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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

#571

Post by michaelcampbell »

derealized wrote: post #390
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'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…

And this propagates the problem. Getting an answer without understanding. Sometimes the history is necessary in order to not repeat botched attempts at "fixing" something that people have already tried.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#572

Post by KMag »

RajT88 wrote: post #368
throw0101b wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I have 6 stitches in my left hand from such an offering.

Unless it was a recent incident, you should probably see a doctor about getting those stitches removed.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#573

Post by KMag »

philk10 wrote: post #379
foobarian wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I for one do not mind that part of computing getting abstracted away by the cloud, whatever its other failings. :-)

Every Friday I had to take a bunch of magnetic tapes to the bank so they could look after our backups ( which was a good excuse to pop into the pub next door to the bank...) Oh, and we never ever tested that the backups actually worked

My first job out of school was engineering consulting, writing software models of pre-production military radio hardware. The client was a military contractor, and they paid a crazy sum in order to have 3 DAT tapes: one tape always in the drive used to make the daily backups of the shared working directory, one tape always stored in a bomb-proof bunker, and one tape potentially in-transit via courier. I think it was once a month that the client's sysadmins rotated in the "unused" tape, sent the latest tape to the bunker, and waited for the old tape from the bunker to return as the "unused" tape.

Due to absurd government requirements, we were not allowed to use any version control software other than PVCS, and PVCS could only be used for storing official releases of the models. So, the last person in the office on Friday needed to make a dated zipfile of the shared project working directory.

So, one day I convinced the project manager to just let me rename our working directory, create a new empty one in its place, and tell our sysadmins that I accidentally deleted the contents of our working directory. It turns out that the client's sysadmins hadn't set up anything to expunge the oldest backup and had dutifully ignored the alarms that the tape was full. So, the latest available backup was from about a week after they last changed tapes!

The senior sysadmin prominently had a sign on his cubicle reading "Programmers are the ditch diggers of the 21st century." Those same sysadmins were supposed to keep the server room door open while I reinstalled Solaris on a Sunfire V1280 via serial connection from my laptop, because there were cables carrying TSSCI (Top Secret - Secret Compartmentalized Information) traffic. However, the V1280 consumed so much power that the server-room was under-cooled, so the sysadmins illegally shut the door to keep their cubicles cooler. They had top-secret clearances. They knew their obligations to keep me away from those TSSCI cables. Those lazy lazy arrogant sysadmins.

Anyway, unless you have recently passed a restore-from-backup drill, you don't really have backups. Even if you pay absurd amounts of money for sysadmins with top-secret clearances and absurd amounts of money to store your backups in a bomb-proof bunker.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#574

Post by ornornor »

SomeRndName11 wrote: post #487
arethuza wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

> 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.

Nothing’s changed on that front.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#575

Post by ornornor »

K0balt wrote: post #567
baz00 wrote: post #533

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

At first, it was an opportunistic grift by a teenager looking for party money. As prices fell rapidly at the supply level, local box stores would occasionally sell off stock at deep discounts (reflecting the real market price). Being a teenage sociopath, I would buy every last bit of it in town and then coast on the uninformed price perception for a week or two. Prices were falling so fast at that time that the store…

I’d watch that movie.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#576

Post by ornornor »

dxuh wrote: post #265
throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #93

Don't live to work, work to live. I bet Arthur partied his ass off back in the day, stumbled into work without sleep, napped during retros and refinement. He might be the least useful dev but he's a king at Burning Man. Now with his flush 401k, he can finally retire to make little wooden figurines to sell at the farmers market, where he really just wants to regale people with stories of the biggest fish he ever caugh…

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…

I don’t know your circumstances so don’t take this personally as these are some general ideas:

- work 4 days a week only

- save 30–50% of your income and retire after 15 years

- cook your own meals to eat healthier and cheaper (bring lunch to work)

- buy used stuff from a couple years ago

- fix your own stuff and buy cheap “broken” things that are fixable

This way you might not need to die at work or wait 67 to retire.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#577

Post by ornornor »

benoliver999 wrote: post #69

Howdy, that's almost me! AMA! I've spent 10 years as the lone dev at a small medical facility, writing database software and dealing with lab hardware etc. I guess I've touched 100% of the codebase because I wrote it all, but I always wonder if my skillset is so niche that I'll always be at small companies. Here's the deal though, work isn't everything and I'm at a job that recognises that.

I envy you. How did you get I to this gig?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#578

Post by ornornor »

TheRealDunkirk wrote: post #188
rqtwteye wrote: post #145

There will be a lot of these people maintaining the currently fashionable microservice/multiple languages/use as many AWS services as possible/scalable systems in a few years.

I have a friend who just started a job working with AS400's, learning RPG. He's not much of a programmer, but I am, and this made me think, hmm... maybe I should learn it too. There's going to be some serious job security in that field, once AI is writing all the CRUD web apps from scratch in Nodejs.

I’ve tried to look for the COBOL and other legacy languages jobs where there is a shortage for. I came short. And the few I found didn’t pay like there was any kind of shortage. There was a lot of willing offshore sweatshops offering their services though.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#579

Post by rovolo »

dxuh wrote: post #469
jjice wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> by the time I will go into retirement, the whole system will be unviable financially and I might get nothing.

What do you mean when you say "financially unviable"? There have been similar concerns raised about the US retirement system, but AFAIK that only means less money coming in than promised going out. The income is predicted to stabilize at ~75% of expenses after the "Baby Boom" generation finishes retiring. At the worst, I'd expect a pension cut rather than a complete collapse to 0.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#580

Post by dxuh »

rovolo wrote: post #579
dxuh wrote: post #469

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> by the time I will go into retirement, the whole system will be unviable financially and I might get nothing. What do you mean when you say "financially unviable"? There have been similar concerns raised about the US retirement system, but AFAIK that only means less money coming in than promised going out. The income is predicted to stabilize at ~75% of expenses after the "Baby Boom" generation finishes retiring. A…

I don't know how the US retirement system works, but I think Germany is pretty unique in that the current working population is directly paying for the pensions of the retired population. There is no investment of those funds of any kind or something like that. The state is already taking up huge loans to finance this, as we don't have enough payers. We have about two payers to one pensioner at the moment, but when I will be 67 with the current population development it will be one payer to two pensioners. Even with more massive debt one payer will not be able to pay the pensions of two other people. It might just be a huge cut, but if it's not enough to live off of, large parts of the older generation might end up on the street. A large part of the younger generation is aware of this, but 23% of Germans are over 65 and the median age is 45 so older people generally have a lot of voting power and the issue is largely ignored. Very recently there were proposals to switch to a system in which the pension payments are invested into index funds, but it was decried as "gambling away our pensions" and the proposal was shot down.
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