came out of his den and went to yell at the new guy.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#400Earlier quoted context omitted.
They also tend to be brilliant engineers. It’s a heck of a lot easier to always be writing 1.0 of something. It’s a hellaciously difficult engineering task to improve a system that’s been improved upon for decades. These folks should be admired and respected, they’re by far the most crucial people at any company older than 30 years old. Instead we get condescending garbage like the linked article.
I just wish hiring managers saw it the same way. It's hard to explain how your last major project was a web enhancement that would have taken a couple days on a virgin codebase, because for you it involved a month of excavating through multiple strata of code dating nearly two decades old, spread across three codebases, two backend languages, a code generator which no one working there understands anymore, and a libr…
A secret I’ve learned is you only need one job, so you don’t need to take just any job or be hireable at every job. It might take longer, but finding a manager that “gets it” is very important. The most important thing is to find someone who recognizes further that a team is more than the sum of its parts, that each individual is unique and not a cog to be evaluated on a metric rubric and forced into compliance with some idealized engineer. They do exist - I was one for many many years. I’ve recently given up in disgust though and switched back to IC, but senior enough I can shape how managers manage engineers. Regardless, my advice is, if it’s helpful, find the right job with the right team and the right company. It’ll take longer, may pay less at first, but finding the right place that respects work at its value not at its marketability is key to any successful career.