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Comment by rjbwork | Hacker News Reader

Cool project and write up.

An aside - while I love the snark and making fun of these "legacy" systems, it has given me a window into my own maturity as an engineer. I was absolutely this cavalier and cocky about poorly implemented systems I've been a user or admin of in the past. But having now spent nearly a decade and a half getting paid for this work and seeing a lot of stuff and the evolution of best practices, I have much more empathy for the organizations and authors of these systems. There are very very few programs that ever achieve something like elegance and beauty when they collide with the real world.

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I partially agree. While there is nothing wrong with boring "legacy" systems, and the world runs on them, practices like sending plain text passwords over email and all other security failures mentioned in the post are inexcusable. Software like Atrium is a perfect example of companies getting large contracts (usually in the public sector) through connections/corruption and outsourcing development for pennies, with no quality control or other oversight. This stuff should not be romanticized.

In fact there is a non-zero chance that the company's response to this blog post will be to file a lawsuit against these students for "hacking" and ruining their lives, as has happened many times in the past in such cases.

While I do not like the 'get out of breach free card' that companies like Equifax seem to get, your tone has that exact sort of arrogance that smacks of immaturity.

You just can't always apply today's sensibilities to code that has lasted longer than your life so far.

I agree that companies need to be held responsible for their decisions not to update security, but that's a different (related) issue than 'legacy'.

I am more concerned with legislation and law enforcement. That's the real way to fix things. Rust rewrites wont change business incentives.

I’m 46 and been working professionally since the late 90s. There was never a time in the history of the web when storing user passwords in plaintext was OK. Encrypted passwords were already well established in UNIX.. although I remember using systems without shadow passwords or salt.

I am similar age, and there is software older than us that is still running.

Yeah, the best thing about hiring people "fresh out of college" (or whatever the equivalent is today) is that they see things with fresh eyes and want to change everything. The worst thing about hiring people fresh out of college is that they see things with fresh eyes and want to change everything. ;-)

This is a really good insight! The key is to say yes to the good ideas and no to the bad ones.

Turning 50 this year, writing code for living, and could not agree more. I used to think all must be re-written and refactored. "Old crap must go". "I can do it better". But then one realizes the rewritten system is "crap" to someone else soon.

Learning existing system is harder than to create something seemingly equivalent that author understands well. For some time at least.

My measuring stick is how much the team can understand what is happening. When the team at large cannot move through the codebase and effectively make changes then it is time to make changes.

If the code is on the back burner and only receiving maintenance then no need to mess with it.

But active feature development? Teams need to have a grasp on it and have a way to get a mental model of what is happening.

A team that can’t understand what the code does now is not going to write a functional replacement any time soon.

In a dysfunctional company where "the code is the documentation"? Yeah.

If there are knowledgeable people to lead the process, and the transition is done appropriately: it is 100% possible and I have done multiple times in my career.

The burden on rewriting shouldn't lie in developers alone. And before someone quotes Spolsky: not every software is Netscape Navigator.

Corollary: If the change is going to make it harder to effectively make changes (and figure out changes that need to be made, i.e. manual troubleshooting), it's probably a bad change.

(this corollary might be most applicable in robotics?; dealing with the fallout of kubernetes being forced onto robots by cloud-oriented folks)

Wow, I am sorry for your pain and suffering. I am not anti-k8s, I get it, I get why people like it. But it's just so much complexity for so little payoff in many cases where you don't need the overhead.

As ever, the greatest programmers are fundamentally lazy. I hate writing code. I endeavor to do as little of it as possible.

Solving problems? Sure, love to.

But slogging out LOC for the sake of it? Hard pass. Even as a teen that never really appealed to me.

I never refactor for the purpose of refactoring.

If I can do things better, and I usually can, it's because I have a more performant higher level algorithm or set of low level optimization strategies to apply.

I agree, Those API organizers are just creating future crap for others. However, objective benchmarks showing my changes yield 10 to 100 thousand times quicker execution than the old method mean the legacy code was crap...

Legacy being crap is not always the fault of devs. Back on Z80 and similar, before execution caches were expansive and expensive to invalidate, the short circuiting && and || bool operators made sense. Now that invalidating the CPU instruction cache with a jump is far more expensive than just running the ops these short circuits are trying to avoid, it is better to just use bitwise | or & instead of boolean || or && unless there are needed side-effects (really should make the conditional evaluations into proper branches [if statements] anyway, if only for clarity). Benchmark it and see. C is stuck doing LOTS of old and busted style logic, and coders imagine their compiler is doing a lot of magic voodoo under the hood that simply isn't happening. There's loads of compiler optimization hype.

Sometimes the hardware or platform just shifts underneath Good Code and turns it into Crap Code.

Definitely agree. My first few gigs were in consultancy and after seeing how the sausage is made I don't feel much like calling out these kinds of old systems anymore. The budgets and deadlines are tight, the people working on them are often inexperienced and underpaid and have little time to sit down and think things through, and when they have to work on an old system to add some features they have little time and incentives to improve the overall state of things.

I have a similar length of experience as you, but I'm on the opposite side of the fence and side with the students in this case. If an organization is willfully putting out and maintaining shit products year after year and equivocating about how updating things to be more in-line with modern practices is oh so difficult and oh so expensive, maybe they do deserve to be mocked. If they're making an effort, that's a different story. There's really no excuse to keep insecure and outdated things out in the wild except for organizational laziness. Stand behind and maintain the crap you sell or don't sell it at all.

I think as a profession we need more derision and mockery of poorly made, documented and maintained shit and less reverting to robotic response of "you just don't understand, man".

I don't necessarily disagree. But you get what you pay for. These public institutions typically put out bids for projects and take the lowest one. Incentives matter and these types of organizations are incentivizing the production of cheap and poorly made software.

I totally get what you mean, and I feel kind of the same but in reverse: When I was young, I was totally making systems like this legacy dumpster thermal experience.

A lot of this stuff is hacked together by young aspiring programmers just finding their footing, often grossly underpaid, and with very little experience or formal training. Which is great, respect the hustle! But not so super when personal data is being handled. Luckily, it kind of looks like they maybe dodged that bullet in this case?

Lesson of the day is: Use different passwords for each thing you log in to. :-)

> A lot of this stuff is hacked together by young aspiring programmers just finding their footing, often grossly underpaid, and with very little experience or formal training. Which is great, respect the hustle! But not so super when personal data is being handled. Luckily, it kind of looks like they maybe dodged that bullet in this case?

This is an odd generalization to me - are the massive mainframe COBOL systems handling personal data at banks to this day, "hacked together" by underpaid young programmers? I'm sure they were underpaid... but inexperienced with no formal training?

You went straight to massive fortune 50. Guess what, there are 100s of thousands of businesses in the US. Most aren't fortune 50.

Here are some other kinds of business:

Freight

Logistics

Concrete

Construction

Eyeglasses

Lawn care

Plumbing

Cabinet making

Law Office

Hair styling

These small shops run on bespoke industry specific software with few competitors. They are often buggy and out of date because there is only one game in town a lot of times.

There is more to the world than huge businesses headquartered in NYC or SF.

all of them use QuickBooks!

> but inexperienced with no formal training?

someone doesn't have any experience with offshore programmers, eh?

SAP contractors hurt you too?

yes, unironically

Judging from the javascript, they scraped. The system they were scrapping would have been cutting-edge in 2004-5. Keeping something running that long, duck tape and all, is no small feat.

Nothing screams junior dev like the snark of things they don't understand

> There are very very few programs that ever achieve something like elegance and beauty when they collide with the real world.

I write embedded systems. Tell me about it!

Mocking bad systems like this is all fun and games but it definitely demonstrates your inexperience. Eventually you realize this is just normal, most stuff is as bad as this in one way or another. Mocking it all would be your full time job. And you just get tired of it.

Within a couple years of working professionally, I went from "who on earth would do X?" to "ah... almost certainly they were forced to do X by ..." some external factors - time/deadline, workaround to another bad system, or management pressure for some weird reason. Sometimes it turned out to be just "really naive dev copy/pasting", but that wasn't a majority of the cases.

What still bugs me though is that when poorly done/hacky/broken systems still 'work', the assumption is that everything is 'fine'. When I'm needing to work with those systems, the assumption by others (management, other devs, whoever) is ... "why is this taking so long? just do XYZ and move on!" not understanding that often I'm discovering all the ways the broken system is broken - very hidden things, bad docs, charset issues, speed, incorrect data coming back that other consumers just 'know' to hack around (without it being documented anywhere, etc). It's not frustration at the devs of the other system as much as the pressure you face when others don't realize how much workaround you're needing to do to do something 'simple'. And yeah, it should be simple, if the broken system wasn't broken in the first place.

100%, I love debugging and digging through legacy systems, personally, yet have only run into co-workers in my career over the years that loathe and fear them!

Being able to jump in and put out fires on a building that's already built has served me very well in my career, but in overall satisfaction as well!

Yeah, once you have gone through a few cycles or your cutting edge approaches becoming standard and then becoming legacy and outdated, you realize the treadmill never stops.

There's a ton of dunning-kruger going on, but I think as college kids riding a high of winning a contest and learning a ton, it can be excused.

Absolutely. I'm not trying to dump on them. It may not have come through with my choice of verbiage, but there's something romantic (in the aesthetic sense) and admirable about what they've done and their attitudes. That kind of unbridled optimism and confidence of youth that can be hard to cultivate as we get older.

Life is full of cringe and certainly I have had more than my fair share of it, who am I to judge anyone. Maybe I am even far more cringe than an average person, or maybe I notice my cringe much more, I hope it is the last, but I can never tell.

haha I had this same exact thought while reading it. "Oh sweet summer child..."

To me it seems like a miracle anyone ever had the budget to create this kind of website to begin with, let alone to "keep up with the times" :)

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