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Comment by dougmccune | Hacker News Reader

Two years in the industry and the author has seen multiple large enterprises "go bankrupt" because of technical debt or bad code choices? Color me skeptical.

It's a hard truth to swallow that in the "real world" (read: any business that's not a software company) we as software developers are simply there to enable people to do their jobs better. Our software doesn't exist as an end in itself. We are purely a means. Bad/inelegant/old software can often accomplish a business's goals. It might not be as efficient or pretty as possible, but remember that your job isn't to make pretty software, it's to make a business successful.

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Agreed. I had this problem a lot when I was starting out. I could not believe why they would use such outdated software. One company was even still using a COBOL program and this was in 2010. Then I realized that the people who use the program are not engineers, they are people just trying to do their job. Software just has to work and it does not matter what language or protocol it uses. This is often hard to swallow but the fact is companies make money off software doing its job, and sometimes its job does not require "secure" or "fast".

There's nothing inherently wrong with software being old and outdated, that may just mean the software was designed well enough to be long-lasting.

However, the problems come when you're working with software that's decades old, has no master feature list, sparse documentation and no unit test coverage for countless feature enhancements and business rules that were tacked on over the years, so no one understands everything that it does and no one can touch the code without breaking something unpredictably, plus it's monolithic and not modular or portable at all, so it's really hard to migrate any part of its functionality. And it's in a language no one learns anymore, so it's really hard to hire developers. Meanwhile your business has become so dependent on it that you can't continue to make money unless the program continues doing its job. So the software will only continue to get older and more outdated, because it's irreplaceable for all the wrong reasons.

Sure, it's fine to still be on a COBOL system, but in reality I bet that most companies that are still on COBOL would migrate to more modern and maintainable systems if they could. But they can't, they're locked in by the amount of technical debt they've accumulated.

We have tons of actively used and maintained COBOL systems (including new features/requirements). The cost to rewrite and test these systems would be extremely high, since there is a tremendous amount of business logic embedded within them. In most cases, it is cheaper and makes more sense to continue to supporting the existing applications.

For me, the worst part is two years in the industry doing small part time gigs and the author thinks he is smarter than most of the other people there. And after one year of 'debugging, refactoring and getting the build to work' he quit cause he didn't know how he could fix the project.

Seriously? And he has the guts to say Enterprise is broken with his so many years of experience.

What is with this trend where people with 1-2 years of experience think they know more than 100s of people with more years experience than they have been alive shouting this bullcrap? And I have nothing against youth, I started my career at 18 after dropping out of school, but I had the good sense of not being an arrogant know it all that wanted to rewrite complete systems on my first real job.

Having pretty software and good code makes my job easier. It's less about the company being successful and more about my work day not being compromised by anger.

hey the author here. It depends on what you mean by large.

Not world wide large but large like 500 people worked there. I was just a frontend jquery guy how was doing some fancy frontend stuff but i head a look into the company.

They failed not because of old code. What is bad code choices ?

"we as software developers are simply there to enable people to do their jobs better." Exactly!

"it's to make a business successful." Right. For example in a company which was a eCommerce Company. They wrote the eCommerce Software them self and it worked for 6 years but they got bigger and bigger and the manager didn't care to make the software better. One day the main developer quit the job and nobody now would know how to change that or to do that. is this still a good Bad/inelegant/old software ?

That context of size is important. To some people, 500 is a large company. Indeed, in many respects, 500 really is a large company. Only ~0.3% of US companies have more than 500 people [1]. But HP has 317,000 employees. So depending on who you are talking to, "large" suggests different things.

[1]: http://www.census.gov/econ/smallbus.html

To me that's not a software problem, that's a management problem. That organization did not pass the hit-by-a-bus test, it's just that in this case the bus was the main dev walking away.

That's a planning / organization problem, not an IT / software one.

In companies often developer do organizing too. Or you have influence on the management

I'm assuming your anecdotes (the 500 person company and the eCommerce company) are two different companies? Because if a 500 person company folded when they lost a single employee then there's a whole lot more messed up than quality of code.

Yes should point that out more clear!

the 500 person company had more then just technical problems.

No, my job is to work and your job is to pay me. If your business is successful or not, is none of my problem. Fuck you, pay me. I write your stupid shit enterprise cruft all day and cash your worthless benefits. You want me to create and generate new value? Fuck you, pay me. Nobody cares about your groundbreaking technology that is the foundation of thousands of other bullshit businesses selling nothing but hustle. Put the cash in my hand so I can get the fuck out of here.

Wow, just... wow. There are companies in this world that you can get behind, where you can "generate value", and where your involvement actually improves your life instead of shitting all over it. I'm sorry you think the world is divided between soulless snake-oil corporations and mercenary employees, both of whom are out to totally fuck the other over. That's a dark world to have to live in.

It's not dark (more appropriately, it's not false), it's just overstatement. Most employees just want a paycheck, and most employers want to maximize profit at whatever cost.

We all live in the world in which this happens. Not all of us, thankfully, are employed in that part of the world; that does not mean, though, that it does not exist. I'm glad you're not part of it; I'm not, either, but only because I left and made my own way. It wasn't easy, and still isn't, but it was and is worth it.

It's easy to dismiss doom and gloom because it's not everywhere. But the GP's experience is perfectly real.

Doing good work for the money does not make you a mercenary (in whatever bad sense you're implying here.) It makes you like 95% of the workers in the world. Are people who work at McDonald's fucking them over if they don't give a shit about corporate's goals?

"Fuck you, pay me" is the beginning of wisdom in this industry.

Corporates are not human so I'm not sure what your basing your opinion on.

A bit of context for "Fuck you, pay me": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6h3RJhoqgK8

Wow, what's with the rage? Find a job with a company you like, and get some proper job gratification and self respect, please.

>Find a job with a company you like, and get some proper job gratification and self respect, please.

It's so easy! I wonder why he hasn't just done that before!?

Self respect and job gratification are algorithms to be optimized.

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