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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)

#161

Post by escapecharacter »

greenchair wrote: post #137
ticklemyelmo wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Better on every axis: security, performance, resource consumption, reliability, verification, documentation... Code is a pure liability that you accept to get a useful service.

exactly..which is also why lines of code written is one of if not the worst possible metric of productivity. easy to game too.

I marked my transition to senior engineer when my net lines of code flipped to negative.

Not that I game that obviously, it just occurred naturally for a ~4 month period

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

#162

Post by bornfreddy »

literalAardvark wrote: post #113
stego-tech wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small, but not insurmountable. The time always comes when a new leader and their lieutenants come into the org and prioritize new features over maintenance, at which point your moat is null and void and you’re on borrowed time. I’ve yet to find a way to build a moat that withstands that level of hostility without actively harming the organization in the process. I’d love to hear how others deal with this inevitabilit…

When you're on a reasonably large legacy project that's a pipe dream. One of the old specialty C ERPs I've worked on has literally buried more than 3 (the ones I know of) "great Ruby rewrites". There are just _so many_ features, that the newcomers always ended up on the chopping block after 5-10 years and before they could achieve real customer traction. The old project just ended up getting some more interface fixes…

Yep. The only possible way to rewrite such projects is to do it gradually, piece by piece. It is also important that the refresh happens from within and is led by those who understand the legacy codebase and, especially, the business requirements it fulfills. No way can an external team do something like that. Being given project description "it must do everything the legacy project does, plus these new features" doesn't help either. If you get a ticket like that - run.

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

#163

Post by marcinzm »

lolinder wrote: post #154
marcinzm wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Using the latest framework improves their future job prospects. Whatever company they work for will lay them off in a split second and wo…

> So why should they care about the long term of a project? Because your future networking potential—and therefore future job prospects—depends on being liked by your peers, who may not choose the same moment of departure as you would. Follow standards and work towards long-term maintainability not because you see yourself at the same company in 2 years but because your coworkers might see themselves there and you wa…

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.

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

#164

Post by simonw »

A company I worked for had that classic problem of there being various older systems that didn't "belong" to any team and which nobody was confident in fixing or changing.

They did something which I thought was brilliant: they gathered a list of ALL of those projects and assigned every single one of them to an existing engineering team, whether or not that team had any relevant knowledge or experience (which was true for most of these older projects).

No team could complain about this because every other team was suffering through a similar challenge.

I think it worked really well! Bugs in older systems now had obvious owners, and teams were incentivized to dig in and figure out how the crusty old code they were now responsible for worked.

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

#165

Post by klik99 »

spike021 wrote: post #136
itronitron wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Additionally, reading through other people's code is educational and it also builds self-esteem.

ironically most people can say the same about coming back and reading their own old code

I forget who said it “The worst programmer I’ve ever seen is me a year ago.”

I found it true for the first five years into my career, now it’s still true but with a longer time scale, which I suppose is progress

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

#167

Post by LPisGood »

breckenedge wrote: post #120
cess11 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Juniors with tons of experience aren't very uncommon.

I cannot grok this. Are you saying that “juniors with tons of experience are very common?” Do you mean that there are seniors with a lack of experience? I believe yes I was also making that same point. Ageism in the industry also encourages seniors to appear to be plugged in with the newest shiniest thing, so we kind of do it to ourselves with our hiring practices. We need to divorce seniority from talent.

“Juniors with tons of experience are common” means that people with many years of experience who are nonetheless at the level of a junior engineer are common.

This phrase is divorcing seniority from talent, albeit perhaps not in the way experienced engineers might prefer.

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

#168

Post by Terr_ »

kerkeslager wrote: post #88
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?

I have hobbies. The most interesting work is going to be 10% interesting and 90% not interesting. In most cases it will be less interesting than that. Prioritizing "interesting" work means you'll always be exploited by the companies that can sell you on less pay, less benefits, less time off, less respect in exchange for some pittance of perceived novelty. Don't fall for this trap.

Ex: Game development.

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

#169

Post by switch007 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #166

You're not a senior engineer until you get the skill to turn any little thing you do into a one-hour presentation and a chapter in a book.

This is too real

Or a 6 paragraph Slack post in #general about what an amazing experience it was...to host a 30 minute Q and A on a certain topic. #community #growth #sharingiscaring

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

#170

Post by bpicolo »

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.

> forced to adopt the coding style and practices of that legacy project

Let's keep going with this SQL-injection prone legacy framework, with zero automated tests for the entire codebase!

I've hit that, for real. Sometimes you really do need to move mountains to change legacy.

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