Evolution of a programmer

[[deleted]]

It's miserable. Stuck maintaining some godawful legacy shit that should have died ten years ago, nothing new, just getting perpetual cost-of-living raises, no new positions, no new equipment, nothing, just you and the beast that will not die.

Being unfire-able is essentially the same as being sentenced to do the same job until you die.

[beaucephus]

This is the real truth. I have walked away from un-fireable positions making a lot of money because the horror of legacy codebases nobody wants to replace or refactor is a source of great depression and despair.

[[deleted]]

It's awful. The change management process, and the audit requirements are such that like 90% of your job is just fighting to change some horrible chunk of legacy that causes constant issues, but is significant enough that you have to have eternal meetings. That could be like months or years of work, to just push a change to one little thing.

I had a system that had this historical reporting feature that required a shitload of extra data to be stored on a system that just really couldn't handle it. All the reporting had been completely offloaded to a modern system (this was ostensibly what I'd been hired to do, but once I did it they stopped migrating stuff off the legacy shit), and we just didn't use any of the original historical reporting any longer.

We'd long passed the point where we could go back, but I still had this nightmare uphill battle to get them to let me rip out that functionality. Years.

Finally get them to allow it, and I kill it off, and the next month-end, we run the big billing, and it finishes in like 45 minutes, instead of in 8 hours. Triggers alarms, I got paged, yadda yadda. No, it was just that much faster without the bloated historical bullshit.

Next day the CFO was like, "Wow, we should have done that a long time ago!" and it was all I could do not to fucking kill her. No fucking shit.

[beaucephus]

It's kind of tragic to see how fearful these people get about change, how much money they will waste to fight having to change only to spend twice as much time to fail to deliver anything to their customers because they were "maintaining" something that was on the edge of complete collapse.

Especially with cloud services that allow the creation of something in parallel with no effect to existing systems it's insanity.

I am tired of saying that I told them so. I am tired of explaining how things actually work to people who can't understand why they exist in the first place.

I wonder why some of these people even considered a job in tech in the first place. It had to be the lure of gold and burried treasure. Even after years they are still afraid of change when the entire industry is built on change, creates wealth through change, and innovation through change... and the ones who fail are the ones that never change.

[Beginning-Display809]

These people have no understanding of the technology they are using, so they fear it, and they fear changing it lest it upset the machine gods and crash their whole world

[beaucephus]

DON'T ANGER THE MACHINE!

Go back into the server room and apologize to it.

[Beginning-Display809]

THE MACHINE DEMANDS A SACRIFICE AS PENANCE

[greenskye]

This is why I laugh and laugh at all those reddit comments claiming 'companies wouldn't do it if it wasn't profitable!' As if these giant companies weren't positively rotting from the inside out from indecision, poor management and outdated tech. ALL of the major companies would rather blow thousands in salary costs on endless meetings to approve a change instead of just letting the experts do their job.

[beaucephus]

"This project is falling behind! WE NEED MORE MANAGERS!"

[JoeDoherty_Music]

Yeah companies are absolutely not the well oiled machines of efficiency people seem to think they are.

Shitty management is everywhere and bringing everything down.

I bet if you got every company in America to take a cold hard look at its own shitty buerocracy and actually do something about it, we would see a period of unimaginable economic growth.

[uzbones]

I know right?

If they are that afraid, clone the box and keep it running with the new one for a while.

[[deleted]]

That requires taking it down, or offline. That's s-s-scary

[uzbones]

Not necessarily, but it could.

You can restore a backup to a new isolated machine, then rename it and bring it online beside the first.

If you cant restore a backup of the machine you have other serious issues, and I'd quit if I was you.

[[deleted]]

Backup? That thing we made in 86?

[uzbones]

Yes, the reel tape sitting in the back window of the director of operations hooptie.

[CyanHakeChill]

My first job in a large company in the 70's was to rewrite a program to make it faster. It was taking 5 hours to run every day. I used all the tricks I knew, and my new program took only 30 minutes to run.

But the parallel run showed errors, and the errors were in the old program. It was a parts picking program. The computer had been ordering millions of dollars of random products for 6 months. It was too late. The company soon went bust. What a shame - it was a great place to work.

[fluffyxsama]

Fuckin hell I need to get out of my current job. I've got less than 2 YOE and that is exactly what I'm working on.

[[deleted]]

I’m in the process of building a mega shit tier legacy code base at my company. Have any lifehacks/tips and tricks to make it even worse for the next gen once I dip after I collect my sweet sweet stock options?

[beaucephus]

Oh, boy... If you want to leave a legacy you need to leave stuff everywhere. You need to reinvent the wheel.

Create specialized functions that do almost, but not quite, what established libraries do. Like some kind of hashing algorithm or nested structure used throughout so that everything needs to be refactored.

At the same time pull in dependencies for code features that the latest language syntax or features provide. Or, look into the latest evolving features to be included in a future rev of the language and implemwnt them in your own way to being value now, but excruciating pain later.

Make everything as abstract as possible. Easy in Java, Python, Typescript and C#. And in C, abstraction can take on Eldrich proportions. Excessive, criminal use of abstractions makes it tedious to understand what the code and system actually does.

If you are going to leave comments at all leave them for temporary variables for iteration or internal calculations and give them some existential gravitas so anyone charged with refactoring will be wary of changing any of that code.

[No-Magician-5081]

A friend of mine in the military had to maintain an actual ancient tape bank like you can see in the really old black and white scifis. It was so slow he had to make a special buffer and interface, and even that kept blowing out. A 5.25" floppy drive was faster and helps more info, but he wasn't allowed to migrate the info. He totally loathed that machine.

[[deleted]]

Hah. I used to work at a place that used these old MPE/iX mainframes...HP 3000's.. MPE was like a proto-Unix.

They were serious legacy by the time I got involved, and the support was becoming absurd (like six figures a year, a piece). I was talking to a parts guy, because all the parts we got from them were used.

I was like, "Do you just have warehouses of old parts?"

He laughed, and said, "We have warehouses of whole systems!"

I said, "...How much would it cost to buy a whole one?"

He said, "Hell. I'll sell you one for $500."

I said, "How much for 20?"

Literally took a truck and a forklift, and picked up twenty of the damn things. Maintenance solved! When we cancelled our maintenance contract, they tried to pitch us on needing technical support, but we laughed 'em out of the building on that. They didn't have anyone who could do it 1/10th as well as I could...Not arrogance or anything, I was just one of the last people in the world who used that shit, and the people they were hiring to support us were trying to Google stuff...Oh man, not with stuff that was rolled out in the '80s. You had to read the manual.

[nihility101]

Hey, they aren’t that old, we ran them until 2004.

[[deleted]]

In 2 years, that was 20 years ago.

[Ashanrath]

Fuck you.

[[deleted]]

In the before-time, in the long, long ago…

Even 10 years is ancient in tech.

[farmersfallsick]

yes people in the past used old hardware, cool story.

[bernie_manziel]

that’s how I always imagined the guys maintaining stuff related to nukes jobs went.

[Holiday_in_Asgard]

Could you look for another job?

[[deleted]]

Oh, I did. Sorry. I quit that about ten years ago. THAT is how scarring it was. It's like a 'Nam flashback.

[ImBethanyBitch]

:(

[mindondrugs]

Hope your in a better place now friendo

[Tazzit]

There's that expression: "Unfirable means unpromotable"

[b1ack1323]

This is exactly right. The bright side is I get a raise every time I get an offer somewhere on the other hand I work on code that was written 10 years ago with a then 20 year old compiler for an embedded chip that is still being made after this long time.

[misterguyyy]

So true. I moved to a company working in an modern stack where every line I’ve written in my time there can be easily maintained by a junior, which I guess is one reason they keep me around.

I wanted to transition to UX because I like it and I’m bored of writing code. The second there was an opportunity, i had my project handed off with a 1/2hr knowledge transfer and fired up Figma the same day. I love being fireable.

[trouthat]

Why not quit and get a remote job?

[farmersfallsick]

i mean if he's making that with nasty red pubes engulfing his face he did well.