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Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

421–430 of 596 posts

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#421

Earlier 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.

That is true, but the rapid change in the tech industry makes "skills" mean something different than it would in, say, woodworking.

Once you learn woodwoorking, you're going to be good at it (until you lose strength, flexibility in your fingers, etc).

In our industry, to 'stay at the same place,' you continually have to learn new technologies, new concepts, etc.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#422
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…

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Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#423
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

High frequency algorithmic trading. Often ran on colocated hardware within the exchange / trading system data centers. Started with stuff like Sun SPARC, Solaris and Oracle and we slowly made our way to Suse, Intel and... surprise, our own database optimised for fast writes.

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?

No, it's a zero sum game. HFT firms fight to be the first to pick up a penny, but they can't force anyone to drop more pennies. They don't cause prices to go up more than they would have otherwise, or extract more value from the poor and middle class.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#424
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.

> They're hard not to love. I often search for a clearcut answer to a technical question and I'm met with a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects. Yeah, thanks for telling me why John from accounting was a dick 10 years ago and you had to code this module in a certain way. I really don't care. I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) wor…

> I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) works.

You should want to know _why_ it works that way too if you want to do any meaningful work with it. Context matters. I’ve seen many cases where the way something works seems dumb, only to learn later they had already tried the “smart” way but ran into some obscure problem which the “dumb” way solves.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#425

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…

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.

Yes you could, but the point is that HFTs don't create any new problems that need solving. They don't make anything worse.

> and it would save them billions per year.

This is not true.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#426

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…

> the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small.

See I have the opposite take. There are so many damn facets of modern life/society, and new avenues/facets/domains coming out every year, that it is actually pretty easy to find some niche where something hasn't been done yet that is world-shattering for some specific community or niche.

World-shattering for everyone is pretty overrated.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#427
post #192

Earlier 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...."

You kids sitting there. All you do is change your EC2 instance size and restart it. Back in my day I had to go and install the RAM by hand. And you know 128Mb of RAM then took up a whole suitcase and weighed more than your laptop The I fall asleep at my desk, periodically waking up shouting "STOP-A!" and hallucinating about being bitten by thick ethernet vampires. Going to make myself a coffin...

Sorry, could you tell me what "STOP-A" means?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#428

If 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 insi…

It's making a jab at "minimum effort" employees who manage to coast for years or decades. Note the "hundreds of lines of code".

There are many fantastic engineers who work on otherwise boring, rotten codebases. No shame in that.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

This is a great comic. Understanding and appreciating other people's differences goes a long way. So much harm comes from being fearful or judgemental of people who are different. Now I'm curious - what else is in your "life changing comics" folder?

Baki the Grappler.
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