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Comment by abledon | Hacker News Reader

I’m seeing how a few sprinkles of VBA can make an .org so much more efficient than trying to bend management to green light an entire new web app system written in a ‘real’ programming Lang

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Totally. When you're new to the profession it's like you have this huge shiny new hammer and everything looks like a nail, so you want to build new custom software to solve every problem, because it's fun.

But I feel like after working on enough legacy systems you come to appreciate how crippling technical debt and over-complexity can become to an organization. What was an exciting and fun project for the creators is now the daily hell for a whole department of people.

The downside is I feel like the maturation of software as a whole is at a point now where it's diminished my ability and desire to pursue entrepreneurial ideas. There's so many powerful existing systems that can be glued together that the hassle of making something from scratch rarely seems worth it when you can get something "good enough" without custom code. On the one hand that's great for business efficiency and non-tech companies but kind of shitty for us developers who love to build stuff from scratch.

I concur. The tedium of maintaining somebody else’s crap code in an obsolete language is an invaluable learning experience for new devs. Also, it’s hilarious to listen to the whining.

Sometimes I feel like whining about someone else's crap code is enjoyable in itself.

Until you realize it's code you wrote. Happened to me when our children were little. There were large parts of a system I'd written, sleep deprived, that I had no recollection of writing. Version control said I did, but I didn't remember it.

That can make it even better, particularly if you can remember why you were making the decisions that you did.

Yes! It's actually great -- you can rant as hard as you want because you know the author won't be upset.

Oh but the author is upset, just with themselves

The property of finding their complaints hilarious would make me deeply question your technical judgment & maturity while also being certain you lack leadership skills. I’d also worry you would dismiss ideas of junior team members regarding how adopting new tools could better solve business problems, which is critical even in situations where you’re constrained by stability requirements of a legacy system.

parent comment could be interpreted many ways but heres my take.

there are many types of humour one can appreciate: https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/07/19/there-are-nine-...

If someone can't lighten up and find humour in life, i'd say they are mature enough to graduate life and go on to the next realm lol.

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