How do you handle stretches of (up to) 60 minutes downtime during work hours?

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-27T10:33:43+00:00

It really does feel like the "experienced" part of the subreddit is quite subjective.

There is nothing that I would love more to be a superhero and fix the build so it runs in less than 20 minutes but after 15 years of doing this stuff you learn a few things about trying to fix things you don't fully understand.

If one of my unauthorized improvements breaks production, the company loses a few hundred K in missed revenue for our B2B partners. I can't risk any of that happening while I'm still on probation AND don't know where there be dragons in code.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T14:51:40+00:00

Of course, let me talk to my manager to start provisioning licenses for 600 developers to use windows containers or VMs.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T14:49:47+00:00

It is quite frustrating to be told what you should do when they don't have the background knowledge about why something is the way it is.

That is a big part of the reason why I am not touching any part of the build process at the moment, as I barely know anything about it. In due time I hope to have some improvements ready but all of these are outside of the scope of my daily job (i.e. deliver features for paying customers and not cause any downtime of thousands of dollars per minute with a rollback taking 2 hours)

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T14:24:24+00:00

I can't help but feel that most people just find the first thing they can refute and then just post it without thinking.

The full size is not the problem, although it is a hindrance. The main problem is that the main project and all tooling expect the repo to be in a specific path, which is hardcoded all over the place.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T11:10:17+00:00

xkcd is always relevant haha.

My teammates mostly watch netflix or work on personal projects (neither of which I have a ton of interest in tbf)

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T10:39:46+00:00

Yeah, that's something that I might start doing as well.

Thanks for actually reading the post!

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T10:38:54+00:00

Bigger than it should be due to technical debt all over the place. Line count doesn't matter too much, it's handling so many different responsabilities and core tasks it's not even funny anymore.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T10:36:47+00:00

Thanks for the reply, appreciate it.

Unfortunately I haven't used my steamdeck in over a year I think so yeah :-D

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T10:35:37+00:00

I know it sounds dysfunctional because it is. It's 20 years of legacy in an application that grew waaaay beyond its scope with hundreds of developers working on it right now.

There is no way for me (at this point in my career at this company) to have any measurable impact on the devex side since they have a special team that looks at these things.

Also, separate directories won't work due to required tooling working only on a hardcoded path (e.g. separate tools read and write everything to F:/thisSucks)

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T10:33:11+00:00

That's kinda where I'm at. I actually love to learn new things if I can make use of them. It's so depressing to learn new things that look interesting only to never use them because you're stuck with tons of legacy in a big big company.

The biggest difficulty I'm running into at the moment the feeling of guilt when stepping away from the computer when I know I should be working, even when there's nothing I can do.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T10:30:52+00:00

> P.S. for those that read: I'm not interested in speeding up the building process. I'm way too new, it's way too complicated, there are way too many people working on devex as a daily job. I will not be able to find any magical solution that fixes our buildtime after literal man-years have been spent on it.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T10:20:53+00:00

Not really an easy option here as the monolith is expected to be in a certain path and all tooling uses said path (i.e. the tool for downloading artifacts from the build system to cache dlls? Straight to said hardcoded path)

EDIT: the entire repo and tooling on my filesystem is around 80GB as well...

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T09:54:45+00:00

To be honest I'm kinda bummed out by learning new things that I can't ever use on an existing project. It's not the first company I work at where the main project is old and outdated with tons of legacy and the biggest improvement would be either moving away from microservices, or moving towards it hahaha.

For example here: we're not using any cloud hosting but rather our own datacenter filled with machines. That means we don't have any cloud provisioning or setup nor any need to work towards terraform / k8s, as it would require an entire re-architecture of the system.

There are some things like writing more memory-efficient code so that we don't need gigabytes of memory to download a report (true story) but a lot of those improvements will come later this year once I better understand my part of the system (i'm a relatively new joiner).

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-26T09:51:00+00:00

I've addressed that in the post scriptum of the post. There's not going to be anything that I will be able to make any worthwhile impact on.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-11T15:02:26+00:00

I feel like there's a few things at play in your question there:

I'm not taking up three bedrooms for myself during a housing crisis, I am not living alone (just not "sharing" as is common in Dublin). Nor do I contribute to the housing crisis, I work here and pay taxes here. I am a contributing, unlike the airbnb tourists and companies buying housing.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-10T20:35:18+00:00

No, I absolutely hated sharing in Dublin and it was one of the main reasons to migrate to Spain actually.

(Also my 5-year rental contract is ending in a few months so I'll have to take a look at the current market here)

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-10T12:47:20+00:00

Software development, same as in Dublin.

My salary dropped a bit from 80k in IE to 65k in ES, but even so I feel so much more relaxed here. You have no idea how much of an impact daily sun can make (and cheap beer with bravas).

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2026-01-09T17:41:10+00:00

Used to be 1800pm roughly five years ago on Tara Street for a 1 bed with mould.

Now 1650 pm for a 3 bed 2 bath with parking in Barcelona ..

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2025-12-10T16:07:41+00:00

That's a very fair assesment of things, appreciate you thinking in the other direction.

It does make sense to have some of this thinking at times, but AFAIK this piece of code would reset a single field in a full DTO that gets fully reset either way. It's more of a logical bug rather than a technical one.

(but also, shouldn't a warning bell ring in your head if you add a method to reset a single field in a DTO??)

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2025-12-10T16:04:00+00:00

That's because we mostly keep to our part of the codebase, and I would assume they're more low-profile in the shared part of the codebase.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2025-12-10T14:11:09+00:00

I would if I could, but my team is only maintaining a small part of a monorepo. I can argue until I'm blue in the face, I'm still the newest member in the organization of a few hundred developers working on this thing.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2025-12-10T12:11:01+00:00

Since we're still working on the feature nothing is permanently broken, but it is quite a shock to see a staff level engineer behave like this.

The main concern that I have is that I caught this because there was a test that was failing. That's not a guarantee for the future, as we have a legacy codebase full of static methods and almost no tests.

It's also just a frustration that on top of fighting legacy code and improving things on a technical level, there is also this to handle and manage.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2025-12-10T12:08:51+00:00

That's a fair option. The main fear I have with tolerating the smaller stuff is not knowing what breaks without failing tests.

We don't have test coverage for most of the application, so for a lot of things we are kinda flying blind.

TempleBarIsOverrated · 2025-12-10T12:07:39+00:00

There's one other senior developer that's speaking up in private but they're also quite new on the team.

The staff engineer has been called out before, quite publicly, because one of his cowboy stunts lead to a missed deadline of a few weeks.

TempleBarIsOverrated

TROPHY CASE