Hacker News Reader

Comment by omouse | Hacker News Reader

Millions more lines of instantly legacy code written by inexperienced programmers? Thank the gods we'll all be employed for decades! Decades I tell you! ;p

View on HN

As long as these rookies aren't writing nuclear reactor firmware, who cares? Most of programming is mundane. Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting ;)

> Have the[se rookies] make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting

The reality is the opposite: the smooth-talking aptitudeless "rookies" with a years experience 7 times get themselves onto teams designing "interesting" stuff from scratch, then the programming experts are put on the team to clean up the many bugs for years to come.

This happens way more often than it should.

Often times, only the smartest people can reverse engineer and maintain vast amounts of poorly written code.

When code is terrible, it is very difficult to reason about. Hence, you need to be very smart to reason about it, and be successful in modifying it.

That's not really a fair comparison: the "rookies" (somehow, I doubt that always applies) are working in an environment where they often don't know the requirements and the only way to find them out is through trial and error, and the fact that the organization can even afford "programming experts" means they must have been somewhat successful. Put a programming expert in a situation where the boss doesn't know what he wants and the only way to find out is to build it 20 times and he'll produce a pile of crud too.

> Have them make CRUD apps while we experts work on something interesting

Slightly more complex CRUD apps? ;)

You're assuming these startups will be around for long enough for it to matter.

My reaction was more along the lines of "I'd hate to be the person who has to clean all that up)."

Mine was more along the lines of, "I'm going to make so much money cleaning that shit up."

You're going to need a lot of booze or drugs or to cap the time you do that. It can get real frustrating real fast despite the gigantic checks.

Definitely gets frustrating, but I've done plenty of "cleanup" contract work. Usually someone (business person) without technical knowledge hired the cheapest outsourcing they can find. Money has been sunk, and often there is 80 to 90% of a finished project, but the original contractor doesn't have enough experience to get it that last mile.

It's frustrating work, but it's also gravy train. When I get that call they are desperate and coming in on referral where someone has said, "I know a guy that's a finisher, but he's really going to cost you."

one easy trick: code reviews.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com