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Search - "shitty legacy code"
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I can maintain your shitty legacy node 6 code
And the shitty m3 ec2 instance with Ubuntu 16 that it runs on
And another one with postgres 9
But if I have to make a powerpoint presentation, I am jumping ship.
A man has his limits11 -
It's enough. I have to quit my job.
December last year I've started working for a company doing finance. Since it was a serious-sounding field, I tought I'd be better off than with my previous employer. Which was kinda the family-agency where you can do pretty much anything you want without any real concequences, nor structures. I liked it, but the professionalism was missing.
Turns out, they do operate more professionally, but the intern mood and commitment is awful. They all pretty much bash on eachother. And the root cause of this and why it will stay like this is simply the Project Lead.
The plan was that I was positioned as glue between Design/UX and Backend to then make the best Frontend for the situation. Since that is somewhat new and has the most potential to get better. Beside, this is what the customer sees everyday.
After just two months, an retrospective and a hell lot of communication with co-workers, I've decided that there is no other way other than to leave.
I had a weekly productivity of 60h+ (work and private, sometimes up to 80h). I had no problems with that, I was happy to work, but since working in this company, my weekly productivity dropped to 25~30h. Not only can I not work for a whole proper work-week, this time still includes private projects. So in hindsight, I efficiently work less than 20h for my actual job.
The Product lead just wants feature on top of feature, our customers don't want to pay concepts, but also won't give us exact specifications on what they want.
Refactoring is forbidden since we get to many issues/bugs on a daily basis so we won't get time.
An re-design is forbidden because that would mean that all Screens have to be re-designed.
The product should be responsive, but none of the components feel finished on Desktop - don't talk about mobile, it doesn't exist.
The Designer next to me has to make 200+ Screens for Desktop and Mobile JUST so we can change the primary colors for an potential new customer, nothing more. Remember that we don't have responsiveness? Guess what, that should be purposely included on the Designs (and it looks awful).
I may hate PHP, but I can still work with it. But not here, this is worse then any ecommerce. I have to fix legacy backend code that has no test coverage. But I haven't touched php for 4 years, letalone wrote sql (I hate it). There should be no reason whatsoever to let me do this kind of work, as FRONTEND ARCHITECT.
After an (short) analysis of the Frontend, I conclude that it is required to be rewritten to 90%. There have been no performance checks for the Client/UI, therefor not only the components behave badly, but the whole system is slow as FUCK! Back in my days I wrote jQuery, but even that shit was faster than the architecuture of this React Multi-instance app. Nothing is shared, most of the AppState correlate to other instances.
The Backend. Oh boy. Not only do we use an shitty outated open-source project with tons of XSS possibillities as base, no we clone that shit and COPY OUR SOURCES ON TOP. But since these people also don't want to write SQL, they tought using Symfony as base on top of the base would be an good idea.
Generally speaking (and done right), this is true. but not then there will be no time and not properly checked. As I said I'm working on Legacy code. And the more I look into it, the more Bugs I find. Nothing too bad, but it's still a bad sign why the webservices are buggy in general. And therefor, the buggyness has to travel into the frontend.
And now the last goodies:
- Composer itself is commited to the repo (the fucking .phar!)
- Deployments never work and every release is done manually
- We commit an "_TRASH" folder
- There is an secret ongoing refactoring in the root of the Project called "_REFACTORING" (right, no branches)
- I cannot test locally, nor have just the Frontend locally connected to the Staging webservices
- I am required to upload my sources I write to an in-house server that get's shared with the other coworkers
- This is the only Linux server here and all of the permissions are fucked up
- We don't have versions, nor builds, we use the current Date as build number, but nothing simple to read, nonono. It's has to be an german Date, with only numbers and has always to end with "00"
- They take security "super serious" but disable the abillity to unlock your device with your fingerprint sensor ON PURPOSE
My brain hurts, maybe I'll post more on this shit fucking cuntfuck company. Sorry to be rude, but this triggers me sooo much!2 -
I'll keep it short:
My nastiest freelancing horror stories contain shitty clients who dont pay, the nastiest fucking legacy code you can imagine, and expectations as high as trump thinks of himself.
The lesson is simple: Choose your freelancing clients wisely and always expect partial payment in advance. Even from family or firends!8 -
I was told there's gonna be:
- good salaries
- informal company setups with benefits
- lots of jobs available
- non-dev people look at you in amazement
- get to work on really interesting stuff
What I'm actually doing:
- carrying a team of people in uni because you're the only one who knows how to code
- deal with shitty uncommented legacy code at work
- be reminded that if you don't do something super-sophisticated you're easily replaceable
- spend unpaid overtime hours because you're the only one at your job that is on the issue (I see a pattern of being alone in a problem here)
- requestion all my career decisions
- cry and be stressed
- hate every minute of work, yet be stuck in it because it's a source of income that is flexible enough for me to be able to study full-time
So dunno man, I'm still waiting on what I've been told, people say there's lotsa money and satisfaction waiting for me after grinding through 5 years of high education, it'd better be worth it5 -
Just read an article that really grinds my gears. Its about coding in other languages. Not programming languages, but literally other languages.
Btw I learned to code in Spanish and I'm not against coding in programming languages using variable names in other languages.
That's fine.
What pissed me off was that the author claimed that we should be able to code Fucking JavaScript in SWAHILI or other languages available. What kind of PC bullshit is that!
Coding is barely fucking readable and now we have to make standards for Multilanguage support. Just learn the less than 60 reserved words you lazy fuck and code with them! I leaned to code with shitty tutorials in Spanish and theres no 1000x resources out there and this author claims you can't code unless you know english.
Granted. It's easier but wtf not just learn it. When I coded in Java in Spanish, I didn't know wtf a Class was or ags meant. So what. I memorized that shit. How? By coding!
Why bring this PC shit to programming? The author thinks there are few programmers bc we don't support fucking SWAHILI in JavaScript. Fuck no!
Now if you want to support this initiative. Think of this,
...legacy code
...in 32+ languages.
Have fun debugging this thing.14 -
Folks...
I think I need to get away from web development...
Honestly, no grudge held against web/mobile development itsef... But the projects, the teams, the workflows... It's always shitty af.
I'm fed up with the bad architecture, poor management decisions, unmaintained legacy code, broken windows, arrogant juniors, arrogant seniors, code smells left to rot, the freaking red door... Hell! The fucking "we don't have time for that" answer to testing... Damn!
Been there done that.
Feels like it's always the same crap and unfortunately, it's rare to start a professional project from scratch.
Fucking angular, broken piece of shit.
Fucking react (& RN) community modules, broken pieces of shit.
Fucking lazy-ass node developers.
Fucking ES and fucking garbage proposals submitted to the TC39.
I wish I could do Haskell / Rust / Clojure professionally... I could even enjoy Go with a good team... Anything but that huge pile of dogshit JS and its community of brainfucked so-called developers.10 -
Worst dev experience was when I was asked to "take a look at" a propriatery Windows app built by a now non-existent team at the company.
The code base resembled the quality of legacy code where about every hour I felt like I needed to vomit. But that wasn't even the worst part for me.
This was the first time I had to develop on Windows and was sent a separate dedicated laptop for this. Now I started to have a bad feeling about this because as far as I had known every single dev at the company used company Macs for development (including me for other projects). It turned out the Windows laptop was indeed configured for a non-dev team :)
Having liased with IT admins for a day I finally got my environment set up and hit install on the dependencies and in 10 minutes it got to less than 10%. The laptop was pretty powerful so I couldn't belive wtf was going on, fans were ramping. Checked task manager and the company Anti-Malware was hogging the whole CPU.
I was so mad that I managed to get the IT admins to completely disable it and then it was only the pain of working with shitty code on Windows which would have been more than enough from the start. Thankfully it only lasted a week. -
Dat moment when, after some hard work, you can finally delete that abomination your predecessor left you as a present...
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Overwhelmed by a shitty codebase? Use the boy scout rule and leave the code you're editing a little better than you found it.
Worked wonders for me when I realized I could spend literal months refactoring and desperately needed a systematic approach.
Little by little that rotting house of cards will turn into something okay. It's a nice feeling looking back after a couple of months and see what you've done to make things better.
Also, make sure to remember the cost of wrestling with hurried legacy solutions in your estimates as well. Just adjust the level of bluntness depending on your work environment: admitting that things can/need to be improved can be unpleasant for some to hear even though it's true.5 -
Every single stakeholder in my company tells me that I should be working on something different, every time I talk to them. For example - we've got some issues, that I've ranted on previously. I go to my manager, and tell him that it's going to take longer than I'd hoped, because the author of this part of the codebase wasn't familiar with functional programming or OOP, didn't document anything, and just generally produced an unmaintainable, borderline indescribable mess. The next guy after him made it all so much worse, because they're both a couple of tryhard douchebags, and I hope they fucking die. For real. I hope fire ants are involved.
Anyway, getting carried away there, whew. So I tell my manager that we'd be further ahead just replacing the code, because it's only doing a couple of things, and should not be so complex. He says "cool, but what you really need to be doing is rebuilding this other thing." So I switch gears and work on that other thing until I hit a point that requires the input of another stakeholder. I go to talk to this guy, and all hell breaks loose "why are you working on that, this is higher priority", and I explain the sequence of events. Manager denies having said what he said, I look like an asshole, yet again. Then the old "this should be simple, just change this" from the dudes who don't know code, and don't want to know. I try to explain, offer to show them precisely why their "simple ask" is anything but, but they just start screaming about how they hate technology. Yeah, well me fucking too. I keep hearing about how much "job security" I have, but man I'm going to lose my mind at this rate. I have seventeen motherfucking things that are "emergencies", and as many fucking dumb ass unintuitive workflows to go through to get them changed. All on production, because this place is fucking stupid. Just let me discard this shitty legacy code and be done with it already. FUCK.
Thank fucking fuck it's friday. In about six, seven hours, my goal is to be so fucking wasted that I can't feel my face. Get drunk, play with the dog, install a new distro on the desktop, maybe play a little guitar (the guitar is normal sized. It's not a ukulele or anything). Perfect friday night.9 -
Just got an internship in a big company. Related to web development but they want me to use/maintain legacy jsp, servlet code. Should I take it? There are other departments too but I have been put in this shitty one.4
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I am really stressed rn. I have terrible Imposter's Syndrome coupled with this being my 2nd year as a professional (bootcamp grad) and an extreme lack of insight and support from my company. WFH has only exacerbated it. Im on a 2-ish person team handling some ancient legacy code with no one ever willing to just throw me a fucking bone. My supe is actually on my team and makes up the "ish" part and has always told me to ask questions but when I do he gets pissed and reminds me of all the people who are working and super busy and dont have time to stop what they're doing and help me. Its my first job in tech and I just need to know if this is a consistent thing across the board bc im ready to fucking jump ship. My anxiety levels are through the roof and when I go over our backlog I look at every card and ask myself how tf Im going to grt it done bc Ive never seen any of it before. Initially I thought i landed a great workplace with complete autonomy but now I just dont know. My other teammate has a habit of being condescending, whether he realizes it or not and therefore I just feel like im out here alone trying to figure all this shit out. This sprung from a card ive been working on for 2+ months but cant resolve, finally I just came to the conclusion it was above what im currently capable of and he told me he's "disappointed Im just throwing in the towel" even though ive asked for help from senior devs. Idk what to do, he even told me there'd be cards I may hit a wall on when I first started but this just feels shitty. Ive had other things going on to including surviving a fucking hurricane, having a friend murdered, and having my dad die all within a few weeks time. I am absolutely stretched to my emotional limit, but I dont know if Im overreacting. Anyway, I just needed to vent to people who could understand, thanks for reading.6
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The worst co worker I had is actually pretty recent. He joined a well integrated team on what was basically a legacy project. He sounded like a good developer and seemed to know his stuff but it took him ages to push out fixes/features. They were always massively over-engineered, poorly named, partially tested and what documentation he did write still managed to bitch about how poor the project was structured.
He spent most of his time bitching about the general shitty nature of the project (he wasn't wrong) and the lack of interest from other Devs.
He was so unpleasant in interpersonal communication that by the end no one would work with him.
In his last team meeting he basically said he was glad to be going and that we were all lazy, disinterested and shouldn't consider ourselves his peers. The equivalent of storming out of a party after setting the couch on fire and shitting in the sink.
We've since removed all his overcomplicated, not standard, unmaintainable code. -
So, if you were supposed to work on a website that is already pretty shitty coded, shitty styled and outdated... Would you go on coding like shit for the sake of consistency or would you embed a new mini-system in it trying to pay some fucking respect to everything you have learned?
Edit: in this scenario, you can actually make a choice haha7 -
How do you get over the bad times? I keep having to work with shitty legacy systems that were written in perl and flash in the 90s, but my boss keeps telling me "No" on redoing some of the bigger stuff even though it is really needed. I mean, that is your goal here, right? Rebuilding this POS? FFS you still stored passwords in plain text twoo weeks ago! But no, you's rather dig around in Perl than upset some random user because his fucking interface looks different.
But then I also have to work with another system that I could redo in Cake/Laravel in two weeks (it's literally getting and writing data to one table, so two views and user auth), and the previous dev just... made a huge mess. I mean, why would you need to post data asynchronously when it's this one stupid form ? Just do a regular form submit? And the system is really not suitable for extending, because everything is in the database, EVERYTHING! Like, html form inputs? So to add a simple input to the template I have to create a new input type in the types table and then add that to the form structure table? Only to have the input checked by fucking regex? REGEX! Why? Seriously, this is not some high end CMS that needs this level of code reusability No. This is a simple fucking form.
And I can't get it to work. No documentation of course. No comments, either. All of this makes me feel like I'm just the shittiest dev ever. I feel dumb, and useless. Haven't turned on my private PC in weeks because I see no reason to work on any of my own stuff.
I used to have a job, working with Magento and Wordpress. And yeah, it was horrible, it was chaos, but it was fun and I was great at it. I bent that motherfucking system to fit my needs. People respected my opinion, they were convinced I could program this and that, and I proved them right. Did I make mistakes? Hell yeah. Did I give up? Fuck no!
But now, I just feel like I can't even write a simple fucking form any more. I'm just so close to giving up on development as a whole, even though I love it so much.5 -
So today i had to visit this banks site to do updation on a document but for some reason the modal dialogue that was supposed to open was not working and i couldn't continue to next step.
On an attempt to contact customer support, i browsed the site for relevant details. As i do that, i observed this site is so shitty that it can't even properly render on Google Chrome! It was an horrific experience finding info in that site.
Finally found the customer support form and as I clicked the "submit" it didn't give any feedback whether it was processing or not. After like over a minute of uncertainty, it got redirected to a 404 page.
Frustrated, I went on to their twitter and I almost tweeted calling out their terrible web developer team.
But, my instinct told me to calm my titties and i tweeted a regular confused user tweet.
Got their attention and few hrs later i got a phone call from someone working there. He didn't sound like a customer service representative from the way he spoke. He told it was an issue with their website and had fixed it. I tried again as he was on the line but it was not working for me. And then i shared screenshot of the issue. He tested it again and said it was working for them. Still not working for me. ( Probably cache issue on my end ). Thought he would suggest to clear cache and try. But he asked me to try on another computer since it was working for him.
As i searched for a another system, i got a call from customer support guy and he said he will do the update on their end and told me to tell details. Since the info was not that sensitive in nature, I went with it.
Pretty sure the other guy i talked to was a developer.
This made me think - had i tweeted out a mean tweet calling out their shitty website it would have been probably awkward talking to him - I'd have to be mean again. It could've ruined his day, maybe he was under pressure from his pm that he had to make the phone call. He probably hates his job already managing that shitty legacy code..
I don't know - either way, I'm glad i was able to keep myself calm and not be a source of negative energy. -
Took over a project where a dev created a table with no primary key and enforce a unique constraint in code. Wtf? He also always selected top 1 so if you added a record directly in the table it completely fucked the expected data.
So, when I took this piece of shit over I didn't realize what the table was and when I tried to convert it to EF it barfed since there was no PK. Was a complete PITA and had to create all new tables.
Some people shouldn't develop software!!!!!!!!! -
Does anyone watch the movie The Mack (1973)?
Today I am working with some legacy code written by a shitty developer who isn't with us anymore. Every time I make a change the code screams at me with problems.
Every error makes me feel like saying this quote from Goldie the pimp...
"List to me and listen good. I don't give a shit what happened to you!.......get back out there and get me my money!" -
Blindsided by a project meeting 5 mins to end of day when I was super busy and I've spent all day dealing with shitty hacked together legacy code, requirements changing everyday and still no business solutions to some areas of the project. We already have one booked in for tomorrow at 10. What the fuck. Needless to say I pretty much shouted about everything to everyone. Fucking joke. Now I'm just mad at me for letting my blood boil externally
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FOR FUCKING FUCK SAKE
I have a shit ton work to do. Just finished (hopefully) all of my exams, came back to work and got tasked with simultaneously developing a new app (Android), adjusting some of my own code to work with client's specific requirements in completely different project (C#) and also I have to fix a legacy app (Android) because UE comitee will be visiting us on wendesday.
I've never seen this code earlier. I've never seen this WHOLE SHITTY PROJECT. Guy that was developing this left few years back.
It's a complete spaghetti. 550 FUCKING LINES OF CODE for a one class, most of the methods are deprecated and won't even try to work on Android > 4.0. No documentation. Nothing works. Whole code is ridden with bugs, warnings and looks like it's glued together with duct tape. I even had to migrate from fucking Maven to Gradle it's that old. -
Joining a job to build rich single page applications deployed in the cloud, then watching it slowly turn into porting shitty legacy code to slightly less shitty .NET Core code and hooking it to an existing WebForms application...
Time to start the hunt again! -
Made a rant about working with shitty legacy code and still doing that. So making something new would be nice.
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I have been working on a really interesting project for the last 6 months, now they put it on hold because another department wants something else done.
Now I have to go back and work with shitty tech and horrible legacy code.
They said is only for a month or so, but I can feel that it will be more, way more.
I feel like it is bothering me more than it should, probably because the other project was mine since day one and was way more enjoyable to work with.
Part of me wants to quit because of this, part of me tells me that I need to wait and I will get the other project back.
What would you do? How can I shut up my internal quitter voice? -
Why in all fucks would you NOT preconfigure your language client BUT provide a shitload of highly biased default shortcuts just IN CASE some sorry soul took time to preconfigure one.
I'ma be totally honest here, Neovim has lost its way. Every single day I pick it up there's a fuckton of shitty new default bindings...
But that's not the worst of it
You see, they've cramming all sorts of shitty code in there. Like this one default commenting plugin... It does in 600 lines what my setup does in 50. Why? Because, while mine uses the lpeg lib maintainers decided to cram into the editor, the other does a fuckton of hacks so fucked that refactoring is impossible, impossível! Despicable.
Now, their C codebase... Ok, ok arena beats vanilla malloc, alright, kudos to that, BUT refactoring out that old fart of quasillions of legacy C? MADNESS! They should be focused on adding built-in auto completion??? Well-defined syntax highlighting conventions? A FUCKING FUZZY PICKER for fucksakes!! But, oh no, we've got better things to do like FUCKING THE USER IN THEIR ASSSSSSS
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DIS-FUCKINGTRESSED here
FUUUUUUUUUCKKKKKKKKKKK6 -
Who knew FE development could be so much fun (working on FE tasks after months of shitty legacy BE code).