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You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

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Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#41

Post by cess11 »

tobr wrote: post #32
joezydeco wrote: post #20

As an embedded engineer in a new position I always volunteer to take up an old crusty legacy product that nobody else wants to touch. It's a quick education into how the company approaches projects and all the ghosts they had to fight along the way. All the business logic is there, and sometimes it's even documented. And once you have a semblance of knowledge about how the thing works and how to make fixes, you've bu…

Haven’t you also often made a moat between yourself and doing literally anything else more interesting at the company?

What could be more interesting than code that has managed to survive in the trenches of production?

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#42

Post by Narann »

One of my most educational personal project has been to update a ten y/o mupen64plus OpenGL plugin (Rice) to OpenGLES for RPi.

So much code that looks weird that I had dig in a lot and finally understood why this tiny piece of non-sense code is actually what make the whole system working, and think about how smart the previous dev was and how dumb I would have solve the problem myself.

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#43

Post by bobthepanda »

tobr wrote: post #32
joezydeco wrote: post #20

As an embedded engineer in a new position I always volunteer to take up an old crusty legacy product that nobody else wants to touch. It's a quick education into how the company approaches projects and all the ghosts they had to fight along the way. All the business logic is there, and sometimes it's even documented. And once you have a semblance of knowledge about how the thing works and how to make fixes, you've bu…

Haven’t you also often made a moat between yourself and doing literally anything else more interesting at the company?

More often than not it’s not enough work to just work on the legacy system that keeps chugging.

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#45

Post by powerhugs »

tobr wrote: post #32
joezydeco wrote: post #20

As an embedded engineer in a new position I always volunteer to take up an old crusty legacy product that nobody else wants to touch. It's a quick education into how the company approaches projects and all the ghosts they had to fight along the way. All the business logic is there, and sometimes it's even documented. And once you have a semblance of knowledge about how the thing works and how to make fixes, you've bu…

Haven’t you also often made a moat between yourself and doing literally anything else more interesting at the company?

Engineering isn't about working on the most interesting problems. It's about getting stuff done and management happy.

Here, parent explained in detail how to get stuff done, management very happy and secure their position for years to come.

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#46

Post by draw_down »

joezydeco wrote: post #20

As an embedded engineer in a new position I always volunteer to take up an old crusty legacy product that nobody else wants to touch. It's a quick education into how the company approaches projects and all the ghosts they had to fight along the way. All the business logic is there, and sometimes it's even documented. And once you have a semblance of knowledge about how the thing works and how to make fixes, you've bu…

[dead]

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#47

Post by codegeek »

Legacy or not, I don't consider anyone really senior unless they have spent building and more importantly maintaining/fixing a system at least for 3-5 years at one single place and have done this at least 2-3 times across different companies. We all know that it is a lot easier to start a new/greenfield project with shiny tech etc. It is a lot harder to maintain especially once it is 2-3 years old and in production with tons of users.

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#48

Post by maerF0x0 »

gorbachev wrote: post #30
namdnay wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the only better experience than "working on a greenfield project long enough to watch it become legacy and see the good and bad consequences of past decisions" is working on a second greenfield project long enough to see that drastically overcompensating for all the bad things from the first one is not the right solution either :)

I keep telling people v1 of anything always sucks. One of the tells of an inexperienced engineer I use is how much they disparage the previous team's work.

> how much they disparage the previous team's work.

And many fail to discern between "disparage" and "critique" or even "Question in order to learn"

One of the greatest failings I've seen in leadership in our time is the idea that in order to make a critique one must come with a solution in hand. As a leader I want to know the things that are going wrong as soon as they're seen, not to require someone to go through the heavy lifting of a solution before they say a word. Now, of course, there's a difference between bitter unhelpful cynicism, and simply identifying a gap between the current state and optimality.

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#49

Post by cess11 »

breckenedge wrote: post #35
seanalltogether wrote: post #31

You're also not a senior engineer until you've been forced to adopt the coding style and practices of that legacy project. A lot of younger developers like to come into a new project and slap on the latest frameworks or coding practices that they've picked up recently, without acknowledging that breaking the standards of the project lead to higher mental load to maintain that code over the long term.

It isn’t just younger developers doing this, nor even inexperienced ones. I’ve seen a ton of experienced people do this to themselves and their teams, mostly it seems to be able to pad their resume, but some honestly believe newest and shiniest is best.

Juniors with tons of experience aren't very uncommon.

Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)

#50

Post by regularfry »

powerhugs wrote: post #45
tobr wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Haven’t you also often made a moat between yourself and doing literally anything else more interesting at the company?

Engineering isn't about working on the most interesting problems. It's about getting stuff done and management happy. Here, parent explained in detail how to get stuff done, management very happy and secure their position for years to come.

It depends on your goals, though. Depending on the company, that can be a very good way to be treated as a cost centre to be minimised.
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