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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

#34

Post by bowsamic »

Otek wrote: post #26
whoisthemachine wrote: post #14

Funny, but there's nothing wrong with that if Arthur was/is happy (which isn't mentioned).

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

I can only assume it's because HN is full of young, inexperienced people whose main wish is to stay on the cutting edge of technology rather than sinking into a stable profession

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#36

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

bowsamic wrote: post #22
bjord wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's supposed to be a "real" article about a real person, I think it's art (that speaks to some of our fears) do you believe that something has to be purely "productive" to be deserving of space on the internet?

I think it's quite inspiring rather than invoking fear. I would take a job like this any time.

There was a Dilbert once (no longer available, for some reason), where Phil, the Prince of Insufficient Light, curses Dilbert to select one of two choices:

1) You will be paid well, but your code will be destroyed every night.

2) You will be poorly paid, but your code will be useful and appreciated.

Dilbert says "Hey! They're both better than what I have now! Wally, you should come and get some of this!"

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#37

Post by Aloha »

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…

Was it something that ran in an embedded environment?

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#38

Post by mytailorisrich »

antupis wrote: post #15
bjord wrote: post #3

I'm worried this will be me someday. I suppose that's the point.

Does somebody work 35 years in same company, it is usually 2-5 years -> new company grind rather than working at same company.

Yes, I know many people in software/tech who have been 20+ years with the same company. Hopping every 2 years is not common.

That said, it is a red flag for me if most people in the team have been there for very long: it means that as a new comer I will always be bottom of the pile and have no career growth opportunity.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#39

Post by whoisthemachine »

mawadev wrote: post #12

My boss straight up told me a couple of juniors could do my job the other day

Most coding is pretty mechanical... and most juniors can pick that up easily. In spite of the mysticism surrounding software development, higher level languages are actually intended to be easy to pick up. If you have good problem solving skills, those are harder to replace with a couple of juniors (or ChatGPT).
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