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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

#491

Post by perrygeo »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #101
ModernMech wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean… he’s eating cat food. Do you know many happy people who eat cat food?

Cat food is relatively expensive though... I don't undertand why people do (or claim to) eat that.

I met a thru-hiker on the Appalachian Trail that carried a few pouches of cat food. You need to carry emergency rations and they need to have decent nutritional content. But how do you stop yourself from eating it when mildly hungry? His theory was, it should be so gross that you wouldn't possibly eat it except in a true emergency. He made in from GA to CT without dipping into the forbidden slop.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#492

Post by SomeRndName11 »

KMag wrote: post #477
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 remember upgrading from a 4.3 GB HD to a 20 GB HD around 2001. I had the old hard drive sitting on my desk, and the new hard drive sitting in the case, both attached to the motherboard via IDE ribbon cables. Most of the way through backing up the 4.3 GB HD to the 20 GB HD, I heard a screech and the old hard drive twisted slightly on the desk... conservation of linear momentum. The drive was visible to the BIOS, but…

Yeah, did same in 1999 or 2000, but we _did_ _not_ take the HDD from the freezer, just pulled the ribbon and power cable through the narrow slit between the door's rubber gasket and the fridge's body.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#493

Post by tumetab1 »

prepend wrote: post #130

This is like the programmer equivalent of WH Auden’s poem, The Unknown Citizen [0]. When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that w…

some old verses that rhythm with the current zeitgeist

> Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

> That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

> When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#494

Post by SomeRndName11 »

bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #443
coffeebeqn wrote: post #431

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean I’ve literally had people like this fight adding in a version control system.

How can we be sure we can trust this "git" thing? Besides, CVS already does everything we need.

The CVS receipts are too long though.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#496

Post by wwilim »

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.

Just one?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#497

Post by bick_nyers »

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.

They are worth their weight in gold, truly. I had the pleasure of interacting with one such man at my previous company weekly for an extended period of time while planning/designing a rewrite. Listening, thinking, and questioning his stories and perspectives allowed me to formulate problems and architecture in a more first-principles, fundamental way and I believe that experience really helped me mature as a young engineer (as well as the project).

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#498

Post by ycombobreaker »

actionfromafar wrote: post #255
lordnacho wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I explained that. It doesn't matter whether it's a computer doing it or a guy in a jacket, but once one guy gets a computer all the market makers need it.

So take away the computers. Or more realistically, batch run all orders once an hour.

Retail consumers aren't exactly disadvantaged by the gradual narrowing of spreads, so what are you trying to fix? The latency arms-race is exclusively professionals fighting each other.

Getting back on topic, being a software developer for an HFT shop can be a lot of fun: serious technical challenges and a rapid feedback loop in a role where you may be the revenue stream rather than just another cost center. But posters highlighting NIH syndrome are spot on: you risk pigeonholing yourself.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#499

Post by shadowgovt »

intelVISA wrote: post #138
armitron wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you left a job that paid 2x and exposed you to hard problems that require reliable solutions for a job inside the horror clusterfuck that's the modern web where nothing really "works" and there's no real engineering to speak of besides monkeys throwing crap in a shared pile and shovelling it out the door ASAP. Good for you I guess?

Most people I know, inc. myself, would call this a "bruh moment". I can't fathom willingly entering the web mines if you've already sunk in the hours to master high perf native code, OSdev, dist systems etc. People usually enter web to avoid having to learn such things. To discard that knowledge and instead compete with an endless stream of fresh grads, boot camp grinders and LLMs for less money? A madness if I've se…

Speaking as someone who does both:

Web tech is more immediately rewarding. With C++ (and especially with modern web dev agile processes), you can spend a week building enough framework and infrastructure crap to stand up the barest inkling of a demo of the solution you plan to implement, only to have the whole thing pivot out from under you and become wasted work.

More complicated languages and frameworks that manage memory and do UI and everything for you let you get to a prototype much faster, so you can see whether it'll work or whether you want to toss out the idea much sooner.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#500

Post by ycombobreaker »

SomeRndName11 wrote: post #494
bqmjjx0kac wrote: post #443

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can we be sure we can trust this "git" thing? Besides, CVS already does everything we need.

The CVS receipts are too long though.

A real life application of Odysseus's Oar. I have mentored junior devs who have "heard" of SVN and also think CVS is just a pharmacy. It was a real gut-punch the first time.
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