Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

Post by weinzierl » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 4:42 PM UTC

athrowaway3z wrote: post #380

weinzierl wrote: post #119

Everyone can build something new and shiny on the green field. If it doesn't work out you can always find someone or something to blame, because what you set out build was an awesome, highly innovative[1] endeavor anyway. Moving on to something else new and shiny after a while is not only ok, it is expected. Sticking to something, through good and bad times, on the other hand, that's not something many people can do,…

You're examples have very little to do with an average org's IT projects. Not in scope, definition of 'success', or definition of 'finished'. If you're company is building a programming language or operating system you need to make sure that is what you love doing.

Post by marssaxman » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 4:59 PM UTC

rthomas6 wrote: post #466

intelVISA wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by ukuina » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 5:03 PM UTC

rthomas6 wrote: post #466

intelVISA wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by agentultra » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 5:28 PM UTC

surprisetalk wrote: post #486

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

Post by Arrath » Thu, Aug 03, 2023, 5:38 PM UTC

throw0101b wrote: post #280

bayindirh wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Working on the hardware directly is more than half of the fun.

> Working on the hardware directly is more than half of the fun. It never really worked until you gave blood to the computing gods on a sharp edge of a metal case.