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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

#481

Post by kpw94 »

frenchman99 wrote: post #434
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It also makes it feel all the more exploitative that young developers are encouraged to work long hours and put their everything into their job. And that women are de-incentivized to have children by the market, if not capitalist society at large - don't do it, it'll cost you your career! We only give you two weeks of leave after you gave birth. You can't afford child care, or all your wages would be spent on it! etc…

In France, women get 10 weeks & men get 4 weeks paid leave.

This is surprisingly low for a country known for its long vacation! Especially the men.

Here FAANG it ranges from 18 to 24 weeks for women, 12 to 18 weeks for "non birthing parent" (men, or adopting parents).

There's State-by-state paid family leaves laws, which makes it usually around 12 weeks (men or women).

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#482

Post by kstrauser »

WaitWaitWha wrote: post #363
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.

I recognize the parody about me. ;) Do you know why I am giving you the two hour history? First, I recognize that I need human interaction, but do not really like people. Second, I am hoping that you will learn & understand instead of just memorize & regurgitate so in the future you can resolve it yourself instead of bothering me. Now, go away; I had my week's fill of socializing. /joking - or am I?

Ha ha but really.

I’m not trying to explain why you shouldn’t change it. I’m trying to help you understand what competing forces made it that way in the first place so you can decide if any of that’s still relevant.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#483

Post by entropicgravity »

baz00 wrote: post #192
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #107

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...

Continuing with the Monty Python vibe, the first code I wrote was in machine code (ie hex, not even assembler). Though I worked with a guy who wrote machine code on a magnetic drum and they used the delay of the rotation of the drum for their timing. The good ol' days.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#484

Post by ericmcer »

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.

It doesn't seem like a bad way to go. If the company is stable enough and you can cash in your engineers salary for 25 years and have crazy good job security.

Seems better than being a 50 year old trying to wow a 28 year old interviewer with your skills on whatever hot new framework just came out.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#485

Post by lcnPylGDnU4H9OF »

InvertedRhodium wrote: post #471
WaitWaitWha wrote: post #363

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I recognize the parody about me. ;) Do you know why I am giving you the two hour history? First, I recognize that I need human interaction, but do not really like people. Second, I am hoping that you will learn & understand instead of just memorize & regurgitate so in the future you can resolve it yourself instead of bothering me. Now, go away; I had my week's fill of socializing. /joking - or am I?

For me, it's usually trying to rapidly justify the existence of whatever Rube Goldberg machine I'm having to explain. There's always reasons behind the madness, even if they're not particularly good ones.

> justify the existence of whatever Rube Goldberg machine

I'm at least going to be waiting for questions to be asked.

"Why was it done this way?"

"Circumstance combined with 'path of least resistance'."

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#486

Post by surprisetalk »

agentultra wrote: post #304

Man 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…

Author here!

I love this so much. I've totally been this guy :) Learning how not to be an insufferable doucheb*g was a surprisingly hard challenge for me

I've been writing a longer fiction piece about overzealous know-it-all engineers in the style of Confederacy of Dunces. Probably won't be done for a while, 'cause there's a lot more of my soul in it haha

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#487

Post by SomeRndName11 »

arethuza wrote: post #299
baz00 wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

"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…

I worked in some ex-USSR government facility, and they had an old hp-9000 system, that needed ram upgrade. HP wanted some ridiculous thousands of $$ for like 16MiB of RAM. After some inspection it was discovered that the RAM is nothing more than 72pin SIMMs. We took some ram from nearby old 486 and it worked.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#488

Post by vbezhenar »

bayindirh wrote: post #253
foobarian wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An old IBM tech told me that hard drives failed when power cycling equipment could be temporarily resuscitated by placing the drive on the floor, twisting it hard by hand, then as quickly as possible connecting it back into the machine and powering on. Apparently getting the platters to spin helped them get around a worn out motor that couldn't make the initial spin-up.

I would believe them. I have heard a similar story. A data center had to go through a planned power cycle event. All systems were working when they shut down, but ~40% of the disks failed to spin up due to worn down motors. That's a lot of disks.

What’s a procedure to avoid it? Reboot machine once a week so disks fail not all at once?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#489

Post by esMazer »

rr808 wrote: post #71
hliyan wrote: 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…

I did the same, I thought C++ was heading for obsolescence. Now a master of Java, Javascript and can write great full stack apps. Meanwhile HFT C++ jobs are paying double, I'm thinking of going back, even if the systems are boring.

been working on java jobs and easy code bases since I graduated 10 years ago, nothing had been really challenging and I'm not complaining. Would be interested in a job that pays more even do you think working on C++ jobs is more challenging or just boring?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#490

Post by derealized »

as1mov wrote: post #450
derealized wrote: post #390

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

It probably depends on the person, but I personally enjoy such tales. Gives me more context about why a piece of code was written the way it is now. But then again, I also enjoy scrolling through the commit history of a repo like it's an archaeological dig site, so I might be the weird one here ahaha.

It's full of "fix" or "fix typo" or "update blah.c"... tiny commits straight to the master branch without CI.

Anyway, I really don't care about the past in this way. A simple "accounting needs this for that" is enough for me. No need to explain that Adam was getting divorced at the time, so he was grumpy, and, and, and...

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