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”

…
…

When you have to support over 20 years of legacy code.

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.

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!

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.

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. 😠

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.

I really hate sales people. My stakeholder wants to buy an address verification service but is hesitant to purchase now because the dev time needed would be substantial. Now the sales rep has planted seeds of doubt in my SH and SH thinks I grossly overestimated the labor I quoted.

Sales rep is all “major corporations have installed this in a weekend.” 🤬🤬🤬 Major corporations also have more than one developer and probably aren’t dealing with a website that has a dozen address forms that all work differently. Oh, and I DON’T WORK WEEKENDS MOFO.

My SH originally requested a labor estimate for installing the AVS on all address forms and that’s what I delivered. My audit revealed a dozen different forms. I’m working with a legacy code base that’s been bandaged together and maintained by an outside dev agency. The only thing the forms have in common is reusable address fields. They all work differently when it comes to validating and submitting data to the server and they all submit to different api endpoints. At least a quarter of those forms are broken and would need to be fixed (these are mostly admin-facing). I also had to provide an estimate on frontend implementation when I have no idea what they want the FE to look like.

My estimate was 5-8 weeks for implementation AND testing. I wrote up my findings and clearly explained the labor required, why it was needed, and the time needed. All was fine until the sales rep tried to get into SH’s head.

My SH is now asking for a new estimate and hoping for 1-2 weeks of labor, which is what will SH to buy the AVS. Then go to the outside dev agency you used to work with and ask for a second opinion. I’m sure they’d also tell you at least month if not more for testing, implementation, and deployment because you have a DOZEN FORMS you want to add this to. 1-2 weeks is only possible for a single form.

My manager doesn’t work in the same coding language I do, but he read my documentation and supports my original estimate.

I honestly want to ask my SH if this sales rep is giving a very good price for the AVS. If not, are there other companies in the mix? Because right now you have a sales rep that’s taking you for a ride and trying to pressure you all so he can get another notch in his belt for getting another “major corporation” as his account. I don’t think it’s a good idea to be locked in with a grimy sales rep.

"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... bwahahahaha

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.

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...

A legacy custom made WordPress Theme.

Old developer made main styling sheet with 8000+ lines of code with no component separation.

so am 23 , with a work experience of 1.5 years (1 year at b2c cumpany, 6 months at current b2b company) and am kinda uncomfortable with the comfort in my job.

tldr : my company has a work heaven and a very boring product , the nature of tasks makes me feel like a glorified QA and i am kinda feeling like wasting my 20s. should i quit?

my last company used to keep me on toes. they had this massive multi module fast evolving android app on which i used to work. it was made with latest techs from 2021/+ and combined with a lot of modules/architecture, it was very overwhelming at first.
i used to work 12+ hours everyday , not because of any pressure ( the pressure to execute fast was there, but the team was very helpful and understanding) , but because i liked to learn and explore.
at the end of my journey with them, i left with a lot of good memories with helpful seniors, a great knowledge of android dev and an unsatisfactory amount of bank balance.

my current company is... i guess ok. the work here is awkward. the product is made of either legacy techs(large verbose java project in which even concurrency or image downloading classses are written in project and not any 3rd party library) or techs that i don't find interesting ( unity , react native , flutter, etc projects that are just wrapper over native sdks)

its heen 6 months here and the growth for me here seems weird.

- i mean i can say i got to work on different techs but 1) am not becoming a master or anything useful in those techs . and 2) i already know a frontend framework i.e native android which i like and was growing in it.

- most tickets are client side tasks : client is unable to use some feature/product > i ask for their logs / app and weather they followed the docs/sample > they say we did> i check the logs which indicates that they didn't > i inform them the step and they are back to being happy. but most of the times i am also clueless and get to the conclusions after discussing with my seniors

- the non client tasks that i got were also not very interesting : one ticket was included testing out all sdks and 3rd party integrations and make a csv of what features are available in each . another was about creating a cicd pipeline that was kinda okay. but now its done so am guessing am back to making it useful by adding more unit tests :/

- however the work environment is very good i guess? daily scrum happens on MWF only, i get literally 0 meetings if not urgent on TT . apart from sat/sun and general festivals, the 3rd monday of every month is off . plus i get 2 additional paid leaves every month that gets can be carry forwarded for 11 months. in a nutshell, i feel like being the son of a school principal in school.

- pay is good , i switched here for an almost 100% hike

i have tried to utilise my time in learning different tech stacks (working on android all the time feels like unworthy) but i am not getting a kick. the satisfaction that i got in writing code that is immediately being used by 5 million people gave me the kicker to learn more and more.. but now am just feeling like being on a extended vacation where i have to sometimes wash utensils.

should i start interviewing with other companies? it's not like my current company is some well established corporate to always keep less worthy resources like me around. i am definitely worth getting the axe on the next possible layoffs

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.

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.

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.

♫ 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, ♫

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.

So... as a Library creator, you have to write all the network implementation, DB, image/audio/video stuff(decoding, encoding, file handling, streaming,etc) all by yourself?

If you are working in a company that makes libraries and doing this stuff on daily basis, won't you become rotten with just the legacy, OS-level knowledge, and nothing else?

are there any advantage to such opportunity in comparison to the one where you are working on a cutting edge code with the latest versions of most popular libraries ?