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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

#581

Post by rovolo »

dxuh wrote: post #580
rovolo wrote: post #579

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The US retirement system (Social Security) is paid for the same way. The population pyramid for Germany does show a much larger hump of upcoming retirements compared to the US though. The ~30yo population cohort has grown in recent years though (through immigration), so maybe it won't be as bad as you expect.

Why do you think Index Funds would solve the upcoming issue?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Gemany_population_pyramid...

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#582

Post by Aerbil313 »

iExploder wrote: post #510
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?

mate you think retirement age is 67, thats very cute of you. just wait for 20 years and see how many times this milestone will change with the way the world population is going :)

This. People don’t see what’s coming. The Era of Abundance is over.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#584

Post by runeks »

Honest question: how many HN'ers have worked on a codebase they considered non-crappy?

Or, put a better way, for all the codebases you have worked with, how many were crappy and how many were not?

I'm increasingly convinced that there does not exist a large codebase in actual use that isn't crappy in some way or another.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#585

Post by Aeolun »

kerkeslager wrote: post #556
Aeolun wrote: post #419

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The smugness of people with kids is just annoying. The ability of people without kids to have a firm belief on how they’d feel with or without them is also astonishing. I doubt people with kids are smug about it. It’s just been life changing for them, and to some extend they must regret that other people will never get to experience that, especially if they were initially hesitant too. Anyway, fully agree it makes…

> The ability of people without kids to have a firm belief on how they’d feel with or without them is also astonishing. First he tells me how I feel, now you're telling me what I believe? I don't know how I'd feel if I had kids. What I do know is that I "fully appreciate my moments without kids". If a non-parent told you that you can't truly enjoy your free time because you have kids, wouldn't that be a bit rude?

> If a non-parent told you that you can't truly enjoy your free time because you have kids, wouldn't that be a bit rude?

Nah, I’d nod my head and agree, but I imagine that’s not the point you were going for xD

I feel it’s like growing up, it’s hard to appreciate childhood, or university, or any of that until it’s passed.

By the same token you start to appreciate the seas of time you had without children once you have them, but by then it’s too late of course, and you can only appreciate them in hindsight.

I’m sure the same thing will be true after my children grow up. I’ll appreciate all the time I got to spend with them more in hindsight.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#586

Post by fnordpiglet »

swaggyBoatswain wrote: post #534
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 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

What I propose wherever I go is writing a deprecation plan before production release. It may not be kept up to date over the lifetime but at least a plan for what it would look like to exit to another platform exists documenting assumptions and one way doors, why things were done, and what a replacement would look like and why. I’ve never had great success though, people are too eager to make the next 1.0.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#587

Post by sixstringtheory »

afstr wrote: post #566
surprisetalk wrote: post #486

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Please do! That’s my favorite book! I love your other posts too

The only book i’ve read cover to cover in one day. I would buy a programmer-based version of it in a heartbeat!

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#588

Post by sixstringtheory »

r-u-serious wrote: post #530
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…

I lost it at "best practice". I once worked with this guy. He would use that term whenever he didn't have any good argument, which was basically all of the time. He would have the strongest opinions, whenever it didn't matter...

It’s appeal to authority, a logical fallacy, the things people who can’t accept they’re either wrong or outnumbered fall back on.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#589

Post by sixstringtheory »

JackMorgan wrote: post #367
mabbo wrote: post #157

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is though. It's 2023 and today companies will quite happily lay you off the moment you aren't profitable to them. This fictional person made it all the way to retirement and good for him. But the guy who followed this strategy for 15 years and now is job hunting because the company needed to cut 18% of its staff? He's got a huge gap in useful skills and decades left before he can retire. That guy is in real tro…

This is the real reason I put moderate effort into staying current: I've interviewed too many guys with 15 years in the field who can't write actual code at all because they only have written a few dozen lines ever. They are a sad lot and it's embarrassing to even interview them. If I could be guaranteed I'd have the same job forever with the same tech then who cares, but I've never met anyone for whom that was true.…

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. They aren’t incompetent because they worked the same job for 15 years. And they probably weren’t even laid off because they were deemed incompetent.

You just got unlucky enough to interview them instead of someone who got laid off after 15 years and were amazing at their job and could pick up a new tech they’d never heard of and immediately be off to the races.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#590

Post by sixstringtheory »

perrygeo wrote: post #491
Double_a_92 wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So really he just carried unnecessary weight. He could’ve carried an extra pouch of tuna fish meant for humans and it’d have been the same.
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