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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

#541

Post by josephg »

deely3 wrote: post #246
constantly wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t even know where to begin with this comment. It’s a gross mischaracterization of what was being said for starters.

Its not a mischaracterization, its a projection: if you don't do something that parent commenter believes is important then you are not important. Moral : before starting new job always ask parent commenter are this new job is important for him?

That’s not an accurate summary of my beliefs. Maybe this would be clearer:

If you want to be interesting, choose to do something interesting. Luck is rarely the limiting factor in your creative output.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#542

Post by josephg »

DoingIsLearning wrote: post #260
josephg wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. No there aren’t. For every Jonathan Blow, Salvatore Sanfilippo (redis) or Mike Pall (LuaJIT) there are probably thousands of run of the mill developers working at feature factories. You don’t build amazing software by being lucky. Your boss at GenericCo will never go out of their way to…

> No there aren’t. You underestimate the odds of talent in a population of 8 billion humans. > If you think you’re all that, don’t blame your company for “not getting the opportunity”. Please. You already have all the tools you need to code. Make something cool! There are neurosurgery robots operating with my code running in the background for several years now. I am now working on ophthalmic surgery software for sub…

> There are neurosurgery robots operating with my code running in the background for several years now. I am now working on ophthalmic surgery software for sub-retinal operations. I would think that is actually kind of pretty "cool!".

That’s super cool dude! Surgery robots are pretty world shattering for the people whose lives are saved by them. Contributing to that sounds like something well worth feeling proud of too.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#543

Post by smabie »

omscs99 wrote: post #539
lordnacho wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that you won't have the skills, it's somehow demonstrating them. I also worked at an HFT C++ shop that used no STL. Every data structure has a weird name and API that you get used to. The whole architecture has its own idioms, and hasn't needed much upgrading in terms of language features. Imagine you learn the grammar of English. You learn how to pluralise nouns, when to put an s at the end of a verb, how t…

Unrelated question: do hfts make you move out to east coast, or are there some in California?

HFT firms are primarily in Chicago / NYC.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#544

Post by Gigachad »

ericmcer wrote: post #484
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.

It doesn't seem like a bad way to go. If the company is stable enough and you can cash in your engineers salary for 25 years and have crazy good job security. Seems better than being a 50 year old trying to wow a 28 year old interviewer with your skills on whatever hot new framework just came out.

If I’m still building webshit SaaS products at 50 then something has gone wrong. I should be either retired or some kind of high level manager.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#545

Post by m463 »

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.

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node1....

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#546

Post by m463 »

diegoperini wrote: post #386
coffeebeqn wrote: post #256

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’ve seen a few of those. Some are worth their weight in gold. Most are set in their ways from the trauma of trying to make everything not fall apart for so long. Almost all have stagnated and are incapable of bringing in new ideas. Almost all are husks of human beings from putting up and personalizing so much of company dysfunction

> incapable of bringing in new ideas But they are REALLY capable of detecting bad ideas.

It's hard to walk that line.

There are really good or valid ideas that people try to implement in terrible ways.

things like: for our app on windows, we just ship LIBRARY.DLL with it. We should do the same with linux. (ldd shows 50 inter-dependent libraries)

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#547

Post by lordnacho »

nly wrote: post #535
lordnacho wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that you won't have the skills, it's somehow demonstrating them. I also worked at an HFT C++ shop that used no STL. Every data structure has a weird name and API that you get used to. The whole architecture has its own idioms, and hasn't needed much upgrading in terms of language features. Imagine you learn the grammar of English. You learn how to pluralise nouns, when to put an s at the end of a verb, how t…

I work at a HFT shop and put C++ code is modern (C++23, GCC 13) and uses stacks of third party libraries

Yeah I'm not entirely sold on the NIH story. Plenty of things written by other people will work just fine for HFT.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#548

Post by lordnacho »

nly wrote: post #538
lordnacho wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The whole business model is misunderstood by your average internet commentator. When you have a market, you need someone to be there to provide liquidity. Imagine if you're a farmer and you show up to the market with your wheat, but all the bakers have gone home that day. Or the baker shows up and there's no farmer. The market maker stands around all day offering to buy and sell so that you don't have to wait for the…

You're describing market makers, not all HFT participants.

True but trying to keep it simple.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#549

Post by lordnacho »

omscs99 wrote: post #539
lordnacho wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that you won't have the skills, it's somehow demonstrating them. I also worked at an HFT C++ shop that used no STL. Every data structure has a weird name and API that you get used to. The whole architecture has its own idioms, and hasn't needed much upgrading in terms of language features. Imagine you learn the grammar of English. You learn how to pluralise nouns, when to put an s at the end of a verb, how t…

Unrelated question: do hfts make you move out to east coast, or are there some in California?

Firms are mostly in the financial centers but maybe there's a remote role here and there.

There's at least one in the bay area though.

Re: Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

#550

Post by salawat »

loa_in_ wrote: post #512
Aeolun wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Second, I am hoping that you will learn & understand instead of just memorize & regurgitate so in the future you can resolve it yourself instead of bothering me. Where does all this hope come from? I’m barely 15 years into my career and I’ve nearly given up…

Hope is dangerous, for it's itself very hard to resist.

I've started to attempt to gently grind that into juniors. After a certain point, hope is a vice you cannot afford. It is simply something you outgrow, if only because of the unceasing retirement from the mortal coil of those that can bail you out.

Hope is for the young and inexperienced. Everytime I come to your rescue, you'd best pay attention. I have an expiration date.

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