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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)

#81

Post by nadis »

I would have loved more detail in the "The limited role of developers" (or maybe merits a separate follow up). On the one hand, this section feels so obviously right. On the other, roles like ops and QA evolved for reasons so curious in wrangling with this legacy product how that could've been better / different beyond just consolidating work / roles.

"The only thing left was to deploy it so that we could test it. This was a problem, of course – in this case, we were not the ones deploying it or testing it. Deploying had to be done by the ops team, and testing by the test team. Why couldn’t we, as developers, manage the whole feature from start to production instead of opening tickets and waiting for other teams before we could close our task?

Firstly, we couldn’t avoid manual testing since much of the code wasn’t covered with tests. We also couldn’t deploy the application ourselves since the infrastructure didn’t allow us to.

This had us thinking about the reasons behind the separation of duties and how our current approach is better. Seeing that our lead and cycle time on this project was significantly higher than usual (it took us weeks to deliver something we usually deliver in several days), the evidence was strongly in favor of that."

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

#83

Post by SR2Z »

MassiveQuasar wrote: post #62
regularfry wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It depends on your goals, though. Depending on the company, that can be a very good way to be treated as a cost centre to be minimised.

Yes, let's minimize the only dev working on legacy software.

Do you think that software becomes poorly understood and maintained because the company treats it as a prestigious job and rewards people for working on it?

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

#85

Post by thecleaner »

itronitron wrote: post #66
joezydeco wrote: post #20

As an embedded engineer in a new position I always volunteer to take up an old crusty legacy product that nobody else wants to touch. It's a quick education into how the company approaches projects and all the ghosts they had to fight along the way. All the business logic is there, and sometimes it's even documented. And once you have a semblance of knowledge about how the thing works and how to make fixes, you've bu…

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

> it also builds self-esteem.

Well crafted dig.

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

#87

Post by donatj »

ninetyninenine wrote: post #77
donatj wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on your definition of interesting? I find improving established code of far more interest and reward than greenfield. Coming to understand what a person was thinking while building something is fascinating. My updates are tangible life improvements to real human beings. That interests me, at least. Greenfield, I have the incredibly stressful job of making all the major architectural mistakes people will compl…

I’m interested in finding the patterns and architecture that prevents those mistakes. I think I’ve found it already.

Check back in a couple years ;)

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

#88

Post by kerkeslager »

tobr wrote: post #32
joezydeco wrote: post #20

As an embedded engineer in a new position I always volunteer to take up an old crusty legacy product that nobody else wants to touch. It's a quick education into how the company approaches projects and all the ghosts they had to fight along the way. All the business logic is there, and sometimes it's even documented. And once you have a semblance of knowledge about how the thing works and how to make fixes, you've bu…

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.

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

#89

Post by nickjj »

I really like turning legacy code into non-legacy code. It feels like getting to solve a mystery.

For example, maybe there's really crazy hard to follow code and the person who wrote it left a decade ago and there's no tests so it's too risky to refactor it but you can write new tests, really delve into the use case of the code and then refactor the original code.

Or, maybe the code is using a version of a framework that's 9 years out of date but you can incrementally upgrade it after gaining confidence in any way you can.

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

#90

Post by antisthenes »

4ndrewl wrote: post #55
fjjjrjj wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And the only better experience than that is killing a new greenfield project before it gets to production because the old software was good enough and the problems were organizational in how the software was being used.

The best code is the code that doesn't exist.

Certainly the most secure code. Not sure about best.
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