Tech employment now significantly worse than the 2008 or 2020 recessions

Are we in the Cathedral or the Bazaar now? I get that confused. Everyone upload their code to GitHub --keep your truth (philosophically AND mathematically) in the Cloud ;) Oh and don't forget to document your critical thinking, on Slack. It goes much deeper tho.

[cue the POS https://youtu.be/SP-gN1zoI28]

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This has been pointed on HN about 50 times but the headlines keep coming.

They're incorrect, and my reply to a sibling covers why in detail.

But to reword it: if you think the reason 0 to 1 work is typically a duct-taped mess is because of a lack of experience or understanding from greenfield devs, you'll probably fail at 0 to 1 work yourself.

Not that a noob developer great at selling has never landed 0 to 1 work, crapped out a half working mess and left with a newly padded resume... but maintenance work is missing out on by far the most volatile and unpredictable stage of a software project, with its own hard lessons.

The duct-taped nature of 0 to 1 work is usually a result of the intersection of fickle humans and software engineering, not a lack of knowledge.

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People in maintenance can do things like write new tests against the production system to ensure behavior stays the same... what happens when 1 quarter into a 2 quarter project it turns out some "stakeholder" wasn't informed and wants to make changes to the core business logic that break half the invariants you designed the system around. And then after that it turns out you can't do that, legal pushed back. And then a few weeks later they came to an agreement so now we want a bit of A and B?

Or you're in consumer and there's a new "must have" feature for the space? Maybe you'd like to dismiss as "trend chasing", but that'll just doom your project in the market because it turns out following trends is a requirement for people to look at everything else you've built

Or worst of all, you know that quality engineering of the system will take 8 weeks, and there's a hard deadline on someone else's budget of 4 weeks, and you can of course decline to ship it, but then you'll need a new job. (and I know, you'll say "Gladly, I take pride in my engineering!", but again, you're probably going to end up maintaining a project that only survived by doing exactly what you quit over)

tl;dr it's Yin and Yang: you can't have one without the other, and you need to have a bit of the other side in you whenever you're working in the capacity of either to be a good technical leader.

> Are you really recompiling 6000 things each time a dev in the company needs to add a line somewhere in the codebase?

It happens when someone modifies a widely included header file. Which there are a lot of thanks to our use of templates. And this is just our small team of 300 people.

> Have you thought about splitting that giant thing in smaller chunks?

Yes. We've tried but it's not scaling. Unfortunately, we've banned tactics like pImpl and dynamic linking that would split a codebase unless they're profiled not to be on a hot path. Speed is important because I'm writing tests for a semiconductor fab and test time is more expensive than any other kind of factory on Earth.

I tried stuff like precompiled headers but the fact only one can be used per compilation job meant it didn't scale to our codebase.