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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

#121

Post by lawn »

sneak wrote: post #48
Otek wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly this. Guy had a comfortable stable job for years. Probably knew codebase and technology enough to have lots of time for family/friends/hobbies. More than this story scares me how HN reacted

Having a comfortable, stable job for many years sounds like the worst version of hell one could possibly invent for people who live like I do. There are better things to aspire to than predictability whilst making someone else rich.

Your imagination is lacking.

Having no job or income and having to worry about how to afford food or rent is surely much worse than "just" having a stable job.

Or how about a super stressful job, like the Japanese salarymen who are literally killing themselves?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#123

Post by hliyan »

DrBazza wrote: post #57
hliyan wrote: post #24

For ten years, I worked on codebases written in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL -- we needed faster, thread safe versions of strings and maps which were not available at the time; Boost? What's that?), its own custom messaging middleware built directly on sockets, its on distributed process management system built with unix syscalls (obviously). There was not a single line of HTML, Java…

> so that I could learn the web tech stack from the ground up. It was all to avoid this fate. I'd like to think I've succeeded. I'm not sure if that's intentional humour or not.

There is a massive advantage in being able to see the web tech stack for what it is and wielding it without over-engineering or fanaticism, while your competitors are spending 2-3x on monstrosities that essentially does the same thing, but slower.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#124

Post by 0x445442 »

Double_a_92 wrote: post #88
hliyan wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable to support yourself in your old age because you invested decades of your brainpower into a highly specialised, non-transferrable skill.

That's mostly the guys fault and not the jobs fault. Even in a bad code base you can start making things better, apply modern techniques and learn new things. Also most of the skill you gain there is transferrable. E.g. just because you have to work with some legacy PHP project, it doesn't mean that you would suck at creating modern applications in JS. It would just take a couple of weeks to get use to it.

Making things better and applying modern techniques don’t map to a feature story. In the environments being discussed you’ll have to wait for a cadre of architects and program managers to convince the C levels to commit to a multi year, millions of dollar effort to have any hope of improving a code base.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#125

Post by FrustratedMonky »

This is me.

30 years grinding it out on a very small esoteric system.

Hard to explain to people "no, really, my skills translate".

Paid well enough, but can't move, locked in.

But, the small esoteric system is being replaced, so I'm running out of runway and might not make it to retirement.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#126

Post by intelVISA »

bla3 wrote: post #112
hliyan wrote: post #24

For ten years, I worked on codebases written in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL -- we needed faster, thread safe versions of strings and maps which were not available at the time; Boost? What's that?), its own custom messaging middleware built directly on sockets, its on distributed process management system built with unix syscalls (obviously). There was not a single line of HTML, Java…

Sounds like your old place had a good idea what's good about c++. It's not the STL and certainly not boost.

Legit, is that place hiring? Sounds like an ideal stack free from the tragedy of the commons.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#129

Post by scns »

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.

Easy to love?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#130

Post by prepend »

This is like the programmer equivalent of WH Auden’s poem, The Unknown Citizen [0].

When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that we can externally measurable as to whether they were great or not.

I think it’s fantastic they this man’s passion is Soylent cat food hybrids for human consumption. He worked all those years and finally broke free for his passion.

[0] https://poets.org/poem/unknown-citizen

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