Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase | Hacker News Reader

Man spends entire career mastering crappy codebase

taylor.town

866 pointssurprisetalk570 comments

I swear this guy exists at every company I've ever worked.

He's the guy you go to when you find some legacy code which you have no idea how the hell it works and end up getting a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects.

They're hard not to love.

"... And the AIX machines were a real beast. We had 20 of those things, and each had its own 20 amp circuit. Had a tendency for the grounding to the steel case to fail. If you wanted to upgrade it you'd first need to grab a pair of thick leather gloves...."

You kids sitting there. All you do is change your EC2 instance size and restart it. Back in my day I had to go and install the RAM by hand. And you know 128Mb of RAM then took up a whole suitcase and weighed more than your laptop

The I fall asleep at my desk, periodically waking up shouting "STOP-A!" and hallucinating about being bitten by thick ethernet vampires.

Going to make myself a coffin...

"I had to go and install the RAM by hand"

When the Sun 4/330 I used to have needed a RAM upgrade someone flew up from London to Edinburgh with the RAM and installed it. Fortunately we were in the Grassmarket about 10 minutes from the Castle so he had plenty of things for him to do to keep him amused until his return flight.

Edit: I checked and the max the 4/330 could take was 96MB so I suspect the upgrade was an awesome 64MB. That machine cost more than most cars I have owned - even without allowing for inflation.

Continuing with the Monty Python vibe, the first code I wrote was in machine code (ie hex, not even assembler). Though I worked with a guy who wrote machine code on a magnetic drum and they used the delay of the rotation of the drum for their timing. The good ol' days.

My thumbs still have blisters from manually stuffing memory expansion boards with 1Mb of DIP RAM for our 80286 PCs. We were doing image capture and processing, long before it either usable or useful.

"Back in my day, we only got one compile a day with our punch cards. Now you can compile willy nilly without having to put in the forethought we did" - ex coworker

Sorry, could you tell me what "STOP-A" means?

I did a real internship (as in it was for my diploma and lasted only a few months) in a medical facility operating Big Machines. I remember a guy soldering a new battery to some old DEC/Digital hardware.

"They were afraid to turn off or reboot the DEC Vax for fear that if the disks stopped spinning they wouldn't start again. I saw it once at the retirement ceremony and it didn't look like a server but more like a set of industrial washer and driers. The users transferred files using the Kermit protocol and printed locally by a telnet client that could understand the special characters that redirected character output from the terminal to a lineprinter."

I for one do not mind that part of computing getting abstracted away by the cloud, whatever its other failings. :-)

Working on the hardware directly is more than half of the fun.

Every Friday I had to take a bunch of magnetic tapes to the bank so they could look after our backups ( which was a good excuse to pop into the pub next door to the bank...) Oh, and we never ever tested that the backups actually worked

I recognize the parody about me. ;)

Do you know why I am giving you the two hour history?

First, I recognize that I need human interaction, but do not really like people.

Second, I am hoping that you will learn & understand instead of just memorize & regurgitate so in the future you can resolve it yourself instead of bothering me.

Now, go away; I had my week's fill of socializing.

/joking - or am I?

For me, it's usually trying to rapidly justify the existence of whatever Rube Goldberg machine I'm having to explain. There's always reasons behind the madness, even if they're not particularly good ones.

> justify the existence of whatever Rube Goldberg machine

I'm at least going to be waiting for questions to be asked.

"Why was it done this way?"

"Circumstance combined with 'path of least resistance'."

> Second, I am hoping that you will learn & understand instead of just memorize & regurgitate so in the future you can resolve it yourself instead of bothering me.

Where does all this hope come from? I’m barely 15 years into my career and I’ve nearly given up…

Hope is dangerous, for it's itself very hard to resist.

Ha ha but really.

I’m not trying to explain why you shouldn’t change it. I’m trying to help you understand what competing forces made it that way in the first place so you can decide if any of that’s still relevant.

I’ve seen a few of those. Some are worth their weight in gold. Most are set in their ways from the trauma of trying to make everything not fall apart for so long. Almost all have stagnated and are incapable of bringing in new ideas. Almost all are husks of human beings from putting up and personalizing so much of company dysfunction

> incapable of bringing in new ideas

But they are REALLY capable of detecting bad ideas.

They always say no, and are always correct.

It's hard to walk that line.

There are really good or valid ideas that people try to implement in terrible ways.

things like: for our app on windows, we just ship LIBRARY.DLL with it. We should do the same with linux. (ldd shows 50 inter-dependent libraries)

They also tend to be brilliant engineers. It’s a heck of a lot easier to always be writing 1.0 of something. It’s a hellaciously difficult engineering task to improve a system that’s been improved upon for decades. These folks should be admired and respected, they’re by far the most crucial people at any company older than 30 years old. Instead we get condescending garbage like the linked article.

I just wish hiring managers saw it the same way. It's hard to explain how your last major project was a web enhancement that would have taken a couple days on a virgin codebase, because for you it involved a month of excavating through multiple strata of code dating nearly two decades old, spread across three codebases, two backend languages, a code generator which no one working there understands anymore, and a library who's documentation now only exists on the wayback machine.

A secret I’ve learned is you only need one job, so you don’t need to take just any job or be hireable at every job. It might take longer, but finding a manager that “gets it” is very important. The most important thing is to find someone who recognizes further that a team is more than the sum of its parts, that each individual is unique and not a cog to be evaluated on a metric rubric and forced into compliance with some idealized engineer. They do exist - I was one for many many years. I’ve recently given up in disgust though and switched back to IC, but senior enough I can shape how managers manage engineers. Regardless, my advice is, if it’s helpful, find the right job with the right team and the right company. It’ll take longer, may pay less at first, but finding the right place that respects work at its value not at its marketability is key to any successful career.

Or a library who's code now only exists on the wayback machine... and of the modified version that you actually use only a single copy exists on an old machine that one of the devs in the company never bothered to hand in for recycling...

Never mind that it's part of a decade old contract stipulating a quarter century support...

Greenfield is easy. :)

I wish people like this would architectural decision records so people inheriting it later wouldn't be left in the dark by the decisions made in the system

Because sometimes on the outside systems look confusingly written, but it could be a reflection of the scope of confusing business rules to begin with that they had to scope out

What I propose wherever I go is writing a deprecation plan before production release. It may not be kept up to date over the lifetime but at least a plan for what it would look like to exit to another platform exists documenting assumptions and one way doors, why things were done, and what a replacement would look like and why. I’ve never had great success though, people are too eager to make the next 1.0.

It doesn't seem like a bad way to go. If the company is stable enough and you can cash in your engineers salary for 25 years and have crazy good job security.

Seems better than being a 50 year old trying to wow a 28 year old interviewer with your skills on whatever hot new framework just came out.

If I’m still building webshit SaaS products at 50 then something has gone wrong. I should be either retired or some kind of high level manager.

...these OS/2 machines were once interconnected by a networking technology called 'token ring'.. no joke. It was basically an entire network where if one single node on the network misbehaved it would bring down the entire network - they didn't self recover either! you had to reboot them all. I remember once when I misconfigured a token ring card on a PC and it brought down the mainframe! It shut down the bank for 30 minutes"

To be fair, in those days you could sink Ethernet (broadcast hubs, no switches!) with a faulty or malicious PC spamming the network, too.

Didn’t have to reboot the others, though.

> in those days you could sink Ethernet with a faulty PC

That is still possible in the modern era.

What do you mean hubs? Back in the day we manually pierced thick Ethernet coax to get access; of course you could ruin the whole segment running tens or hundreds of meters if you didn't take care.

It's funny, startups turn over so fast that I've managed to become that guy while staying at a company less than two years.

Hard to be anything else if the entire job is spinning up a yet another microservice and then spending most of your time debugging in production because shit keeps breaking all the time.

Oh good, we’re not the only ones. The rest of my time is spent saying I can’t help people fix problems with some old microservice my team “supports”

You'll have that. I've always said those places should keep an anthropologist on staff.

Maybe we're thinking of two different archetypes, but I wonder if their "hard not to love" nature is part of the survivorship bias of why they're still there.

A former coworker of mine claims that he lasted over forty years in the company out of sheer stubbornness. He might still be there.

They are worth their weight in gold, truly. I had the pleasure of interacting with one such man at my previous company weekly for an extended period of time while planning/designing a rewrite. Listening, thinking, and questioning his stories and perspectives allowed me to formulate problems and architecture in a more first-principles, fundamental way and I believe that experience really helped me mature as a young engineer (as well as the project).

This is where another one of your Pied Piper boxes would go. Okay. Let me show you the next location where we would install one of your Pied Piper boxes. ... okay

They are hard not to love.

They also hate each and every one of you.

Or at the very least: incredibly suspicious of every one of you, and very unimpressed with the latest fad in software development.

Not necessarily hate...there's always the 1-2% of new hires that are highly impressive and gives us hope for the future. They tend not to last too long. The rest seems hell bent on never even cracking open documentation, and keep asking "where are the architecture videos?" (at least where I work).

This has not been my experience at all

I am slowly turning into this person and I am not sure how I feel about that.

This is actually something I've identified as a major con of working at startups (there are a lot of pros too, and I'm at a startup right now that I love): It is impossible to have these people, because the company is just too young. And also I think this kind of person doesn't usually join a startup for its first, like, decade.

https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel-annotated/node1....

I think they're called senior devs who've been there longer than you.

Damnit that's me at the moment. I need a new job.

I usually give the history lesson to forestall the endless series of "Oh god, why do we do this?" questions.

Easy to love?

"Hard not to X" is not the same as "Easy to X". It may be easy to do something but also easy not to do it. It would be easy for me to yell "Elephant!" right now, for example, but also easy not to do it.

Just one?

> They're hard not to love.

I often search for a clearcut answer to a technical question and I'm met with a 2 hour history lesson into a decade of company politics and failed replatforming projects.

Yeah, thanks for telling me why John from accounting was a dick 10 years ago and you had to code this module in a certain way. I really don't care. I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) works.

I'm currently in this situation and a colleage never gives straight answers to anything. It's always some little rant about something and when it's done, I still haven't got my answer.

> I'm new to the codebase and I just want to know how it (the codebase) works.

You should want to know _why_ it works that way too if you want to do any meaningful work with it. Context matters. I’ve seen many cases where the way something works seems dumb, only to learn later they had already tried the “smart” way but ran into some obscure problem which the “dumb” way solves.

It probably depends on the person, but I personally enjoy such tales. Gives me more context about why a piece of code was written the way it is now. But then again, I also enjoy scrolling through the commit history of a repo like it's an archaeological dig site, so I might be the weird one here ahaha.

Easier said than done, but try telling them that. "I appreciate you sharing context, but it's too much to take in at once. It would work better for me to get a more clear-cut answer."

Sometimes, the 2 hour story isn't worth the time it's told. Sometimes, the 2 hour story gives you the insight necessary to satisfy Chesterton's Fence. It seems like in this instance, that's not the case, but I'd definitely encourage you not to dismiss stories in general because you don't think you need the history to achieve your goal.

That attitude gives me “I don’t know how my code works, I copied it from the Internet and it does compile!” creeps.

And this propagates the problem. Getting an answer without understanding. Sometimes the history is necessary in order to not repeat botched attempts at "fixing" something that people have already tried.

Man spends entire career convincing himself the reason he keeps job hopping is because everyone else is writing crappy code.

Karl Hackerman shows up to each meeting complaining. He seems sour that he hasn’t been given the go ahead to rewrite the system in Rust. He knows a lot about bleeding edge frameworks and best practices and always seems annoyed that he can’t use them at work. He thinks it’s because everyone else has settled in to becoming wage slaves instead of striving to be the best programmers they can be. Everyone puts up with him because they know he’ll quit in six months anyway.

Karl is 47 now. Hasn’t held a job for more than a couple of years. Has mostly been freelancing lately and trying to sell books on tech and frameworks nobody cares about anymore.

Author here!

I love this so much. I've totally been this guy :) Learning how not to be an insufferable doucheb*g was a surprisingly hard challenge for me

I've been writing a longer fiction piece about overzealous know-it-all engineers in the style of Confederacy of Dunces. Probably won't be done for a while, 'cause there's a lot more of my soul in it haha

Awesome! Enjoyed the post. Keep up the good work as long as it makes you happy. :)

Please do! That’s my favorite book! I love your other posts too

I did not expect to wake up and be attacked like this. Not even a warning. Savage.

Good thing I'm not in my 40s yet, still time to recover from my wayward path.

Yeah this is ruthless. On the other hand, I feel ok with my present course because the intermittent chance to use new shit is the only thing that keeps me interested anymore. That and the exorbitant pay, I guess.

This was great.

I felt this way earlier on, but quickly learned to get fulfillment in my day job purely from shipping and contemplate the mysteries of computer science largely on my own time. Sometimes they overlap, but good day jobs are often 80% boring in my experience.

I lost it at "best practice". I once worked with this guy. He would use that term whenever he didn't have any good argument, which was basically all of the time. He would have the strongest opinions, whenever it didn't matter...

It’s appeal to authority, a logical fallacy, the things people who can’t accept they’re either wrong or outnumbered fall back on.

FYI, Karl has been reincarnated as MyCurrentIntern

For ten years, I worked on codebases written in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL -- we needed faster, thread safe versions of strings and maps which were not available at the time; Boost? What's that?), its own custom messaging middleware built directly on sockets, its on distributed process management system built with unix syscalls (obviously). There was not a single line of HTML, Java etc. anywhere. It was a comfortable, high-paid life and I solved cutting edge problems (HFT, distributed, concurrent computing). In 2013, I forced myself to quit, start with a small company that paid me half the salary so that I could learn the web tech stack from the ground up. It was all to avoid this fate. I'd like to think I've succeeded.

I don’t think anyone working with low-level C++ for HFT can face similar fate. Most of skills gained at such job seem very transferable. The article seems to be more about jobs where 95% of work consists in implementing CRUD in accordance with very specific business logic of the company.

The only reason to change such job I can imagine is to sit out your non-compete package. But I am not in this industry so maybe I’m missing something.

It's not that you won't have the skills, it's somehow demonstrating them.

I also worked at an HFT C++ shop that used no STL. Every data structure has a weird name and API that you get used to. The whole architecture has its own idioms, and hasn't needed much upgrading in terms of language features.

Imagine you learn the grammar of English. You learn how to pluralise nouns, when to put an s at the end of a verb, how to to use commas, and so on. You then go to work at a place where they have a different word for coffee, drink, and order. Along with every other word. You end up learning where everything is and how to talk about it, and you're productive.

How do you apply for another job? Chances are you will be asked how to order a coffee and drink it.

Very real issue btw, I still have friends there.

I work at a HFT shop and put C++ code is modern (C++23, GCC 13) and uses stacks of third party libraries

This kind of issue cuts both ways - how do you hire new people and get them productive quickly on a code base where they will almost certainly understand nothing?

Getting rid of weird data structures that now have STL analogs then is a productive exercise - existing devs get to learn more STL and new devs have more familiar ground. You get to delete code too.

Unrelated question: do hfts make you move out to east coast, or are there some in California?

Yeah, I find it amazing someone would transfer to standard web CRUD development from that. Sure you can have enough of all the custom stuff, but there are plenty of companies that will hire you for your current salary for non-web work. (you can probably guess how little I like web work)

Same! The poster's pivot reads like horror to me. Like they lost their mind and joined a cult where they worship Memnon with sermons of JavaScript.

> It never sat well with me. Colocated systems saw latencies no mom-and-pop investor could ever dream to achieve. That is one of the reasons why the second company I joined was a non-profit that built systems to help track human rights violations, enforce labor rights, monitor democratic elections etc. Third job was in the food industry and the last one, in housing / property management. So I'd like to think I've made sufficient amends.

Ah, nevermind. Turns out they were worshipping Memnon with C++ and renounced that cult with web tech! :p

> so that I could learn the web tech stack from the ground up. It was all to avoid this fate. I'd like to think I've succeeded.

I'm not sure if that's intentional humour or not.

There is a massive advantage in being able to see the web tech stack for what it is and wielding it without over-engineering or fanaticism, while your competitors are spending 2-3x on monstrosities that essentially does the same thing, but slower.

I was originally concerned about your parent comment regarding your new foray into web dev (that C++ path sounds amazing), but this comment has put my soul at ease.

If you walk into web dev with aggressive principles and a willingness to be controversial, you can get a lot of shit done and it will feel great. Watching others struggle under the various JS framework circuses has almost an opulent/aristocratic vibe in 2023.

The day a professor made me implement a simple http server was the day I achieved code enlightenment.

At that level of abstraction it’s all just strings

Fair point. The web stack is the one thing I actively avoid doing anything significant with for exactly the reasons you've just described.

Out of the frying pan, into the cow manure.

I have a pretty similar story. I spent 7 years working as a subcontractor for a big telco with CORBA, pthreads and the ACE reactor library. First week, I halted a whole contact center service by adding a sleep call to the codebase (it was on UAT environment). Fast forward several years and I could effortlessly debug cores with thousands of threads, reason about semaphores, reentrancy and even tell the difference between the POA and the BOA Orbix adaptors. I began to become the mythical guy who knew what everything did not because I was technically good, it was because I understood the business and how it mapped to the different architecture elements.

Then I felt like I could spend my whole career there and decided there was a whole world out there in the web, began to learn PHP in 2004 until the mythical "blog in 5 minutes" Rails demo appeared. I switched jobs in 2007 and I have never looked back.

> I understood the business and how it mapped to the different architecture elements

If you have access to key systems, you can definitely reverse-Conway to understand how an organization really works.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conway's_law

Any organization that designs a system (defined broadly) will produce a design whose structure is a copy of the organization's communication structure.

— Melvin E. Conway

Interesting. I've used semaphores with pthreads (only once -- after that I realised plain old mutexes will do). Like your sleep call, I once brought an entire service to a grinding halt by adding a simple `fsync` call (to fix a recovery failure because once a sequenced message we thought we had written to disk before a crash had actually got lost in the buffer). Understanding things at that level makes any new tech fairly easy to grok.

C++ is such a damn chore. This is partly why, everyone always assumes they can do it better, they don't trust any other code, so you end up with monoliths of NIMBY code and esoteric build setups. Code reviews are incredibly painful for the same sort of C++ reasons, everything can effect everything, the whole idea of encapsulation tends to fall apart when memory, time, ordering behavioral effects get relied on after some amount of time usage. Every change is a footgun to be found in production under just the right circumstances.

Hard to be productive when you can't trust the language, the tools, or other developers to be correct.

I did the same, I thought C++ was heading for obsolescence. Now a master of Java, Javascript and can write great full stack apps. Meanwhile HFT C++ jobs are paying double, I'm thinking of going back, even if the systems are boring.

been working on java jobs and easy code bases since I graduated 10 years ago, nothing had been really challenging and I'm not complaining. Would be interested in a job that pays more even do you think working on C++ jobs is more challenging or just boring?

Depends on the job of course. Probably more technical problems and tuning. Often code is low level which is interesting if its your thing but not if you like business problems.

Sounds like your old place had a good idea what's good about c++. It's not the STL and certainly not boost.

Legit, is that place hiring? Sounds like an ideal stack free from the tragedy of the commons.

Those stacks can be full of 'not invented here'. They are unique and have their own quirks. Quirks that you more than likely can not google for any sort of guidance as to what is going on. I wrote one of those stacks a few years ago. No std libs at all. Why? must fit in 32k and most of that space is needed to hold data. That means throwing a lot of those helper bits out or spend weeks figuring out how to bend the compiler to your will and not include everything. When it is easier just to roll your on CS version of whatever. But it sucks because you probably have odd edge cases.

I know it's not all about the money, but over the course of your entire career, do you think that move was financially positive or negative?

I'm very roughly estimating that you could probably have worked in the HFT job for around two-thirds the time you're going to have spent working on generic web tech, and still been better off.

Absolutely 100% positive. I was largely an individual contributor all that time, and only did some unstructured, untrained, unguided people & project management. Perhaps because it was such a niche, engineer-dominated environment. Several years after leaving that company, I quickly learned to effectively manage people and projects, architect systems using more mainstream/open source tech and eventually reached exec level (but that's a different story).

I hope it worked for you, but I don't see any big difference. Web technology will become dated faster than the old C++ codebase. If you learn some web tech stack today I expect that it will be obsolete in 5 to 10 years. What are you gonna do next? Move to another small company for half the salary to learn everything again and compete with 20 year olds?

What about it would you like to avoid? I don't understand the fears that people have in this thread. To me this sounds like the Platonic ideal of a programming job.

EDIT: I'll reply to my replier here because /u/Dang rate limited me (again), though I must commend him for letting me have one more comment than usual before he pushes the button ;)

> I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable to support yourself in your old age because you invested decades of your brainpower into a highly specialised, non-transferrable skill.

I would contend that such a person, unless very reckless with finances or extremely underpaid, should have enough money saved up to make what is mentioned there very unlikely. That said, I know some high-income earners struggle to not blow their entire bank account each month

I would say the ending -- the part where you are unemployed and unable to support yourself in your old age because you invested decades of your brainpower into a highly specialised, non-transferrable skill.

Are you aware that rate limiting is not something a moderator goes around doing to a single person, but instead a server managing its own workload?

> learn the web tech stack from the ground up

Ouch. Should have stayed in legacy C++.

> in C++ without using any third party libraries (no, not even STL

As God intended it!

Was it something that ran in an embedded environment?

High frequency algorithmic trading. Often ran on colocated hardware within the exchange / trading system data centers. Started with stuff like Sun SPARC, Solaris and Oracle and we slowly made our way to Suse, Intel and... surprise, our own database optimised for fast writes.

And now you are jumping from one "stack" to another, none the wiser, your knowledge hopelessly outdated just a year in. The principles you learned in HFT? Those apply all the same.

So you left a job that paid 2x and exposed you to hard problems that require reliable solutions for a job inside the horror clusterfuck that's the modern web where nothing really "works" and there's no real engineering to speak of besides monkeys throwing crap in a shared pile and shovelling it out the door ASAP.

Good for you I guess?

Most people I know, inc. myself, would call this a "bruh moment".

I can't fathom willingly entering the web mines if you've already sunk in the hours to master high perf native code, OSdev, dist systems etc. People usually enter web to avoid having to learn such things.

To discard that knowledge and instead compete with an endless stream of fresh grads, boot camp grinders and LLMs for less money? A madness if I've seen one.

The arrogance you are showing is disgusting.

Even if the decision he made was a bad one, you don't know anything about why it made sense for him at the time.

People aren't algorithms running in complete isolation and silence. They live in nuanced circumstances you can't possibly understand by his short history in a comment.

I hope you can find understanding and peace in the future.

HFT is still CRUD, CRUD for the extremely wealthy.

If you want interesting, go to HPC large scale simulation.

Tell me you know nothing about web dev without telling me you know nothing about web dev

Damn so it's not just me having that impression. Guess I better steer towards other things..

That first place sounds awesome

> so that I could learn the web tech stack from the ground up. It was all to avoid this fate

same fate

> I'd like to think I've succeeded.

possibly not

Don't live to work, work to live. I bet Arthur partied his ass off back in the day, stumbled into work without sleep, napped during retros and refinement. He might be the least useful dev but he's a king at Burning Man. Now with his flush 401k, he can finally retire to make little wooden figurines to sell at the farmers market, where he really just wants to regale people with stories of the biggest fish he ever caught, or his dream of opening up a ramen food cart if his in-laws will go in on it with him. Arthur's lived a life - just not at work.

Hard to do if most of your life is work. I find it very hard to find space for an actual life after subtracting a full-time job, exercise, personal hygiene, nutrition, etc. from my waking hours. It's essentially ~2h a day + the weekend, which often also consists of getting stuff done you didn't manage during the week.

I hate the thought of my life starting in retirement. Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is the legal retirement age, where I live.

https://taylor.town/10-minutes

> Especially if I might be 67 by then, which is the legal retirement age, where I live.

When you say "legal retirement age", what do you mean? Is this to receive some sort of retirement benefit like Social Security in the US? Or is it something else?

I don’t know your circumstances so don’t take this personally as these are some general ideas:

- work 4 days a week only

- save 30–50% of your income and retire after 15 years

- cook your own meals to eat healthier and cheaper (bring lunch to work)

- buy used stuff from a couple years ago

- fix your own stuff and buy cheap “broken” things that are fixable

This way you might not need to die at work or wait 67 to retire.

I think this was a contrived example, but I really appreciated all the little details here! They struck close to home and felt very validating, even if accidental :)

Yes that would be great and I do hope for mr A the reality is some variant of this.

More often than not though, its not so rosy. Arthur would be overweight, riddled with medical issues, solitary guy with unhealthy attachment to XYZ (anime, gaming etc).

But if he had kid(s) and raised them well, well as a parent too I do have tons of respect for him for that alone, rest are details when looking back.

There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small. Anyone pegging their self-worth on that goal is setting themselves up for a lot of mental health struggles.

My levels of ambition and relentlessness absolutely shifted after having kids, I used to be absolutely furious about being the best. Now I am very much "fuck you pay me" and my priority is having as much free time as possible for family and friends. I for one would be fine with Mr. Westbrook's career although thankfully I haven't had as crappy colleagues as him throughout my career.

There are people of all types who will want different things, no point in judging. As the great thinker Alicia Keys once said: 'you do you boo!'

> I used to be absolutely furious about being the best.

I found out that just being better than yourself takes you a long long way.

I have never competed, but just did my thing. Then found out that I've already know more and ahead of many people I'm inspired by.

Yet, this was not my aim, and still is not. I'm just one of the so-called dark developers. I just do my thing, try to do it better every time, and don't care about hall of fame of anything casual or serious.

I recently put a little modal on my phone that just says "Compete against yourself" every 30 minutes, and I'm finding it remarkably helpful at focusing my efforts back to what I want to see in the world.

I like the mindset of trying to be just a little better than you were, every day. It feels... correctly scaled, somehow.

> I found out that just being better than yourself takes you a long long way.

That resonates with me.

There is a saying where I'm from that says "most people are just kicking dirt" that basically means people are doing the bare minimum or don't care at all, and if you just do your thing and really care about your stuff, you're already ahead of the majority.

Being anxious all the time, I use that saying in the opposite way though: just relax and do your thing... you don't need to worry about not having a job, all those other people are barely doing anything and you can't be the best at everytime. Just do your thing are relax.

> I found out that just being better than yourself takes you a long long way.

I usually hold vast disdain for the "self-help" genre of books, but after a recommendation from someone whose opinion I value greatly, I read Atomic Habits by James Clear. I've never found myself agreeing with and finding revelations from such seemingly mundane and obvious statements. Sometimes seeing a statement or opinion you take for granted can make you cognizant of that point.

I've since tried to adopt such "agile" methodologies in personal improvement. Clear says 1% improvement each day always sounds attainable, and such iterative improvements add up.

Would you mind expanding on what you mean by ‘dark developer’? I could guess from context but Id appreciate your definition if you dont mind.

I'm in a constant state of pendulum swing with this. (Not with the goal of being "ground breaking" or "world impactful", but just doing "great" work within the range of my own self-perceived capabilities.)

When I first had children, my pendulum swung way over to disinterest in seeking anything in my work beyond financial support for my family and time to spend with them (while still supporting and not breaking trust with my professional colleagues).

But my kids are growing and becoming more independent all the time, and I'm currently in a phase where my mental cycles and energy are on an upward trajectory over time, and now I'm back to being excited to use those cycles to do impactful work. But critically, I think, with significantly more wisdom about how to strike a healthy and happy balance for me and my family. I mean, I'm not naive, I don't think it will be easy to strike a good balance, I think it require be constant work and effort at it. But as I've emerged from the baby-brained haze, I have renewed clarity that neither focusing my energy entirely on family or entirely on work is the right path for me.

> the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small.

See I have the opposite take. There are so many damn facets of modern life/society, and new avenues/facets/domains coming out every year, that it is actually pretty easy to find some niche where something hasn't been done yet that is world-shattering for some specific community or niche.

World-shattering for everyone is pretty overrated.

Agree with you. I don't understand the point of this article other than some sort of tongue and cheek snobbery. Hope it maybe made the OP feel better about themselves.

Author here!

For context, I recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek guide on how to coast in large companies.

[0] https://taylor.town/corporate-camouflage

That got me thinking about what happens when people, especially engineers, coast too much, or fail to plan out their careers.

I know plenty of smart people that are enchanted by comfort, then chain themselves to companies that take advantage of them.

If you've developed transferrable skills, this parable probably isn't for you :)

I personally think it's okay to be ambitious, and it's also okay to chill.

This level of reaction tells me more about you than the author. Referring to it as 'snobbery' shows that you interpret satire as a personal attack on someone, probably yourself. I clicked to their home page and immediately figured out that they dabble in tech and like to joke around.

This is as much a tip for myself as for you: take a deep breath before reacting.

I think it was just a joke :)

> There are talented people everywhere, the probability of somehow being ground breaking and world impactful is ridiculously small.

No there aren’t. For every Jonathan Blow, Salvatore Sanfilippo (redis) or Mike Pall (LuaJIT) there are probably thousands of run of the mill developers working at feature factories. You don’t build amazing software by being lucky. Your boss at GenericCo will never go out of their way to ask you to build that thing you’ve always been dreaming of making.

You choose to work on software you find interesting. Or, for any of 1000 totally valid reasons, you choose to be small.

If you think you’re all that, don’t blame your company for “not getting the opportunity”. Please. You already have all the tools you need to code. Make something cool!

> No there aren’t.

You underestimate the odds of talent in a population of 8 billion humans.

> If you think you’re all that, don’t blame your company for “not getting the opportunity”. Please. You already have all the tools you need to code. Make something cool!

There are neurosurgery robots operating with my code running in the background for several years now. I am now working on ophthalmic surgery software for sub-retinal operations. I would think that is actually kind of pretty "cool!".

However, I still know full well that I am a cog in a big machine. I still know full well that my impact is not world shattering. And I still very much think "fuck you pay me!".

My self worth is pinned by family and friends. Work is fun but it's a side quest. If you think differently that is ok, and so am I.

I don’t even know where to begin with this comment. It’s a gross mischaracterization of what was being said for starters.

Redis will bit rot. LuaJIT will bit rot. Jonathan Blow did make some fantastic games, but even then it's in a sea of games that are pretty great. Everyone is pretty small in the long run.

Yea this is as classic fallacy.

This famous talk outlines it: https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html but theres a huge amount of factors that go into becoming one of those guys.

Its not just talent, or desire, or luck.

Its:

  - Talent - obviously have to be really good to even do anything in the first place
  - Vision - Need to have a goal of some sort to accomplish something 
  - Decision making - The goal needs to actually be something the world finds useful. 
  -  Drive - Be able to take constant set backs and negative feedback and believe in yourself to an almost delusional level. 
  - Consistency - This means doing  and thinking about your "thing" for a REALLY REALLY long time. Like weekends and holidays and ignore family and etc...

The talk above goes into it pretty in depth, but theres no mystery about it. You need ALL those things and no less. People who achieve at this level aren't accidents. They are simply not only talented in their fields, but also in areas of being able to consume volumes of information and handle failures. They're the ones getting up at 6AM every day working and thinking about their "problem" and going to bed dreaming about it, for years.

You can be a 10x developer, but you also need to be 10x in several other areas to actually accomplish valuable things. Theres a grand canyon of difference between them and everyone else.

The truth is almost certainly between those extremes. People who never put themselves in a place where they can do something amazing are obviously much less likely to do so.

Equally, there are many, many talented people out there who never achieve recognition for what they do or were capable of.

You may not want to hear this (I certainly didn't when I felt similarly)...but perspective does change with age/personal life...with all due respect do you have kids? A partner? Any major commitments outside work? That's an enormous part of OP's statement.

People don't stop being talented/smart when they have kids/families/personal lives...but they will have less time and their perspectives do change.

It's a balance/spectrum where most of us end up somewhere in between two cliches: do what you love and you never work a day in your life on one end & work to live not live to work on the other.

Your response is completely out of line with what you were responding to.

Engineering is one of a few special disciplines where peoples' hobbies align easily with ability to earn money at most levels of professional performance; being mediocre is still a recipe for a generally acceptable standard of life. Compare it to things like sports or acting or music. It's possible to make a living at the lower echelons (read: everything below elite level), but it's hard work or mundane and often not well compensated.

While I love programming and computer science that is one of the reasons I chose programming over other fields. I figure if you want to be a journalist you’re basically broke unless you’re one of the top few that are also making money writing books or doing podcasts. If you’re a historian you are basically not doing well unless you are one of the top and get a tenure track professor position. If you are a programmer, and aren’t even that good, you have a comfortable life in the us. The bottom 20% of software jobs are still in like the top 75% pay range.

Have kids really bring things into perspective. Every moment with them is unique.

Every moment without them is also unique.

Maintenance doesn't get enough respect / glory too. "Arthur" should be highly thought of.

Folks writing new code in the wonderfully free world without a ton of odd dependencies and corner cases ... IMO often aren't doing as much "work".

Writing new code with no existing constraints or requirements isn’t some masterful feat of engineering, usually.

Working in an existing code base, on a team with multiple features going in, gathering requirements from stakeholders and negotiating deliverables on a timeline while refactoring is happening, libraries being upgraded and CVEs being fixed - navigating all of that while being a useful, compassionate team member - that’s priceless on a team.

You're just going to off load your lost potential and lack of ambition on to your kids, and so on and so forth. It's the main reason why people have them.

You're being negged into oblivion, but you have a point.

There is "I'm OK with my pedestrian job but I still try to do my best and actually like the people there" and "my job sucks all joy out of my life and provides me with nothing of value except money".

I have kids, but I somehow skipped the "I want to be the best"-phase and went straight to "I'll make do with whatever you give me" so nothing really changed. I actually work a bit harder now so my kids can see work is good - also to pay for their fancy shit.

Even stupid jobs can be sources of relative joy if you let them. Don't put up with abuse of any kind, though.

The opposite is no good. I had 1 or 2 opportunities which a lot of people of my age were looking at with envy. I was not super gifted but they came out of passion: by working on the things I loved relentlessy, I ended up being noticed. I was good because I worked a lot. It was not hard work since it was stuff I enjoyed a lot to do, but I spent countless hours on it (about 25-30 hours a week in addition to my studies or day time job).

Problem with the kids is that when I tell them about that, they feel they don't have enough passion to succeed. So you see, eventhough I was on the right side of success for a while, it scares the hell out of them...

I mostly had my kids because I was drunk.

So true, I wish I had this perspective before having kids as well, I was so focused on the rat race and on "being the best", to the point of being hospitalized with intestinal problems. Now I have a great job, that gives me joy but the two things i care the most in life are my two little devils.

I also went from dreaming of being the best at 1 thing to "fuck you pay me" in a hilariously short time.

10 years of being underpaid and yet being the most productive guy at work will do that to you.

I largely agree. My goals have shifted from having an impact moving the technology world forward to not being frustrated and depressed from work and getting enjoyment and satisfaction from personal small projects with no deadlines.

Since having kids, most of these have shifted from a few months in time to a few years, but they are unambitious, poorly defined and unimportant so who cares if they take a little longer?

My main goal at work is not getting annoyed or frustrated and getting paid well for my time.

It was once said that the national anthem of Hell is "My Way", and that the motto over the main gate reads "Do what thou wilt".

Pride, radical individualism, self-promotion. These are extremely common today, especially in the US (just compare an American resume with a European CV). Both the US and Europe have their problems, but this particular obsession tends to be more conspicuous in the US. Paradoxically, it doesn't bear the desired fruit because it misunderstands the nature of personal excellence.

This isn't a vote for collectivism or mediocrity. Only dead fish float downstream. It's a vote for the notion that the riches of society are the result of countless incremental contributions up and down the hierarchy of value for the sake of the common good. But liberalism embraces an inverted view of reality. All our relationships are viewed instrumentally and transactionally. We place desire above reason. We've become atomized, because nothing sensible unites us (perfect for those in power who view people as "human resources"). The "social contract" view of society is a disaster.

I absolutely LOVE this comment. Thank you for this prose.

Funny, but there's nothing wrong with that if Arthur was/is happy (which isn't mentioned).

Exactly this. Guy had a comfortable stable job for years. Probably knew codebase and technology enough to have lots of time for family/friends/hobbies. More than this story scares me how HN reacted

There is though.

It's 2023 and today companies will quite happily lay you off the moment you aren't profitable to them.

This fictional person made it all the way to retirement and good for him. But the guy who followed this strategy for 15 years and now is job hunting because the company needed to cut 18% of its staff? He's got a huge gap in useful skills and decades left before he can retire.

That guy is in real trouble.

Or whether the employer was happy (it was - he stayed there for 35 years).

35 years in a single easy role with good job security, plus an early retirement.

Arthur was happy.

I mean… he’s eating cat food. Do you know many happy people who eat cat food?

In our company we do medical devices. It is a hard SDLC business. Once a colleague of us left and shifted over to another (much bigger) medical device company. I met him some years later and he told me, retroperspectively, our company is a high-performing, super agile group. His new employer needs a year for a two line code change without really changing but only adding something. And that despite him pushing and pushing.

To be fair: to modify blood dialysis systems is no joke business.

AT&T 5ESS switch had a similar atmosphere back in the day (no idea about now). The rule was no function deletion so you delete the code in the function instead. I remember reading about a very talented guy from Bell Labs being on the 5ESS team and writing some ridiculously small number of lines of code in one year due to all the rules in place to prevent major telephone system issues.

There is a lot of analysis that goes with it. I worked in both medical devices and also transportation.(Rolling stock signalling systems). It is definitely not a joke when you are moving such huge mass of metal with people in it.

This is like the programmer equivalent of WH Auden’s poem, The Unknown Citizen [0].

When I first read this poem I thought it was sad and about a person who wasted their life on mundane, average things. But now I think it’s a positive for a person who lived an average life on the outside but likely had a rich internal life that they didn’t share with the world and that we shouldn’t expect people to have metrics that we can externally measurable as to whether they were great or not.

I think it’s fantastic they this man’s passion is Soylent cat food hybrids for human consumption. He worked all those years and finally broke free for his passion.

[0] https://poets.org/poem/unknown-citizen

Also : Sisyphus.

The concept of life as meaningless, to be happy with the drudgery, or repetition, instead to be happy with the 'journey', to be in each moment.

Very common throughout literature/history.

I'd like to think we are somehow different, that modern man with technology is reaching some new level, to find some purpose. But now, not so sure, it's still just day-in-day-out, then you die.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisyphus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Sisyphus

I'd argue that modern technology takes us out of the moment more than anything.

That sounds like a well above average life. No problems and a functional member of society in every respect? Good relationships? Five children?!

It seems obvious this guy was in fact happy, despite the last lines of the poem, or else he would have acted out at work, become an alcoholic, divorced, or whatever. That or a supreme stoic.

some old verses that rhythm with the current zeitgeist

> Our researchers into Public Opinion are content

> That he held the proper opinions for the time of year;

> When there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.

If this is a jab to supposedly mediocre programmers, it fails to be funny.

I have a friend, let's call him AP, who is a programmer in a local java shop. He's been working in the same place for 12 years since he graduated. He kind of fits the description on this article, but he is one of the happiest people I know.

He gets paid above average wage, and his work is easy and not very demanding. He knows the codebase inside out, and gets along well with his colleagues. Outside work he goes out cycling or for a beer with his friends or travels the world with his wife.

Different people have different priorities, and some are not obsessed with excelling at work.

It's making a jab at "minimum effort" employees who manage to coast for years or decades. Note the "hundreds of lines of code".

There are many fantastic engineers who work on otherwise boring, rotten codebases. No shame in that.

Author here!

I agree with you :) here's some more context

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36985316

Everyone can build something new and shiny on the green field. If it doesn't work out you can always find someone or something to blame, because what you set out build was an awesome, highly innovative[1] endeavor anyway. Moving on to something else new and shiny after a while is not only ok, it is expected.

Sticking to something, through good and bad times, on the other hand, that's not something many people can do, and while it is by no means sufficient in most cases it seems to be necessary for sustainable success.

Examples: Guido van Rossum[2], Linus Torvalds, Daniel Stenberg

[1] You wouldn't even have to put the "high risk" nature of it in the fine print, because it's readily understood.

[2] I could not find the source but I remember him saying in an interview when asked about Pythons's breakthrough, that it never had one but that it constantly and steadily grew.

You're examples have very little to do with an average org's IT projects. Not in scope, definition of 'success', or definition of 'finished'.

If you're company is building a programming language or operating system you need to make sure that is what you love doing.

starts promising but ends unnecessarily snarky and condescending.

why dumpster diving? and those guys cannot be replaced by any number of junior devs - that is exactly the problem with them retiring. they know the legacy stuff nobody wants to touch but everything depends on.

so, from that angle this writing reflects very poorly on the author and his work experience.

having said that - the title could fit just about any lawyer. law is the crappiest codebase that you have to spend a lifetime learning. especially the german tax law - but it guarantees a very comfortable income.

also in defense of people like that man i'd even argue that mastering a legacy codebase is mentally and motivationally not that different form mastering a game like chess.

Maybe dumpster diving is extreme, to drive home a point.

But, there are a lot of old people that are hungry, and work as Wal-Mart greeters.

If you didn't save/plan well enough, and 30 years of cool software development ends as being a Wal-Mart greeter, that can seem equivalent to dumpster diving.

There is something to be said for stability. Since our protagonist retired early, the pay must not have been bad. The glass is half full, or so I tell myself.

I thought so at first too, but the planned "street performance and dumpster diving" tells a different story.

Retiring at 58 would be awesome. Some people live to work and others work to live. I like what I do but I also have hobbies which I really enjoy.

I get that the post is satire but at some point in your career there are diminishing returns on learning new things. If you are somewhat specialized say in backend systems involving scaling, message queues, clustering, etc. it probably isn't a good time investment to learn whatever is new in the frontend world. And by learn I mean to become proficient professionally and get a job doing it, not just a "hello world" learning. Doing "hello world" learning on a technology is like learning how the yolk and rudders work in an airplane, you're not going to be flying professionally anytime soon.

Learning new things is how you keep your mind working. People who sit around doing nothing in retirement tend do die sooner than those who keep busy. What you keep busy with doesn't matter, just do something challenging.

Howdy, that's almost me! AMA!

I've spent 10 years as the lone dev at a small medical facility, writing database software and dealing with lab hardware etc.

I guess I've touched 100% of the codebase because I wrote it all, but I always wonder if my skillset is so niche that I'll always be at small companies.

Here's the deal though, work isn't everything and I'm at a job that recognises that.

You wrote it all? By yourself? That sounds ideal to me. The horrible part of this to me is that he inherited a mess and left without having done much to it, evidently being unable to do so for whatever reason. The headline says he "mastered" it, so clearly other forces were at work than his skill. That's the depressing part to me, pulling my hair out to try and understand someone else's antediluvian code base which was built under duress.

I think devs imagine someone else out there is having a better time at their computer than they are. I definitely do.

I envy you. How did you get I to this gig?

One of the scariest short stories i've read all year.

For $666/day the author also sells infinite exponential growth. [1]

[1] https://taylor.town/hire-me

That's a varied set of stacks they're comfortable taking clients for.

The site says $1000 for me. Regional pricing perhaps?

Page says 1000 though. Anyways this is crazy, who he thinks he is lol

This is where I am heading. The article is motivating me to change that.

I don't get these threads, it's impossible for everyone to do a job that they love and that is meaningful ... it's the ultimate luxury. Try to find an alternative way to give meaning to your life. (I have not yet succeeded in doing that by the way ...)

It's just their minds screaming "oh no that's me in six months!"

For decades, Arthur raised flags to upper management about the high complexity of the codebase, and begged them to hire a couple of junior devs. Only then could he delegate enough work for him to take on the refactoring project. The software's uptime and stability - he reminded them - was critical to the survival rates of children stricken with spinal meningitis. But management churn and budgetary chaos at the org resulted in the project fluctuating between "investment" and "divestment" states for decades, leaving him to fend for himself.

He told his manager that the data access layer - consisting of 5k LOC batch scripts calling Microsoft Access - needed to be brought up to speed. Maybe they'd consider PostgreSQL this year. Containerization, he protested, isn't going to fix the problems inherent to the system's labyrinthian integrations with countless software vendors and proprietary components. He also reminded them that it's 2023 and Windows containers still don't support RDP.

They still needed a replacement for "Bob". Bob left the org back in 2008. Under duress, and impossibly tight sprint deadlines, Bob was asked to make surgical modifications to the WingdingsAbstractFactory.java class - to be deployed directly into production no-later-than-end-of-sprint. Bob complained that there were no conceivable DR plans, or QA engineers assigned to the project. After a ten hour deployment - and a highly blameful postmortem - Bob exited on record-short-notice.

Arthur was forced into an early retirement under the recommendation of his physician. It was said that his stomach issues were brought on by the stress at work. Only Soylent and tinned meat were within tolerable levels of discomfort.

Arthur will be remembered by his loved ones for his patience, steadfastness, and creativity.

I've done something like this for a couple of years, albeit not full-time. The project was written in Symfony 1.x and got stuck there, as Symfony moved on to higher versions and wasn't backwards compatible with 1.x. The codebase consisted of thousands of lines of poorly documented and commented code, intermingled with custom JS modules that nobody understood. When management wanted to implement changes, it would take days to comprehend the potential effects on different parts before I could initiate any modifications. The project would have required a complete rewrite, but the management was staunchly against it. This has been the most frustrating and unsatisfying tech work I've ever undertaken, alongside past tasks of migrating MS Access apps.

I sometimes find myself pondering why I didn't cease working on it, especially given the compensation wasn't particularly impressive. It's crucial to recognize and act when you sense that a project is no longer benefiting you, and simply move on.

I love that your response to this article is to try to prove you're that guy.

We get it. You're that guy. :-)

That is one extreme. The other one is developers hopping from new project to new project without ever even seeing the product going live or getting user feedback/bug reports from the live product.

This is quite funny in a painful way. I identify on a few different vectors. I started my "professional" career in telecom. There I really did become an expert on some very small percentage of code. It was exhilarating to do patches in 286 assembler for an obscure language (CHILL). Now many years later, I work in NPD at one of the small divisions of a giant Medical device company. I wrote 90% of the legacy code. It is embedded and I have not needed to update any of it in 10 years. With changing management styles, the new push is to buy new products from smaller companies, and just to the required paperwork for regulatory approval.

It is satire but I think people like this are heros. Not doing the flashy fancy stuff but keeping the world ticking over nicely.

I don't think it is satire. Or reality has become the satire. This seemed entirely real to me.

There will be a lot of these people maintaining the currently fashionable microservice/multiple languages/use as many AWS services as possible/scalable systems in a few years.

I have a friend who just started a job working with AS400's, learning RPG. He's not much of a programmer, but I am, and this made me think, hmm... maybe I should learn it too. There's going to be some serious job security in that field, once AI is writing all the CRUD web apps from scratch in Nodejs.

This is my retirement plan.

There is something admirable about someone who commits to maintaining a codebase, no matter how crappy it is. We don't see this often in tech and often being a person who is more reliable and stable is more desirable than two junior devs and a Keurig machine. Speaking from my first hand experience when reverse engineering a poorly documented product for a small company these people were the real heroes. Thanks to all the "Arthurs" that keep the world spinning.

I found this on his site https://taylor.town/-10x, I like it even better

My boss straight up told me a couple of juniors could do my job the other day

Most coding is pretty mechanical... and most juniors can pick that up easily. In spite of the mysticism surrounding software development, higher level languages are actually intended to be easy to pick up. If you have good problem solving skills, those are harder to replace with a couple of juniors (or ChatGPT).

Danger, Will Robinson! Time for a new boss, possibly new company.

Find another job

Question: Wouldn't a couple of juniors be more expensive? I don't think I ever work at a company where junior developer was paid less than half of a senior developer.

Maybe he tells those juniors that GPT4 can do their job.

Leave and make him prove it.

That's me, got fired 4 years before retirement. Made them rich. Young guys came in, it all had to be rebuild in microservices. Last press release, they have tripled their staff, financial turnover went down, the new system is working but is lacking the functionality of the old systems. All the pitfalls i warned them fore and got me fired, became reality.

How did Arthur avoid promotion to management?

He was sufficiently good at programming:

> Westbrook once touched legacy code without ending the company.

They couldn't hire any replacement VB6 programmers.

Programming is a job, it is not a mission to save the universe. A few programmers become famous for a combination of talents and luck, but nobody can control either of these things. In the end, 99.99% of programmers do the same things that this guy is making fun of.

Life is too short for working with crap code. Unfortunately there is more crap code out there, than there are opportunities of working on beautiful code. At least in most jobs there will at minimum be compromise and part of the job will be dealing with ugly code.

Most developers see and work with crap code because good code runs well and rarely needs to be touched. At least that’s what I tell myself.

Now that I'm older this sort of comment actually makes me laugh. Thanks for that. Good code.. oh, sweet sweet summer child.

Life sucks and then you die, I don't need constant reminders of it from the internet though.

Recently on a call my client introduced me to his $BigCorp whale client as "my IT guy" and his client said "oh yeah I have 12 of those here on my team".

I'm cool with that. I keep doing work valuable enough to pay well for, and the rest is semantics.

This is me.

30 years grinding it out on a very small esoteric system.

Hard to explain to people "no, really, my skills translate".

Paid well enough, but can't move, locked in.

But, the small esoteric system is being replaced, so I'm running out of runway and might not make it to retirement.

This is the dream imo. I love this kind of work

His manager noted, “Arthur had a knack for working hard without learning transferrable skills."

^^^This!

Arthur was lucky to retire at 58. He probably made fat bank which turned out to be golden handcuffs. If he ever got downsized, he had been f*d.

That's not how it works. Those who've been there 20 years and who would have difficulties finding another job are those who get low salary increases. On the other hand they've been there for so long without looking elsewhere that they probably have no idea that their pay is low.

> He probably made fat bank which turned out to be golden handcuffs.

This is a big assumption, not everyone in this field is a high earner - plenty of people make okay-ish salaries without being anywhere near highly paid.

Wasn't this a bit of a self deprecating summary of his own career?

Many of the comments seem to assume that it was written by his colleagues and that the description of his career is condescending or snarky.

Personally, I find it really funny, and that it probably describes many of us, despite the fact that we think we are way too cool to ever be like the character described in the piece.

Most of today's new tech will become tomorrow's 'legacy'. Imagine how your awsum multi lambda hairball deployment will look in 30 years. (If it's even around in three decades.)

This is how it should be on salary. If you're good enough then you can get time back from the job and work less per week. It starts to look crazy good when you are doing like 5-10 hours per week because you're so familiar with a code base and have a decent understanding of the business. If they aren't going to give meaningful raises for doing maintenance, then time is the only thing you can get more of.

If companies want people to work harder, they'll have to give more compensation that scales better with performance.

"Most of today's new tech will become tomorrow's 'legacy'" Only the successful ones

The idea that two interns are going to be able to take over for this guy was the funniest part of the article. Maintaining a large old legacy code base is a hard job because there is so much to learn before you can even start. Codebases like that live that long are often used in important places where a YOLO approach of “test it in production” can cost tremendous amounts of money or even lives. The article makes fun of the guy for only committing hundreds of lines of code, but they worked perfectly the first time and every time.

> Westbrook believes he grapsed over 4% of the entire codebase

He's doing well

Einstein once said "Once you stop learning, you start dying". I feel like in IT it's the case for most what people are thinking. In my case I have been switching tech because I felt I wasn't learning anything new or simply because it's was dying. I feel like these guys like him are probably too confortable in their confort zone or too lazy to learn anything new (the less you do the less you've got motivation + you can't teach old dog new tricks).

To be fair you can learn outside your job. I wouldn't call him lazy just because he stuck with a company for a long time. Most jobs will only require a small percentage of a programmers' knowledge, so people supply their urges with outside endeavors. Hence reading books, doing Open Source, side projects, etc.

Lots of significant inventions in computer science began as a side project only the creator cared for initially and had to borrow his own time to do it.

This is quality satire :) it also works somewhat for larger codebases, even non-crappy ones.

> Arthur had a knack for working hard without learning transferrable skills. He will be dearly missed

When I was at Google during the pandemic, I noticed more and more people saying they needed to learn open source tooling so they can have skills that transfer to the outside world.

That company is full of brilliant engineers who have mastered (part of) a great code base but have to start at the beginning with popular non-Google tools.

Nothing against Arthur Westbook and his career choice [;)] but I think the proper way of turning mastery of a crappy codebase into a career is joining a bug bounty program. Some are big enough (think Yahoo's scope) that you can earn a living mastering them and finding bugs. But won't those bugs dry up eventually you ask...well thankfully new features, API endpoints, (sub)domains etc. are intruduced constantly.

I'm unfamiliar with bug bounties but how often do you get to peruse codebases? I thought most of the time you're working in a blackbox setting with just an outside interface that you peek through?

Honest question: how many HN'ers have worked on a codebase they considered non-crappy?

Or, put a better way, for all the codebases you have worked with, how many were crappy and how many were not?

I'm increasingly convinced that there does not exist a large codebase in actual use that isn't crappy in some way or another.

I mean, a lot of people work on things that, despite being billed as a Great New Thing, are throwaway projects that will disappear without a trace in a few years (once management changes, the market turns, or the founders/VCs cash out, or the SEC comes knocking, etc.)

At least a 35yo codebase probably actually does something more useful than sell a narrative whose purpose is to enrich a few random jackasses.

Often times great ambition requires moral concessions that are untenable even in the face of the end result.

Politics is a helpful lens. Either you compromise and muddy the purity of the result, or you take the high risk path of being uncompromising and greatly reduce the odds of achieving any result at all.

When facing this, many individuals optimize for lower-risk self-fulfillment over great ambition.

This type of cynicism/snark used to be a lot more funny before it dominated all internet discussion and interaction. Maybe the people who spend all their time online are the bitter/angry ones and it just has taken over all discussion?

In any case it's just a job, and anyone harboring illusions otherwise will learn the truth soon enough.

I got bad news for some of the folks in this thread: just about _everyone_ can be replaced with two junior devs and a Keurig.

From 1997 to 2012 I was the sole IT guy at a trade show company. We had a database called Smiley.... I wrote 3 different replacements for it, they were always afraid to convert over, even though I was fully prepared to run them both in parallel.

I've been this guy, sorta.

I've been afraid to even try personal projects since then... that job broke me.

I left my previous job because it was obvious this was my future (or would be my future if the company could stay in business, which was unlikely). My mandate was to fix all the problems without changing any of the founder's work that caused the problems. My new job is terrific.

"Two junior devs and a keurig" - that will totally wreck the system by refactoring it to "modern patterns" without bothering to understand what it actually did. But it's OK, they're younger and therefore better. Thus, the cycle begins anew.

This article may and should be the trigger for thousands of life-affirming resignations.

I think that was the point, but see all the sympathising comments here. Being full-on driven by your day job is only one way of having a good professional life, and I wouldn't say it's the best or the most common by far. The way how software development is democratised and slowly becomes the next blue collar job, the engineering hero ethos will fade.

Unrelated: this link opened almost instantly, what’s this magic? Even HN takes longer!

If you serve plain static HTML from S3 or Cloudflare Pages (or even a vanilla nginx on a vps) and put a decent CDN in front of it (and don't load 3p resources), it will astound people how fast your page loads. I regularly get this feedback on my own webpage.

It's not rocket science - it's how we made webpages in 2001. Browsers are really good at that.

I'm worried this will be me someday. I suppose that's the point.

I had about 15 jobs over 40 years, not including 9 years at the two companies I started. But some were short term contracts, and several (in a row, sadly) ended in my employer going out of business, mass layoffs, etc. I always found doing something new was revitalizing. Also found that sometimes something new was awful. Being comfortable changing what technologies you are expected to use helps, taking advantage of new tech being new, and not many people knowing it, is good too. At my last job before retiring I stayed for 5.5 years, and could still be working there today, except it was enough of a career.

Does somebody work 35 years in same company, it is usually 2-5 years -> new company grind rather than working at same company.

I'm that guy at work. I solved the problem by completely rewriting our huge and aged out internal application. The plot twist is that I also completely wrote the original crappy codebase.

actually terrifying. feels like the onion. let me laugh it off hahahaha

If he already mastered the crappy codebase, then "two junior devs and a Keurig to replace him" or even a senior dev might not be able to replace him in a short amount of time.

The things people do for "job security".

This was a funny title but not a nice post. Ick.

Is there anyone who is accessing this page via a command-line text-based browser?

Spend time digging deep into something, or spend time skimming the surface of a bunch of things, I guess.

Why does Taylor have to play Arthur like this, poor man will need burn cream after this blog post.

I thought it was the conclusion for every single developer in the world when they retire, no?

It will be interesting to see how the average HN'er is doing when they're at 58.

Alternately, Man Earns Enough to Comfortably Support His Family and Retire Years Early

I feel personally attacked

mirror: https://archive.is/12eOI

The headline reads as if it was from The Onion.

And for this, I spent six years of college...

Finally something funny for once! thank you.

That THAT is the internet as she is spoke.

Would be a dream to retire at 58

You gotta do what you gotta do.

I just learned ASP Classic 3.0.

Is this humor LLM generated ?

Bit of a threadbare post

I am Mr. Westbrook. AMA.

Guaranteed to be C++

This checks out.

Ctrl+F the comments for `dailywtf` ... no results. Sad.

I am this guy

Harsh.

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