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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

#531

Post by derealized »

freetanga wrote: post #526
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…

That attitude gives me “I don’t know how my code works, I copied it from the Internet and it does compile!” creeps.

Because I don't want to hear about personal stories? How is that related? I do very much want to know how code works. It's the very core of my argument.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#532

Post by tannhaeuser »

actionfromafar wrote: post #251
blantonl wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...these OS/2 machines were once interconnected by a networking technology called 'token ring'.. no joke. It was basically an entire network where if one single node on the network misbehaved it would bring down the entire network - they didn't self recover either! you had to reboot them all. I remember once when I misconfigured a token ring card on a PC and it brought down the mainframe! It shut down the bank for 30…

To be fair, in those days you could sink Ethernet (broadcast hubs, no switches!) with a faulty or malicious PC spamming the network, too. Didn’t have to reboot the others, though.

What do you mean hubs? Back in the day we manually pierced thick Ethernet coax to get access; of course you could ruin the whole segment running tens or hundreds of meters if you didn't take care.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#533

Post by baz00 »

K0balt wrote: post #529
baz00 wrote: post #336

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah crazy money. My father used to import RAM when it was really really expensive in the 1980s. He used to take it on planes from Taiwan as hand luggage handcuffed to himself because it was that valuable.

This brings back memories. I got my start in parts wholesale selling 30pin SIMMs in static baggies out of my leather jacket in a Taco Bell LMFAO. It took some convincing to convince the management I wasn’t selling drugs, but the getup helped me to not be noticed by people that might otherwise know that I was carrying thousands of dollars in cash and chips daily. I would sit there and wait for RAM hungry customers tha…

Hahaha hooky RAM dealer. Much respect though for being there at the start. I used to do something similar with pirated Amiga games but that was a limited market!

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#534

Post by swaggyBoatswain »

fnordpiglet wrote: post #208
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 also tend to be brilliant engineers. It’s a heck of a lot easier to always be writing 1.0 of something. It’s a hellaciously difficult engineering task to improve a system that’s been improved upon for decades. These folks should be admired and respected, they’re by far the most crucial people at any company older than 30 years old. Instead we get condescending garbage like the linked article.

I wish people like this would architectural decision records so people inheriting it later wouldn't be left in the dark by the decisions made in the system

Because sometimes on the outside systems look confusingly written, but it could be a reflection of the scope of confusing business rules to begin with that they had to scope out

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#535

Post by nly »

lordnacho wrote: post #171
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone working with low-level C++ for HFT can face similar fate. Most of skills gained at such job seem very transferable. The article seems to be more about jobs where 95% of work consists in implementing CRUD in accordance with very specific business logic of the company. The only reason to change such job I can imagine is to sit out your non-compete package. But I am not in this industry so maybe I’m…

It's not that you won't have the skills, it's somehow demonstrating them. I also worked at an HFT C++ shop that used no STL. Every data structure has a weird name and API that you get used to. The whole architecture has its own idioms, and hasn't needed much upgrading in terms of language features. Imagine you learn the grammar of English. You learn how to pluralise nouns, when to put an s at the end of a verb, how t…

I work at a HFT shop and put C++ code is modern (C++23, GCC 13) and uses stacks of third party libraries

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#536

Post by urtie »

tomatotomato37 wrote: post #295
fnordpiglet wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They also tend to be brilliant engineers. It’s a heck of a lot easier to always be writing 1.0 of something. It’s a hellaciously difficult engineering task to improve a system that’s been improved upon for decades. These folks should be admired and respected, they’re by far the most crucial people at any company older than 30 years old. Instead we get condescending garbage like the linked article.

I just wish hiring managers saw it the same way. It's hard to explain how your last major project was a web enhancement that would have taken a couple days on a virgin codebase, because for you it involved a month of excavating through multiple strata of code dating nearly two decades old, spread across three codebases, two backend languages, a code generator which no one working there understands anymore, and a libr…

Or a library who's code now only exists on the wayback machine... and of the modified version that you actually use only a single copy exists on an old machine that one of the devs in the company never bothered to hand in for recycling...

Never mind that it's part of a decade old contract stipulating a quarter century support...

Greenfield is easy. :)

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#537

Post by specialist »

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...

My thumbs still have blisters from manually stuffing memory expansion boards with 1Mb of DIP RAM for our 80286 PCs. We were doing image capture and processing, long before it either usable or useful.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#538

Post by nly »

lordnacho wrote: post #141
bboygravity wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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're describing market makers, not all HFT participants.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#539

Post by omscs99 »

lordnacho wrote: post #171
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think anyone working with low-level C++ for HFT can face similar fate. Most of skills gained at such job seem very transferable. The article seems to be more about jobs where 95% of work consists in implementing CRUD in accordance with very specific business logic of the company. The only reason to change such job I can imagine is to sit out your non-compete package. But I am not in this industry so maybe I’m…

It's not that you won't have the skills, it's somehow demonstrating them. I also worked at an HFT C++ shop that used no STL. Every data structure has a weird name and API that you get used to. The whole architecture has its own idioms, and hasn't needed much upgrading in terms of language features. Imagine you learn the grammar of English. You learn how to pluralise nouns, when to put an s at the end of a verb, how t…

Unrelated question: do hfts make you move out to east coast, or are there some in California?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#540

Post by djbusby »

notbeuller wrote: post #388
djbusby wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surgery bots are cool. My software just keeps track of drugs

As someone that has relied on such devices to survive cancer - thank you.

You must think I'm cooler than I really am. I don't even do any devices. Just boring ass inventory control.
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