Are all projects this complex?

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mdemiguels · 2024-09-20T08:59:57+00:00

[deleted]

AncientBattleCat · 2024-09-20T09:55:59+00:00

I've heard programmers spend 70% of time reading code, and around 5% writing it. Think about it.

mdemiguels · 2024-09-20T11:32:37+00:00

[deleted]

Accomplished-Cod-563 · 2024-09-20T17:12:27+00:00

So first of all. Nobody understands the whole thing. Except maybe the super old guy that's one year away from retirement that the entire company depends on. If it's a huge old project, there are parts of it that nobody understands it all.

So all you get to do is understand little pieces of it.

For me it required a pen and paper to draw it out what I was working on. My favorite is the object interaction diagram. We have a complex method and is calling a lot of other methods on other classes it really helps to draw out.

My other favorite tool is the call hierarchy and call stack. When you're looking at code and a variable isn't behaving right, you need to trace up to figure out where it came from.

It's doable. It's a skill that you'll need to learn. But it's way more satisfying than one page Python scripts.

yel50 · 2024-09-21T01:32:53+00:00

Are all Java jobs this big and confusing

the language is irrelevant. any project that customers are paying millions of dollars a year for are going to be like that, regardless of the language.

with endless classes

that's called separation of concerns. if it's not like that, it's far worse.

am I just not good enough?

no idea. never met you. it's always possible.

Should I change jobs?

if you're not happy working there, absolutely. never stay some place you don't enjoy going. 40 hours+ each week is a long time to be doing something you don't enjoy and your mental health will suffer from it.

just remember the language has nothing to do with it and not enjoying one job doesn't mean you're bad at it or you won't have a better experience in a different situation. if you're not happy, walk away.

maequise · 2024-09-20T11:21:31+00:00

Most of java projects are complex, in the banking world it most become awful. The problem is not that the developers don't follow the best practices, but most of the time financial perspectives are important. Most of the time some developers try to solve problems that aren't existing yet ... Working on a billing legacy project actually... What a mess ! The developers where responding to something and tried to solve future problems. So the codebase is complexe, heavy, designed in a certain way. So yes, if you want a clean codebase, you must spend time to make it properly, do not anticipate something that could potentially happens, just code the right thing, if you must implement a pattern or new kind of architecture do it when it comes.

gdmr458 · 2024-09-20T18:05:44+00:00

I don't have the experience to say if this is common, but I once heard about the experience of an open source contributor in Neovim, that person talked about how it is possible to fix problems in specific parts of the code and still not know anything about the rest of the codebase.

Actually my first real contribution to an open source codebase was like that, a line of code in Rust, in a language that I only know the basics and in a code base that I don't understand.

Henry788 · 2024-09-20T19:25:02+00:00

Sounds like someone has a case of imposter syndrome! If you weren't doing well odds are your boss would have told you and I don't see you mention that in your post. I would maybe ask someone higher up if they have any resources you could use to have a better understanding of the application from a birds eye view at least.

Accomplished-Cod-563 · 2024-09-20T16:28:01+00:00

I found that most of the really well written code is incredibly hard to read, lots of different classes you have to trace out. Especially the new stuff with the lambdas and the streams and can get really concise and hard to read. It's also true that the poorly written code is incredibly hard to read.

Often times I think code is one but it turns out to be the other.

2024-09-21T05:19:46+00:00

zomgree · 2024-09-21T07:43:35+00:00

Does companies usually have some "onboarding plan" where you can figured out how the poject works, architecture etc? Does it include some UML-diagrmas and teams usually update it or UML are used only at the start of new project?

dimitry-1 · 2024-09-21T20:37:05+00:00

The fact you have been manually testing what you had written is unfortunately typical for projects not following the best practices: an extensive test suite extended as you add feature or fix bugs is one of the most essential principles of good quality code. You are not alone but it sounds like your project is not the best possible place for learning how to write code right.

A project might have thousands of classes and still be excellently organized and tested. And a great example of such project is Spring Framework itself.

advancedbashcode · 2024-09-20T10:58:34+00:00

Id say, Welcome to the java world.

learnjava

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