That's me, got fired 4 years before retirement. Made them rich. Young guys came in, it all had to be rebuild in microservices. Last press release, they have tripled their staff, financial turnover went down, the new system is working but is lacking the functionality of the old systems. All the pitfalls i warned them fore and got me fired, became reality.
Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
461–470 of 596 posts
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#462Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those are rookie numbers. You need to get that down to 5 seconds.
Amateur. I have a neon sign that strobes every millisecond in front of my office chair.
How embarassing for you.
I have a GPS disciplined rubidium clock with a 100MHz output hooked up directly to my sinuses. The slow sensation of waves washing ashore keeps me awake long enough to interact with the rest of you when I am taking my daily luxury 3ms break to read HN. Further, I have a script that, when my break time is over, automatically terminates any conn-
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#463Earlier 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 would dispute that the person that plugs away at a legacy code base, does not necessarily translate to someone that is also good at personal finance.
They can actually be quite opposite, and finances are easy to let slide, ignore as the days go by, while you are zen'd out on some cool technical problem.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#464Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#465Man spends entire career convincing himself the reason he keeps job hopping is because everyone else is writing crappy code. Karl Hackerman shows up to each meeting complaining. He seems sour that he hasn’t been given the go ahead to rewrite the system in Rust. He knows a lot about bleeding edge frameworks and best practices and always seems annoyed that he can’t use them at work. He thinks it’s because everyone else…
FYI, Karl has been reincarnated as MyCurrentIntern
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#466Earlier quoted context omitted.
Those stacks can be full of 'not invented here'. They are unique and have their own quirks. Quirks that you more than likely can not google for any sort of guidance as to what is going on. I wrote one of those stacks a few years ago. No std libs at all. Why? must fit in 32k and most of that space is needed to hold data. That means throwing a lot of those helper bits out or spend weeks figuring out how to bend the com…
Yeh it's a rough but rewarding life; I spend most of my hours on problems that aren't on Google, or any LLM, so I'm kinda used to it now. (Stockholm) Would love to know of more spaces which require this level of programming - usually I feel kinda underworked at most shops. Though, true enlightenment is combining the urge to NIH with some, light, sensible borrowing from those smarter than us :) very much a key skill u…
Embedded programming is this 99% of the time. Abstracting hardware away is a silly notion. Docker? Cloud? Hard to do when your code only runs
at all on one specific custom board. The protocol you wrote to talk to that one chip isn't working? Time to break out the oscilloscope and look at the actual data going to the pins.
Join us, the pay is worse and the work is harder, but also the prestige is lower.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#467Retiring at 58 would be awesome. Some people live to work and others work to live. I like what I do but I also have hobbies which I really enjoy. I get that the post is satire but at some point in your career there are diminishing returns on learning new things. If you are somewhat specialized say in backend systems involving scaling, message queues, clustering, etc. it probably isn't a good time investment to learn…
Learning new things is how you keep your mind working. People who sit around doing nothing in retirement tend do die sooner than those who keep busy. What you keep busy with doesn't matter, just do something challenging.
Strong agree. There is enough to learn in one's professional career that keeping up to date on tangential technologies may not be worth it until you have a need.
Having hobbies where learning and applying things is not just fun but can also scratch that itch to keep your mind fresh.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#468Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Oh man that's funny. Only because something similar happened to us. Hired new cleaners circa 2001. Got into the office one morning and all the PC cases were open. All the RAM and CPUs had been stolen.
In the mid-90s, when CPU heatsinks didn't need to be screwed in, thieves discovered that the new ZIF/zero-insertion-force sockets also make good zero-removal-force sockets.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#469Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is the legal retirement age, where I live. When you say "legal retirement age", what do you mean? Is this to receive some sort of retirement benefit like Social Security in the US? Or is it something else?
The retirement system is completely broken over here. As an employee you have to pay into it. I pay > 500€/mo, which a big part of my pay check and one of my largest expenses. My employer has to pay the same amount on top. You might or might not consider this essentially an additional cost for me as well. It is intended to be the primary pension plan for most people, though by the time I will go into retirement, the whole system will be unviable financially and I might get nothing. If I do get something, I get it starting after completing my 67th year of life. Of course I'd rather invest that money privately. If I choose to go into retirement early, I will have to pay hefty life-long penalties - 0.3% per month that I retire early. Obviously a couple of percent over 20 years of retirement or so can hurt quite a bit.
It might sound silly, but it's one of the main reasons I want to leave this country.
Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase
#470I am this guy