Hacker News Reader

Comment by rho4 | Hacker News Reader

> In my career, I have taken a particular approach based on building new systems from scratch

= Software consultants and free lancers. I don't like them because I am jealous that they get to do greenfield projects and make all the architectural decisions but never actually have to maintain their own creations (and therefore never really learn how to design a system for changeability and maintainability).

> What can we do about this state of affairs?

1st: be aware of these laws and that keeping a 20 year old system in production is a non-trivial task and to be proud of every additional year I can keep it running.

2nd: Instead of seeing it as a 'DoS attack on myself by previous developers', I try to see it as a neverending Sudoku that challenges and stimulates and pays me every day.

View on HN

"2nd: Instead of seeing it as a 'DoS attack on myself by previous developers', I try to see it as a neverending Sudoku that challenges and stimulates and pays me every day."

This is how it is for me, I've had a great time with several business systems initiated by amateurs or mediocre developers that took hold and had been going for 5-10 years when I arrived. Yes, the WTF:s are everywhere, changing these systems is really hard and takes a lot of discipline and care, but every time you put something in production you'll also have made other parts of the application better, more robust and faster.

To me that is really rewarding, and not even noisy, butterfingered management can stop you from littering the commit log with lovely little improvements that incrementally turns the turd into a much more stable income for them, and possibly yourself (and if not you jump jobs after a while and get the raise then). I don't care whether they appreciate my work, first I care about practicing my craft well, second I care about how it is perceived by my peers in the craft.

Of course, this isn't a reason to make crappy software on purpose, but this kind of just happens when you on the cheap test an idea against a market and it flies really well and customers flow in.

Well said, I agree so much :)

> To me that is really rewarding

Agreed. Many years ago I spent two years on a greenfield project that got slowly but surely worse, which was very frustrating. Now I'm working on something that's seven years old and has been through a lot of hands, but every small improvement feels good, and when I need to do the occasional hack, I don't feel bad because on the whole it's better than it used to be.

Sudoku is such an apt metaphor, thank you!

If I can extend it a bit: sometimes when you start a new job, the board state you inherit is actually subtly invalid (i.e. it will lead to an unsolvable solution), and you have to figure out the smallest number of numbers to "erase" to end up with a valid board state.

You get to realistically use the eraser maybe once per year, because nobody likes erasers. So you just compensate for it with lots of notes!

Haha indeed, bosses do not like the eraser at all :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com