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micromanager: "Quick and easy win! Please have this done in 2-3 days to start repairing your reputation"
ticket: "Scrap this gem, and implement your own external service wrapper using the new and vastly different Slack API!"
slack: "New API? Give me bearer tokens! Don't use that legacy url crap, wth"
prev dev: "Yeah idk what a bearer token is. Have the same url instead, and try writing it down so you don't forget it?"
Slack admin: "I can't give you access to the slack integration test app, even though it's for exactly this and three others have access already, including your (micro)manager."
Slack: "You can also <a>create a new slack app</a>!" -- link logs me into slack chat instead. After searching and finding a link elsewhere: doesn't let me.
Slack admin: "You want a new test slack app instead? Sure, build it the same as before so it isn't abuseable. No? Okay, plan a presentation for it and bring security along for a meeting on Friday and I'll think about it. I'm in some planning meetings until then."
asdfjkagel.
This job is endless delays, plus getting yelled at over the endless delays.
At least I can start on the code while I wait. Can't test anything for at least a week, though. =/18 -
My previous manager always complained about the programmer that used to be there before me was utterly incompetent and unable to work.
One day checking a legacy app that needed a minor update I was looking at the code and said: “It is true the previous programmer didn’t even know how to put together 2 lines of code, this is literally the shittiest thing I have ever seen, thank God he is not around anymore!”
…
Manager: “Actually I wrote this myself”
…
…5 -
That moment when you resign from a place filled with politics and legacy code and unqualified people ...
feeling peaceful4 -
In the begining of time, when The Company was small and The Data could fit in some fucking excel sheets, Those Who Came Before implemented some java tool to issue invoices, notify customers and clear received payments.
Then came the Time Of The Great Expanse, when The Company grew to unthinkable levels. Headcount increased with each passing day, and The Data shows that everything was going great!
But when the future seemed bright, came The Stall-Out. The days when The Company could not expand as fast as it did before. And Those Who Came Before left, abandoning their Undocumented Java Tool to its own luck.
Those who came after knew nothing of the inner workings of the Undocumented Java Tool. They knew only that the magical Jar would take a couple fucking excel spreadsheets and spit out reports and send emails like magic.
And those were The Dark Days.
In the darkness, The Data grew to be a monster. Soon a fucking excel spreadsheet could not hold The Data contained any longer. Those Who Came After, fearing the wrath of The Undocumented Java Tool, dared not mess with its code. Instead, they fucking cut away the lowest volume transactions from the fucking input spreadsheet, and left the company to report the unbilled invoices as "surprise losses". Fucking script kiddies, were Those Who Came After.
Then, at The Darkest of Days (literally, Dec 21st), marched into the project The Six Witchers, who fear not the Demon of Refactoring.
This story is still unfolding. Will The Six Witchers manage to unravel the mysteries of The Undocumented Java Tool? Will they be able to reverse engineer the fucking black box, and scale it's magic into a modern application?
Will they decrease revenue forecasting error by at least 2% in a single strike?
Only the future will tell.16 -
Yo, is this devrant or spamspace???
Like, do you even fucking work, mates? Are you a dev? How doesn't a fucking legacy code piss you off on a daily basis? What are all the ways you want to respond to your customer's/PM's abuse? Does your lead dev even know jackshit?
Where did all your quality rants go? Why do you all sound like second graders writing essays for school? Have some passion for your job, and hatred for the incompetence for others!
Now, go produce some quality rants! Funny ones too! Bonus points if it's angry-funny.21 -
Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
What do you code, anyway?
Pvt. Cowboy:
SIR, JAVA, SIR!
Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
JAVA? Holy dogshit! Only steers and queers code in Java!! And you don't much look like a steer to me so that kind of narrows it down. Do you suck dick?
Pvt. Cowboy:
SIR, NO, SIR!
Gunnery Sgt. Hartman:
I BET YOU'RE THE KIND OF GUY WHO'D WRITE LEGACY CODE AND NOT HAVE THE COMMON COURTESY TO WRITE ANY COMMENTS.
8 -
Oh boy, my riskiest coding decision was certainly that one time when I refactored some 50k lines of critical legacy shit code in 3 days, straight up merged everything into master and then deployed to prod.
Luckily there was only one minor bug I had to fix after that... phew...
(To my defense: I was solo-working on it - the infamous CMS Of Doom™)2 -
[CMS of Doom™]
The gift that keeps on giving...
When you think you've seen it all after 7 months in legacy hell, you get another gift:
Let's say you use PHP, but your IQ is in the zero-ish range, then it is obvious to:
- use define() for constants in all your config.*.php files
- then include said config.*.php files multiple times
- and because define() doesn't overwrite the same constant, because it's - you know - a constant, you instead of including just do a file_get_contents() to read the PHP file as string and then parse the values by Regex.
The dev who wrote this was truly one of the devs ever.
12 -
Boss: Our app is to memory consuming and heavy weighted. We to do something because we will have hunsdrets of thousands of users.
Dev: Yes, there are a lot of legacy parts which leave plenty of space for optimization. Every query have to be carefully analyzed. Some can be avoided at all.
Boss: We pay externals to do some clustering with our app.5 -
Today I found out when a user logs in in this piece of crap: 59 calls to the api just to get user permissions 😤
I'm done...8 -
Oh boy some mutex deadlocks inside the 16 year old, unmaintained, company application framework.
Time to look at the stack traces of 24 different threads and try and guess which one fucks it up
(Send help)
5 -
An ancient legend goes that there exists sacred knowledge that enables anyone possessing it not to turn one’s career into a constant uphill battle with the management.
I sought this knowledge, I travelled the world, to no avail. Once upon a time, I climbed the Mount Fuji and met the wizard in his pagoda on the mount. I won in a CSS-golf battle with him, and he revealed the sacred truth: one need to chose companies that do business instead of constant backroom deals and dick-measuring contests.
Like Prometheus, I give this knowledge to you. An ancient scroll says that for this I’ll be chained to the mountain of PHP legacy code, and HRs will peck my brain for eternity, but I found Arachne, the queen of HRs, and exchanged the keto-diet secret for freedom.1 -
> I didn't brought any condoms
> Just pull out Anon, we'll buy some later
You could say I went straight to production and now I'm considered "legacy"3 -
My tech lead keeps assigning me incident tickets in the company's worst legacy app because I solved some bug in it a while ago. I'm the only one who gets assigned these.
If this keeps going, I know for sure that I will be regarded as the designated developer for this application. Then I will be truly fucked.5 -
i understand some developers like to write wrapper functions to handle tedious things, I even understand how to write dynamic SQL queries, but for the love of fucking god and sanity, NEVER FUCKING DO THIS!!!!
Yes its PHP, but its not even bad PHP, its a fucking abomination from hell of PHP.
33 -
These fucking imbecile devs left me a bunch of bugs in a 150k LOC legacy hell...
Too bad it took some 8 months for them to finally surface in prod. God damned...
Technically, this whole codebase is one giant abyss filled to the brim with bugs.6 -
how often did this happen to you?
- fix a bug
- think, now that i'm here, let's smuggle in some refactoring, just this aspect, won't take too long
- spend more than half a day refactoring, finally finding yourself entangled in a spaghetti nightmare
- stash / shelve and revert all your refactoring changes
- continue on your other tasks and talk to noone about it ._.6 -
Coming back here after years to rant about... myself.
TLDR: I fucked up and now have to call a thousand people as a dev, I'm not even getting paid for it and they all get crazy about a random ID that got assigned to them, so now I want to throw away all my electronics and become a skilift operator.
Stupid me deployed a project shortly before we have the largest amount of orders in the year. (Like 90% of yearly orders in a couple minutes cause they are sold out fast and people wait to order first)
I got this horrible legacy "plain self written framework php" project which I tried to upgrade state of the art.
There was one piece missing to upgrade everything and nicely deploy it to some fresh new servers which can handle the high load which peaks at the time orders open.
So I did it the day before orders open and... everything worked well! Nothing crashed.
I wrote my client to wait a little before he confirms the orders, since after confirmation each of the people who ordered will receive an email where they can choose a unique number which they'll receive as a sticker with the order.
Since it's an event my client is promoting, people will meet each other wearing those unique stickers and being able to identify each other online and in person with this number.
Suddenly my clients call me that "customers are complaining about that there is something wrong"
Turned out he confirmed all orders straight away and that part of the application which makes the number unique was broken on the update.
So everyone could chose any number (also taken ones) as his "unique" number.
In my panic, I told my client "It's my mistake, I'll deal with it of course and call the affected people in my free time, since it's my mistake you don't have to pay for it". (it's my largest client by far, am a freelancer)
Realizing when people can chose any number it'll not be a few ones who have the same, it's like almost everyone did chose "69", "1", "420", "88 (a scary amount of people)",... (with 69 being the number being chosen by most people btw, even more then "1")
So now I have to call about a thousand people telling them a new random ID will be assigned to them. I thought of course about mailing them, wrote a script that deals with the issue automatically, and FUCKED IT UP TOO so everyone is confused and the only way to deal with it is by a call basically.
And while I'm sitting here now for 2 days straight calling people in my free time about their random ID will have to change, I realized that some people are quite crazy about random ID's.
I'm talking about yelling and threatening because "is it too much to ask for a working website when ordering this expensive product".
I hate my life right now and am getting quite serious about throwing all my electronic devices away and become a skilift operator instead. Fuck the higher pay, it's not worth the shit, I wanna have only responsibility about one button to press while watching people fall on their face.5 -
What you see:
"we gonna build a new application to replace our legacy one"
How to read:
"we gonna make you put more shit in the legacy app whenever we want and still keep asking about the new app you don't have the time to make"2 -
Fuck this completely abysmal CMS!!!!
Not even god damn Einstein would be smart enough to understand this stinky pile of legacy code!
No, it's not enough to write an HTML template in PHP with less than 500 lines of code, noooooo, every god damn template HAS TO BE AT LEAST 3000 FUCKING LINES OF CODE WITH RANDOM INCLUDES EVERYWHERE!!!
Every fucking thing I fix spawns at least 2 new bugs! I FUCKING CAN'T!!!
I swear, if I meet these fucking worms of developers... someone will eat fresh turds mixed with puke from a highway toilet!17 -
Problem: ugly-ass php spaghetti code that has a technical debt of 16(!!!) years. I mean, it's so spaghetti that has two legacy frameworks that talk to each other inside the same monolith.
Observation: after two months my colleagues, trying to refactoring stuff, they were able to touch so little stuff that it almost made no difference.
How much is worth a rewrite? Because i don't think i can make a difference on a codebase so messy.
I know that rewrite is not the answer 99.9999% of the time, but i have tons of doubts here.14 -
There are so many weird hacks in the quite legacy app I work with I could write a book about all them hacks…
But I must admit, the worst of them all is internal time. Yes, so some blockhead thought it’s a good idea to represent time in a manner completely removed from Datetime objects or timestamps or even string representations. Instead we deal with them as intervals represented by integers - and because this is not fucked up enough by itself, the internal time doesn’t start at midnight, yet the integer representations do. It’s a bloody mess. No wonder most of the bugs we face have to do with dates and time…5 -
I don't know if I'm being pranked or not, but I work with my boss and he has the strangest way of doing things.
- Only use PHP
- Keep error_reporting off (for development), Site cannot function if they are on.
- 20,000 lines of functions in a single file, 50% of which was unused, mostly repeated code that could have been reduced massively.
- Zero Code Comments
- Inconsistent variable names, function names, file names -- I was literally project searching for months to find things.
- There is nothing close to a normalized SQL Database, column ID names can't even stay consistent.
- Every query is done with a mysqli wrapper to use legacy mysql functions.
- Most used function is to escape stirngs
- Type-hinting is too strict for the code.
- Most files packed with Inline CSS, JavaScript and PHP - we don't want to use an external file otherwise we'd have to open two of them.
- Do not use a package manger composer because he doesn't have it installed.. Though I told him it's easy on any platform and I'll explain it.
- He downloads a few composer packages he likes and drag/drop them into random folder.
- Uses $_GET to set values and pass them around like a message contianer.
- One file is 6000 lines which is a giant if statement with somewhere close to 7 levels deep of recursion.
- Never removes his old code that bloats things.
- Has functions from a decade ago he would like to save to use some day. Just regular, plain old, PHP functions.
- Always wants to build things from scratch, and re-using a lot of his code that is honestly a weird way of doing almost everything.
- Using CodeIntel, Mess Detectors, Error Detectors is not good or useful.
- Would not deploy to production through any tool I setup, though I was told to. Instead he wrote bash scripts that still make me nervous.
- Often tells me to make something modern/great (reinventing a wheel) and then ends up saying, "I think I'd do it this way... Referes to his code 5 years ago".
- Using isset() breaks things.
- Tens of thousands of undefined variables exist because arrays are creates like $this[][][] = 5;
- Understanding the naming of functions required me to write several documents.
- I had to use #region tags to find places in the code quicker since a router was about 2000 lines of if else statements.
- I used Todo Bookmark extensions in VSCode to mark and flag everything that's a bug.
- Gets upset if I add anything to .gitignore; I tried to tell him it ignores files we don't want, he is though it deleted them for a while.
- He would rather explain every line of code in a mammoth project that follows no human known patterns, includes files that overwrite global scope variables and wants has me do the documentation.
- Open to ideas but when I bring them up such as - This is what most standards suggest, here's a literal example of exactly what you want but easier - He will passively decide against it and end up working on tedious things not very necessary for project release dates.
- On another project I try to write code but he wants to go over every single nook and cranny and stay on the phone the entire day as I watch his screen and Im trying to code.
I would like us all to do well but I do not consider him a programmer but a script-whippersnapper. I find myself trying to to debate the most basic of things (you shouldnt 777 every file), and I need all kinds of evidence before he will do something about it. We need "security" and all kinds of buzz words but I'm scared to death of this code. After several months its a nice place to work but I am convinced I'm being pranked or my boss has very little idea what he's doing. I've worked in a lot of disasters but nothing like this.
We are building an API, I could use something open source to help with anything from validations, routing, ACL but he ends up reinventing the wheel. I have never worked so slow, hindered and baffled at how I am supposed to build anything - nothing is stable, tested, and rarely logical. I suggested many things but he would rather have small talk and reason his way into using things he made.
I could fhave this project 50% done i a Node API i two weeks, pretty fast in a PHP or Python one, but we for reasons I have no idea would rather go slow and literally "build a framework". Two knuckleheads are going to build a PHP REST framework and compete with tested, tried and true open source tools by tens of millions?
I just wanted to rant because this drives me crazy. I have so much stress my neck and shoulder seems like a nerve is pinched. I don't understand what any of this means. I've never met someone who was wrong about so many things but believed they were right. I just don't know what to say so often on call I just say, 'uhh..'. It's like nothing anyone or any authority says matters, I don't know why he asks anything he's going to do things one way, a hard way, only that he can decipher. He's an owner, he's not worried about job security.13 -
So, first time ranting, sorry if I mess anything up.
When I first started my current job and got introduced to the system we were coding in, something seemed a little fishy to me. Didn't like the system anyway, but at least the language is a compiler language, so it runs quite quickly, right?
In theory, yeah. If the lead dev liked the IDE that came with it. But he has to REALLY fucking hate it, because rather than using it, he codes in plaintext. No syntax highlighting, no auto-indent, nothing. And he's built the entire damn system around doing that. Sadly the compiler is only integrated into the IDE, so what do we do there? Copy the code from the plaintext file to the IDE to compile it there? No no, why would you. The language has a function you can use to compile some code at runtime.
And so he does. Every. Single. Fucking. Script. There's a single main script that runs and finds the correct textfile to then runtime-compile and execute. So we effectively made a compiler language into a massively unoptimized interpreter lang.
I even mentioned that this might be a problem, but I was completely dismissed, so at that point it's not my problem anymore and I have then switched to a different system anyway.
Couple weeks later I heard the same guy complaining that the scripts were running almost the whole night so we'd probably need some better hardware or something.
Well if only there was a really obvious solution that would improve the performance by probably about a factor of 20 or so...13 -
Sometimes my boss wants me to fire a bullet without a gun, they want me to throw the bullet so hard that it feels like it was shot via a gun.
Maintaining a legacy app sucks so bad when you don't even have the full codebase and some douche bag decided to just randomly throw the codebase on the fucking SVN. 😠1 -
So it turns out that one of our systems is so fucking old that its Log4j is off the hook. What they say of blessings being disguised as curses is real.2
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The most C++ I know is from 5 weeks of 'learning' it in college. Now I've been handed a legacy C++ project from sometime before 2004 and am expected to figure out how it works, update it to either a newer C++ version, and compile it to NOT a 16 bit dll (like the current version is) to replace the one on our servers.
Ummmm... wish me luck2 -
I think I’m going to lose my mind. This stupid website I’m working on keeps going down and at the worst times possible. Nothing we do seems to help. I’m again awakened in the middle of the night to attend to it and still have no good answers why. My anxiety is through the roof because I can’t get back to sleep after tonight’s outage. The client is beyond pissed even though a ton of problems would be solved if they would just get off of some legacy software and onto something more modern. But they insisted it be this way and the budget is already blown and then some even if they changed their minds. If it’s going to be that I continue losing so much sleep and sanity, I may just have to quit this job. I hate the thought of that because I always want to see things through to a happy conclusion. And I like my teammates and don’t want to let them down. But I’m too old for that kind of no-sleep development lifestyle now. Nobody’s shitty website is worth my physical and mental health.3
-
"Biggest challenge you overcame as a dev?"
Overcame? I wish! I'm in the midde of fixing the worst legacy code clusterfuck I have ever seen...
Yes, it's even wayyyy worse than WorstPress...
There are days where my coworkers hear profuse laughter coming out of my lone bureau, some of them might already be thinking that I've gone mad. Maybe I have... bwahahahaha3 -
We recently had an error in legacy systems about a user trying to find photographers in Virginia but somehow it shows photographers in Mexico. Apparently it's because both Mexico and Virginia have the same zip code XD guess whatever it uses to search stuff didn't think the company would be used past the US.10
-
The worst part of being a senior software engineer for a team is that the legacy code of the company is not clear, and there's no documentation.9
-
There are devs who are chill. Then there's me. Deadlines give me anxiety. Being responsible for the code I didn't write and being blamed for the bugs I inherited stress me out.3
-
[CMS Of Doom™]
Ah, yes, their built-in bullshit newsletter module just sent the n-th user n emails. Wonderful considering n=368.
The culprit? Better don't ask...
OK, anyway: So the mailer is running as a CRONjob, but nah, not as a console script call but by a public HTTP GET URL call, fucking obviously (it's the CMS Of Doom for a reason).
So these fucking imbeciles "implemented" an ob_start() callback where HTML links are - for whatever fucking reason - modified by some regex (obviously everybody knows parsing HTML by Regex is trivial). In this case the link was somehow modified to recall the mailer Cronjob...
This must have upset the pngoing mailing process thus spamming mails. Whyyyy
And I've thought I've seen it all after 6 months in this legacy hell...
This is why you don't run a company consisting of only beginners in PHP (in cluding their "CEO")! -
After a rough exit from one company, I was diverted into Ops just to continue to have food on the table and keeping the lights on. This, over time, unfortunately made me more or less unemployable as a dev again. Got stuck in that place 13 years doing almost no professional coding.
During the last 5 years I took courses, got side jobs writing articles and tutorials, went to interviews and generally worked hard to get the fuck out of ops and into development again.
After getting to choose between level 1 customer support and quitting in a re-org, I quit without having a new gig. I got a lucky break through someone I'd worked with earlier to start a junior position working on some legacy systems with legacy tech.
After all that work late nights churning away using up my passion for coding, I now can't make my self pick up even Advent of code or Hacktoberfest... My passion is dead... I hope I get it back, but for now I fill my spare time with my guitar...3 -
We have a bunch of legacy applications that runs on Windows only. I'm pretty much the only dev here who doesn't use a Windows machine.
In order to run those applications, I need use remote desktop to a Windows VM.
I use a Mac. And I use a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Case in point, CMD + L to go to the address bar in the browser.
This happens every time when I need to access those applications.
me: *remote desktop to the VM
me: "oh I need to get to the index/landing page"
me: *CMD + L
VM: "I'm locked now"8 -
There is a commercially sold ERP solution that has it's DB schema in excel and Other documentations in MS Word. And its not even properly structured, no schema diagrams, last updated for a 4 year old major release 😒😫.
I have to develop a custom module for it and that requires building an ActivexDLL Project in VB fucking 6 😭😭 .
VB6
Unstructured Documentation
Legacy code
Incomplete documentation
FML
Tell me if you want ss in comments.5 -
A legacy custom made WordPress Theme.
Old developer made main styling sheet with 8000+ lines of code with no component separation. -
It's always fucking file encodings breaking these stupid fucking legacy projects. FUCK
Fuck this I'm going to bed. I'll fix it in the morning it's a little past midnight14 -
You know the PHP legacy code base is complete garbage when it requires a script memory limit of 1.5GB.9
-
C, C++, and Java are legacy programming languages.
So, for the ones who fear that the language will go away in mere 10-15 years. Chill. These languages will stay forever.18 -
Where and How do you make developer friends.
My coworkers are smart and decent developers but they learned on the job for the job.
But they're not interested in discussing improvements to legacy projects that barely still work until they break and we need to rush to recreate them 'better'.
or sit on a call on the weekend working on spontaneous personal projects that usually die cause another idea came along.
Sometimes I really just want someone I can hop on a discord call with so they can criticize my projects and brainstorm ideas and improvements with me4 -
Feels like every damn day I'm learning about another language feature that we CAN'T use... So much legacy code everywhere.
C# is more like C-blunt at this point.2 -
Best:
- I built a good automation mechanism with a decent UI [slackbot]
- used as few frameworks and ext libs as I could. Mostly based on bare java
- client wanted to migrate it to Spring
- got 3 peeps assigned for the migration
- 2 months later their effort failed.
- win: my project has not been molested with Spring
Worst:
- i had an idea to develop smth on top of jmeter, using jmeter as a lib
- I downloaded and imported jmeter's src code
- static contexts, singletons, jmx/rmi everywhere [java is deprecating rmi support]
- not gonna happen... Not gonna build a new project on top of a legacy codebase.5 -
I hate servers that only support EFI boot with a passion. Yes, legacy / BIOS boot is old, but it was so simple. I've been spending hours trying to get EFI boot working on servers with swraid-ed disks and *nothing* works without ugly hackish patches all over!
Anyone successfully got an EFI partition (/boot/efi) on an MDRaid device? D':4 -
Imagine you're in a company, one year in now. You've tried your best to amass as much knowledge of legacy services as you can (specially given no documentation) and you think you've done the best you can.
Now imagine your manager is upset that you haven't gotten as much domain knowledge as an engineer who's been in the team for five years now. Then also imagine that your manager whenever asked about specific product or tech or any knowledge on a service just keep tagging the 5 year engineer. If he ever gives an update in slack on any incident, he doesn't read what everyone has written in the channel so far, but invites the team on a call, and asks them to verbally tell him what to write as an update so as to show he actually understands it all and is showing leadership. What do you do?
Also I've read a good manager let's his team self function without any micromanaging but I feel this is literally hypocritical (lack of knowledge comparison) and useless of him to essentially making no decisions or understanding anything without pointing fingers. What would you all do about this kind of manager, or am I just inexperienced and maybe not seeing what he's actually doing and contributing. -
Idk why but this morning I was thinking about this high school elective class where we learned Adobe flash. But specifically 2 instances where I ignored the teacher and did my own thing
1. We were using Sprite sheets and he had us use photoshop to cut out the Sprite to a different layer and manually save each Sprite one by one to disk to use in flash. Some sheets had 50 fucking sprites
So I found a script for Adobe (action script I think they called their Javascript derivative) that exported every layer for me without all the manual clicking. There is probably an even better way. But this worked for how lazy I was back then
2. Our final projects we could do anything but he suggested not doing anything too complicated cause of time constraints and he barely taught is the scrptinh language for Adobe flash so making flash games was almost out of the question.
Me being stupid really wanted to make a working pong game. So I spent too long watching a German (i dont know German) tutorial video I found, and troubleshooting outdated code from that video. And improving things where I could with my limited knowledge made worse cause I wasn't interested in programming and didn't start learning python until the following year
Yeah don't know why I was thinking about those. But I feel it's a good perspective on how far I've come. From hacking together a pong clone with no skills, to being hired to automate and optimize processes and legacy projects -
Two years ago we took over this project which has been a nightmare to maintain. It's a set of netcore 2.1 webapps running on an on-prem windows machine. Everyone who has worked on it so far has quit, leading to two episodes of it being passed on with near zero handover.
Its function is fairly simple, so naturally we have been nagging to redo it and cloudlift it.
I was finally given one week to see how far I'd get, and had a poc running in Azure after one day; 4 apps in clean net6, SSO, and managed identities. The only thing lacking was setting up the authentication for third parties.
And... they still don't want "something new" when the old one works. Back to IIS and debugging windows event logs.1 -
I’ve become so indecisive in terms of knowing what I want from my career.
All I know is what I don’t want (to end up a in management)
I’m definitely getting a new job and right now it looks like I’ve got 3 offers on the table
Option 1, a previous company I worked for. Still the same problems with the company there as before but the work was interesting and unusual. and my line manager was a good guy.
They have practically no legacy code.
Not much in the way of company benefits but they’re local and it would be nice to see friends again.
So feels like the pull to this is strong.
Option 2, a fully remote company that I’ve been referred to by an ex-workmate.
They’ve not even tech tested me because they’ve read my blogs and GitHub repos instead and said they’re impress. So just had a conversation with them. I feel honoured that they took the time to look at what I’ve done in my own time and use that in their decision.
Benefits are slightly better than option 1 (more hols)
But they’re using .net 6 and get a lot of heavy use on their system and have some big customers. I think the work is integrations to start with and moving services into docker and azure.
Option 3, even though I’ve got an offer from this one but they can’t actually explain the work until We can arrange a call next week (they recruit and then work out what team your in, but Christmas got in the way of me having a call with them straight away)
It’s working on government systems and .net is their least used stack so probably end up switching to Java. Maybe other tech stacks too.
This place has much better benefits than option 1 and 2 (more hols and more pension), but 2 days a week in office.
All of the above pay the same salary.
Having choice feels almost as bad as having no choice.
It’s doing my head in thinking about it , (even tho I might as well not think about it at all until the call with option 3 happens).
On the one hand with option 3, using a tech stack that’s new to me might be refreshing, as I’ve done .net for 10 years.
On the other hand I really like c# and I’m very good at it. So it feels a bit like I should be capitalising on that and using my experience to shape how the dev is done. Not sure I and I can do that with option 3, at least for a while.
C# feels like it’s moving forward nicely and I’m not sure I can say the same for Java or other languages.
I love programming and learning new stuff but so unable to let things go. It’s like I have a fear that c# will move on without me and I’ll end up turning into one of those devs whose skills are a decade out of date.
Maybe the early years of my career formed me in this way.
Early on I worked at a company where there was a high number of Cobol devs who thought they had a job for life.
But then redundancies came and many left. Of those who stayed they had to cross train to Java and they just couldn’t do it.
I don’t think the tech was hard for them, I think they were just so used to not learning that they could no longer adapt.
Think most of them ended up retiring after trying to learn Java for a few years.8 -
Alright, I need an advice.
I have legacy Angular client. It’s impossible to refactor it. The only real option is to rewrite everything from scratch, however, while the team does it, it needs to be accessible to our clients.
The approach I am thinking of is making micro-frontends out of original client and rewriting each of them (in React, Vue, don’t know yet.)
Anyone has experience with that? I would appreciate any advice or suggestion.6 -
Every single morning I despair. I can’t stand this job.
Why pay very highly and get very skilled people to have them working 4 to a support ticket. Doing the most mundane support tickets you have ever seen in your life (mainly updating client contact details)?
And why have such a rigorous recruitment process to get people’s in in the first place?
The company is pissing money away by working like this and all the new starters like me think it’s complete shit.
But the bosses and anyone who’s been here a while think it’s great. Company still is making loads of money so they don’t even care about it.
I’ve never met senior developers who have never worked on a greenfield project in their entire careers until I came here.
I can’t believe how I got suckered into this (was head hunted).
Does anyone have a feel for the UK contracting market right now?
I’m considering the jump but I think I’d have to be looking for remote only contracts because where I live has few opportunities ‘on-site’. Preferably c# / angular.
Is there much competition for roles or is there a shortage of skills in the contractors?
The thought of going into another permanent role that could be as bad as this genuinely keeps me awake at night.
I’m not sure I can go somewhere and then have it in the hands of managers to decide what projects I’m going to do and what tech it will be on.
At any big company there’s going to be tech debt as well as new work. So becoming perm now feels like it’s 50-50 whether or not a new job will just mean being put into legacy stuff for a couple of years or doing something that is actually good.
I’ve been talking various people about roles in government departments (multiple different departments are hiring) and because priorities change none the gov recruiters can guarantee what the work is that they’re recruiting for actually is.
Just that the the big recruitment push is to bring work previously done by consultancies back in house. Presumably because consultancies have been fleecing them.5 -
February will be the first full year at this company as full time employee.
I've updated so many legacy projects, optimized a lot of workflows as well as built new tools to improve efficiency and remove unnecessarily duplicate projects (sometimes literally only 3 variables were different between multiple projects)
My one co-worker taught himself enough code to do the job but doesn't think like a programmer though he is asking me for help and advice to improve what he does since ive proven i know a little. my other direct co-worker I'm practically teaching a Programming 100 course to them
My direct manager at one point said he was so happy he took a chance on me even though I didn't interview well
I like my job, I find it so much better than my last job which was horribly toxic, and more fun than my first 'real' job as a night shift help desk for basically a warehouse environment.
But I feel under paid sometimes for how much i do and all ive improved in my first year, I have my first yearly review coming up. I'm hoping to get a decent raise for all ive done and I want to somehow go over everything with the HR person to justify it. But I have no idea how to talk about my dev work to them in a way a non technical person could understand. I'm also not sure how the review process will work. Like will my manager be there. Or is it just me and HR, is there a paper I'll be sent to fill before hand,1 -
About a year ago I had the great idea to enforce ago I had the great idea of proposing that we all lint our legacy code base using eslint to increase the overall quality of our JS.
I distributed the task of initially fixing all the errors eslint would find to the whole Frontend team (Luckily we only use JS there). I've finished my part in a couple of weeks and came across this piece of spaghetti.
One of the guys who has been with the company for over 10 years said, that the guy who wrote this monster was very proud of it...
In case you cannot understand what this does: It calculates the distance between 2 points on earth.
9 -
♫ It's high time we reviewed our design, ♫
♫ The code behind our system is just too byzantine, ♫
♫ We'll rewrite all the legacy and take it off line, ♫
1 -
What have you suggested at work which sounded like a good idea at the time, but now sounds like a nightmare?
I inherited a nasty old legacy c# desktop app a few years ago, I was a sql developer so it was a steep learning curve, but I’ve tried to make it better, fixing things as I go.
I had the bright idea of mentioning that I would look at starting to add unit tests etc.
It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I’m not so sure.3 -
Does wanting to leave a company simply because of legacy code with no documentation and too much work a bit reason? I guess it probably is as anywhere could have the same thing :) Maybe management would be better suited for me, time to take courses8
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I've been asked to release a project which has been written by someone else, then rewritten by another developer, and both have left the company.
I can't release it yet because there is an inconsistent bug throwing some values out.
We've got it running side by side with an older legacy system which it's going to replace. Before the 2nd developer left they added some logging to our live system to record both values so that they could be monitored to make sure there was no inconsistency.
There are some inconsistencies... however, when I run the same data through the new system and the legacy system in a test environment they both come out correct.
FML
I've considered quitting...2 -
Big ass company paying me fat stacks to remake their 3 important legacy projects (hospitals, gov, big companies) into another stack.
Will require me to no-life.
Or chill local medium sized company which creates apps to help museums, education and other wholesome shit.
Feels like i need to choose the big one because "carreer" but i am haunted by all the burn-out horror stories online.
Currently on my way to the latter for my last interview with them.4 -
At work thres a legacy "common" DLL, which held a helper function that's incharge of creating Slugs, it takes an MD5 of the current time stamp UTC, removing non-URLable chars, and taking the first N chars that remain then
Ngl I was impressed at first at it, but then I thought, its Uniqueness isnt guaranteed
But then again I thought, the uniqueness can be tested via a call given it's indexed anyway in DB so O(1), and if non-unique, just re-call the function. Even in the worst case scenario the hits won't be that many anyway
I didnt change the code, tho at first I was inclined to given my "it isnt proven-unique" stance but am wondering, if this is a good approach
While coolish, it seems wrong in the back of my mind somehow...1 -
First annual review went really well, My manager wants to take some of the tedious day to day stuff I really hate doing, off of my tasks (onto the newest person) so that I can focus on the parts of the job I like, figuring out the technical side of the job, and improving legacy code to ACTUALLY work well, and automating the most time consuming parts of the job that really shouldn't be manual in the first place.
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How do you pick a new language to learn?
I am a C# developer and at work I work on desktop apps and legacy web services etc.
I fancy learning something else so I can have a bit of variety when working on personal projects etc.
I am doing a distance learning degree which has used Java and Python so far, with some PHP and JS etc to come later.
I’m drawn to Ruby as I already have experience there, but I was also thinking about looking at Node as that covers back end and front end all using JS which is definitely useful in general as I look at moving to a more web based role.10 -
There's nothing worst than legacy code without documentation. That means I have to spend more time understanding the legacy code than actually coding.4
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* break it into elementary steps, small enough to fit into your "estimation time unit", e.g. days or hours.
* estimate those steps for "developing at a leisurely pace" if nothing goes wrong.
* think about "what could go wrong" (list everything!) and adjust values accordingly.
* adjust total amount with experience values, like:
* times 1.2 for every manager
* times 1 to 4 based on which legacy projects i have to touch
and finally:
* multiply with `1+log(t/u,2)`, with `u` being the amount of useful data in the requirement description and `t` being the total amount of data in the requirement description
* sample: with our current "favourite" customer, about 90% of all tickets is garbage, so t/u = 100/10 = 10 => log(10,2) = 3.3 => multiply everything with 4.3 -
Can a React.JS expert help me to understand something?
In short, I would like to know what are the main differences between react version 15.6 and 17, in terms of browser issues, and component compatibility?
We have a legacy code base that is in version 15.6 and the team wants to upgrade it and I am attempting to argue with my dumb CTO to upgrade to version 17. However, I’m not versed in react, I'm just a PO and the CTO doesn't know anything but for some odd reason is adamant about staying on an older version. The developers gave me their opinion but I'm interested in an outside opinion.5 -
When your course's interactive code breaks the course runtime environment because of synthetic events and they are still using React < v16
Jesus, this one is a real headscratcher, amazing I never ran into this until today:
https://reactjs.org/docs/...
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update : we are at hr round baby!!!
part 1 : https://devrant.com/rants/5528056/...
part 2 (in comments) : https://devrant.com/rants/5550145/...
the tech market is crazy mann! it's one of the top indie fintech companies in our country and has a great valuation.
i totally felt that they i am crashing the interviews , and am seriously not trying to be humble. before the dsa round , i was trying to mug up how insertion sort works 🥲
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now my dilemma is should i switch if i get the offer. in a summary:
current company:
- small valuation but profitable (haven't picked funding for last 3 years , so poast valuation is some double digit million $, but can easily be a unicorn company)
- very major b2b player in my country. almost all unicorns (including this fintech company) and some major MNCs are their client and they have recently acquired a few other companies of us and eu too, making them- a decent global player
- meh work : i love being a cutting edge performer in android but here we make sdks that need to support even legacy banking apps. so tech stack is a lot of verbose java and daily routine includes making very minor changes to actual code and more towards adding tests , maintaining wrapper sdks in react/cordova/unity etc, checking client side code etc.
- awesome work life balance : since work is shit and i am fast enough, i am usually working only 2-4 hours a day. i joined gym, got into shape , and have already vsited 5 places in last 6 months, and i am a guy who didn't used to have time even on sundays. here, we get mote paid leaves than what i would usually need.
- learning opportunities: not exactly from the company codebase, but they provide unlimited access to various course learning platforms like linkedin learning, udemy and others, so i joined some web dev baches and i now know decent frontend too. plus those hybrid sdks also give a light context to new things
new company :
- positives : multi billion valuation, one of the top players in fintech , have been mostly profitable ( except a few quarters)
- positive : b2c so its (hopefully) going to put me back into racing shoes with kotlin, jetpack and latest libraries.
- more $$$ for your boy :)
- negetive : they seem to be on hiring spree and am afraid to junp ship after seeing the recent coinbase layoffs. fintech is scary these days
- negetive : if they are hiring people like me, then then they are probably hiring people worse than me 😂. although thats not my concern what my main concer is how they interviewed. they have hired a 3rd party company that takes interviews of people FOR THEM! i find that extremely impolite, like they don't even wanna spare their devs to hire people they are gonna work with. i find this a toxic, robotic culture and if these are the people in there then i would have a terrible time finding some buddy engineer or some helpful senior.
- negetive : most probably a bad wlb : i worked for an year for a fast paced b2c edtech startup. no matter how old these are , b2c are always shipping new stuff and are therefore hectic. i don't like the boredom here but i would miss the free time to workout :(
so ... any thoughts about it?4 -
My team and me nearly finished a big new feature for our website.
I am a junior dev and this was the first big thing I was in charge of and now that I see how it unfold I feel really bad.
It consists of php backend (integrated into a 20 years old monolith) and vue frontend (punctually jumpstarted by a clusterfuck of typescript files included into php rendered html) and especially the frontend part looks so bad.
Vue is relatively young in our project and almost nobody has a clue about it. I learned so much about vue in the process, but the result is a behemoth of awfulness that grew over several months.
I have a really strong desire rewrite the whole mess, but I will never be officially allowed because it works and practically all the flaws in our code base are subject to the classic
"well, someday, somebody probably has to do something about that, but for now let's start this shiny new feature"
So for now I think about doing it secretly and pass it to my buddy to review it. I guess chances are high that not even the colleagues in my team (apart from my buddy) are going to notice, since they aren't as interested into vue as I am and don't have the overview over this features code as I do, but on the other hand it feels like something I could get in trouble for and apart from the cursed code base my company is great.
Have you ever bin that disgusted by your own production code before it was even one year old?3
Wow, some guys here have the means to travel to the future!! Cool!! I too want some of that action!