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Comment by lamontcg | Hacker News Reader

It is terrible to just do this on your own, particularly as the n00b.

If there are 5 different standards in the codebase, don't just invent your own better way of doing things. That is literally the xkcd/Standards problem. Go find one of the people who have worked there the longest and ask which of the 5 existing standards are most modern and should be copied.

And as you get more experience with the codebase you can suggest updates to the best standard and evolve it. The problem is that you then need to own updating that whole standard across the entire codebase. That's the hard part.

If you aren't experienced enough with the codebase to be aggressive about standardization, you shouldn't be creating some little playground of your own.

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> If there are 5 different standards in the codebase, don't just invent your own better way of doing things. That is literally the xkcd/Standards problem. Go find one of the people who have worked there the longest and ask which of the 5 existing standards are most modern and should be copied.

I strongly disagree with you and believe you've missed the point of my comment. Think about this: why are there 5 different standards in the codebase, none of which meet your needs? Do you think any engineers on the team are aware of this situation? And how might you get more experience with the codebase without writing code that solves your problems?

“Time” is the answer almost always.

Standards evolve over time, as do the languages and frameworks. Old code is rarely rewritten, so you end up with layers of code like geological strata recording the history of the developer landscape.

There’s a more complicated aspect of “Conway’s law, but over time” that’s hard to explain in a comment. And anyway, Casey Muratori did it better: https://youtu.be/5IUj1EZwpJY?si=hnrKXeknMCe0UPv4

People who created 3 of the 5 no longer work at the company, test coverage is minimal or nonexistent and the system mostly does what it’s supposed to.

In this situation, ‘getting more experience in the code base’ is more or less synonymous with ‘getting paged on the weekend’.

> Do you think any engineers on the team are aware of this situation?

Yes, there probably are. If you haven't been working there for long enough to know who they are, then you shouldn't be YOLO'ing it.

The fact that it hasn't all been cleaned up yet is due to that being an order of magnitude harder than greenfielding your own standard. That doesn't mean that nobody is aware of it, or working on it.

I've absolutely worked for a decade on a codebase which had at least 5 different standards, and I was the one responsible for cleaning it all up, and we were understaffed so I could never finish it, but I could absolutely point you at the standard that I wanted you to follow. It also probably was somewhat deficient, but it was better than the other 4. It evolved over time, but we tried to clean it all up as we went along. Trying to ram another standard into the codebase without talking it over with me, was guaranteed to piss me off.

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