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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

#131

Post by 2-718-281-828 »

starts promising but ends unnecessarily snarky and condescending.

why dumpster diving? and those guys cannot be replaced by any number of junior devs - that is exactly the problem with them retiring. they know the legacy stuff nobody wants to touch but everything depends on.

so, from that angle this writing reflects very poorly on the author and his work experience.

having said that - the title could fit just about any lawyer. law is the crappiest codebase that you have to spend a lifetime learning. especially the german tax law - but it guarantees a very comfortable income.

also in defense of people like that man i'd even argue that mastering a legacy codebase is mentally and motivationally not that different form mastering a game like chess.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#132

Post by zelphirkalt »

yaky wrote: post #115
zelphirkalt wrote: post #43

Life is too short for working with crap code. Unfortunately there is more crap code out there, than there are opportunities of working on beautiful code. At least in most jobs there will at minimum be compromise and part of the job will be dealing with ugly code.

Most developers see and work with crap code because good code runs well and rarely needs to be touched. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Makes me wonder how many of us work on things, that are actually relevant and not just reinventing things or adding to future dystopia.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#133

Post by throwaway2990 »

bjord wrote: post #80
throwaway2990 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s too much crap on the internet now. So yes.

are you also opposed to higher education/research in anything other than hard science, or do you think people in those fields should just stick to pencil and paper?

Are you suggesting art is crap and that I think it shouldn’t be on the internet because you deem it crap?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#135

Post by FrustratedMonky »

mustafa_pasi wrote: post #102
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.

Shouldn't you have ample savings, a private pension and social security?

? In the US? Maybe not. I'd bet a lot of hot shot young programmers think it will be gravy for ever.

Start saving now.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#136

Post by hliyan »

maaarghk wrote: post #72
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.

The web stack might give you more transferable skills but how did you calculate the trade off vs the 50% pay cut? Was the salary not actually very high and at a low ceiling compared to web work - i.e. you expect your salary to soon exceed what you made working in HFT? Or was there a serious risk of layoffs happening far in advance of your retirement? If the goal is to support yourself after retirement, are you saying…

It wasn't such a purely material calculation. Less stress, more time to spend with family and friends, learning more things and doing something that you know actually adds value to the world -- those things matter.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#137

Post by itronitron »

Waterluvian wrote: post #108
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.

Maybe we're thinking of two different archetypes, but I wonder if their "hard not to love" nature is part of the survivorship bias of why they're still there.

A former coworker of mine claims that he lasted over forty years in the company out of sheer stubbornness. He might still be there.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#138

Post by intelVISA »

armitron wrote: post #54
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 you left a job that paid 2x and exposed you to hard problems that require reliable solutions for a job inside the horror clusterfuck that's the modern web where nothing really "works" and there's no real engineering to speak of besides monkeys throwing crap in a shared pile and shovelling it out the door ASAP. Good for you I guess?

Most people I know, inc. myself, would call this a "bruh moment".

I can't fathom willingly entering the web mines if you've already sunk in the hours to master high perf native code, OSdev, dist systems etc. People usually enter web to avoid having to learn such things.

To discard that knowledge and instead compete with an endless stream of fresh grads, boot camp grinders and LLMs for less money? A madness if I've seen one.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#139

Post by DoingIsLearning »

There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. Anyone pegging their self-worth on that goal is setting themselves up for a lot of mental health struggles.

My levels of ambition and relentlessness absolutely shifted after having kids, I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. Now I am very much "fuck you pay me" and my priority is having as much free time as possible for family and friends. I for one would be fine with Mr. Westbrook's career although thankfully I haven't had as crappy colleagues as him throughout my career.

There are people of all types who will want different things, no point in judging. As the great thinker Alicia Keys once said: 'you do you boo!'

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#140

Post by ticviking »

hliyan wrote: post #123
DrBazza wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The day a professor made me implement a simple http server was the day I achieved code enlightenment.

At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

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