And didn't cry like a baby the whole time about every trivial inconvenience and absense of magic.
You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
331–340 of 431 posts
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#332Earlier quoted context omitted.
Haven’t you also often made a moat between yourself and doing literally anything else more interesting at the company?
> Haven’t you also often made a moat between yourself and doing literally anything else more interesting at the company Nope, assuming that code works and handles UTF8 (sorry, but there is a point where it is too far gone to save). You’ve made yourself essential. You know the business better. You are strategic. And often, you become the one person who knows the legacy code base. And you will quickly find yourself a p…
These insights are essential for playing the long game; it may sound distasteful for people early in their careers. That’s fine, but when you’re running out the clock to retirement, can’t go wrong.
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#333Earlier quoted context omitted.
And the only better experience than that is killing a new greenfield project before it gets to production because the old software was good enough and the problems were organizational in how the software was being used.
I thought it was pretty funny how we had this large project that was supposed to replace a legacy system (that was mostly a bad hack that got pushed to production). But when it was finished it failed to meet the basic requirements for the only customer that used the system.
Once you're senior enough those cases won't be funny any more, just sad.
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would require staying in one company for more than 2 years, which means you probably lost out on 20-30% of income over next 2 years.
It’s okay to enjoy work and focus on your craft for two years rather than jump for more money. If you like your employer and colleagues and are growing as an engineer isn’t that better in the long term? I think jumping around can risk creating an engineer who leaves a place worse than when they started.
> If you like your employer and colleagues and are growing as an engineer isn’t that better in the long term?
No, growing as an engineer just means the reality of software development will make you more miserable.
> I think jumping around can risk creating an engineer who leaves a place worse than when they started.
Of course it does, but companies have made the choice to pay more for that than for someone who stays and makes the place better, we should give them what they want.
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#335Refactoring legacy project while keeping the business running well is an arts.
A doctor who can cure patient illness from mallpractice are considered senior !.
Regardless their years of experience.
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
This harkens back to Chesterton’s Fence. It’s always worthwhile to interrogate why things were done the way they were, especially when first coming onto a project. Knowing the why of a decision is essential to understanding if and how it should be changed. Especially if the reason is “this is what we had the time and knowledge to do at the time.”
> It’s always worthwhile to interrogate why things were done the way they were
It really isn't. A lot of the time you end up spending a lot of effort to understand something that was dumb to start with and has been dumb ever since. Something like the bullshit asymmetry principle applies - any idiot can take 5 minutes to write a line of code that will baffle a team of experts for hours. (I've done so often enough myself).
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#337I once had a manager that was fond of saying: > Experience is what you get when you don’t have any. The only better experience than working on a legacy codebase is working on a greenfield project long enough to watch it become legacy and see the good and bad consequences of past decisions.
Too bad a lot of devs love to greenfield, slap it together, then bugger off to the next project pronto.
When that's both more pleasant and better paying, who can blame them?
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#338Hard to disagree. I can usually tell what type of type of experience devs have by the snarky, dismissive responses I've gotten on various internet forums over the last two decades. e.g. "Oh but you would never have this problem if you performed proper code review" - Random_Rockstar_Dev_254 However not all legacy projects are bad to work on. If they're decently developed, then often you'll find that most of the pain i…
I see that going through these three kinds of projects let me grow as a developer: 1. green field project 2. other people's legacy project 3. your green field project growing into legacy project. You can learn so much from each of these, but to me the most eye opening experience was our green field project growing into a project with more and more developers. You could learn so much about others, some were very arrog…
ive been having a blast looking into what parts of my greenfield turned legacy project are still around, vs the parts that evolved.
the new teams doing some cool stuff with my old baby
Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#339I've run into a few engineers, very capable people and I'd be happy to work with them, but their experience was limited to very structured environments. It sounded like they were in well organized organizations. One in particular worked for a sort of "side ways competitor". They were horrified to hear about my deploying a fix all by myself, no review, for a legacy product that really didn't have a good testing enviro…
> deploying a fix all by myself, no review, for a legacy product that really didn't have a good testing environment. This sounds like a great way to cause a live-site incident.
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Re: You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project (2023)
#340Earlier quoted context omitted.
The co-workers that matter the most for networking are the ones playing the same game. They will move to new companies more quickly and try to rise up the ranks more quickly. They will know how to write a good referral because they want to maximize their chances of referral bonuses. They will have the ear of the EMs and Directors because they know that maximizes their own career options.
Saying you're right about which referrals matter (which I don't accept, but I'll play along): you're presuming that not only are these people playing the same game but they're willing to help along someone else who they know has no interests but their own at heart. Why? Why would they want to help you along? They burn capital referring you, they burn even more when you make a mess of things. When you leave a burning…
> you're presuming that not only are these people playing the same game but they're willing to help along someone else who they know has no interests but their own at heart.
Referring people for no other reason than that you know them works great, since it will implicitly happen in reverse too. See e.g. the Freemasons.
> They burn capital referring you? They burn capital referring you, they burn even more when you make a mess of things.
They burn capital if hiring you seems like a failure, they win if it seems like a success. That means your incentives are aligned. No-one gets dinged for hiring someone who implemented a couple of buzzwords, left after a couple of years for a higher position elsewhere (or got promoted into management), and then the project they were on failed a few years further down the line for unrelated reasons. Quite the opposite.