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I highly recommend watching "Its Quieter in the Twilight" ( https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxr ) a cool documentary about the engineers still running voyager (a lot of them have been on it for decades)
> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will…
Additionally, back in the day there was true ownership for the code you write, the code is owned by you not the company, and I know few old engineers that until now (they are retired) the companies still pay them for using their code they wrote while working there. That sense of ownership encourages you to tackle hard issues rather feeling like a machine spewing code for someone else’s business, I have seen some contracts too where the company will have ownership for anything you do while you are in the contract, including your personal projects on your own free time.
> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will…
Because software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense…
> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will…
Because software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense…
Maybe only a few COBOL codebases still active can beat that? Or not?
Reading, analyzing and assembling documentation could be probably done by LLMs.
And by including old code and snippets into the training set, the LLM could be fairly proficient in writing this code probably too?
Maybe someone knows more about the use/not-use of LLMs in this context?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense…
Still paid for the code you wrote while working there sounds like a consultant with a hell of a contract, not an employee.
Banks and airlines are the most common example, many of them run on mainframe systems with code that's old enough for humans to go into retirement - and replacement projects usually tend to go into the billions of euros range with many of them failing catastrophically.
Even paying some greybeard 500k a year to deal with that stuff despite him being retired is far more profitable in the short term. That's the problem with letting beancounters run the show because eventually, there will literally be barely anyone left alive who is capable - and even less who know all the "implicit knowledge" behind edge cases.
Now I wonder how the test it ? Is it on a software emulator on modern equipment or do they have a Voyager replica ?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because software development back in the day wasn’t like how it’s now now, the charade so called software development now is a clown show: scrum, daily stand ups, open office style, tickets, tons of ci/cd BS, and of course, the wrangler aka PM and all politics involved, none of this existed like the cult it is now, I only had one experience in such environment and despite the effort I had to ask for some common sense…
Still paid for the code you wrote while working there sounds like a consultant with a hell of a contract, not an employee.
Many of the issues could potentially be solved by modern LLMs? Reading, analyzing and assembling documentation could be probably done by LLMs. And by including old code and snippets into the training set, the LLM could be fairly proficient in writing this code probably too? Maybe someone knows more about the use/not-use of LLMs in this context?
It's a cool idea, though, I'd like to see this done as an experiment :)