7 ms·

This is great stuff. Problem is there is the work the company needs you to do, and the work you want to do. Both of these change overtime, for example in softw

• dozzie 11y ago
  > So the work you want to do and the one the company wants you to do will probably only overlap for a short period of time. Similarly, there's only short period of overlapping of the work you want to do and the work doing which you would grow. I see too often programmers jumping around abandoning their half-written application or library once it is somewhat working, never learning what semantic versioning is about, what it takes to write good documentation, or how architecture works. I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take pride of maintaining somebody else's work?
  • philipov 11y ago
    I can easily imagine taking pride in maintaining a well-written project doing amazing things. I believe most people unhappy with maintaining someone else's work are dealing with neither, and are furthermore discouraged from doing anything to make it better. Just complete the tickets as quickly as possible, and keep your head low.
    • dozzie 11y ago
      Yes, but you wouldn't know in advance that this codebase you're going to be assigned to is well-written, or that it does amazing things (unless you're in its target users group or know the target industry already). If somebody offered you a job to merely maintain an old, gigantic codebase, I don't think your first thought would be "wow, I'm going to learn so much from this!", and there probably wouldn't be any way you could assess the codebase quality before accepting the offer so you could end up thinking that eventually. This is how things that you want and that could help you grow can be vastly different.
      • philipov 11y ago
        I mean, if you're a novice, it should be your first thought. If it isn't, I consider that a failure of education. Jumping into writing something from scratch when you're not part of the target user group or know the target industry already is a great way to produce horrible code that you (or someone else) will hate to maintain. This is why it's so important to grill your interviewers about the reality of working at the company, although I'll admit that I learned which questions to ask from bad experience. Asking those questions also happens to serve as excellent signalling to your technical interviewers, much more effective than being able to solve some silly logic puzzle. And to be perfectly fair, you do learn so much from working on poorly written projects that are a horror to maintain. Failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time.
        • jetcata 11y ago
          I'd love to hear which questions you ask in interviews to get this information out of the interviewers!
          • philipov 11y ago
            Ask them the questions you'd want to know answers to if you were hiring them, to determine their own merits. Insist on talking with the people you'll actually be working with. You want to know their opinions on programming paradigms, and design patterns. Ask about operational details like version control, code review, and releases. Ask about the history of the code base, who wrote it, where are they now. Ask how documentation is created. There are so many things you can ask. Good code is surrounded by good processes. Ask about the processes that lead to good code. This not only susses out what the situation is on the ground, but also demonstrates your own quality.
        • distracted828 11y ago
          > failure teaches you which mistakes to avoid next time As a recent grad who has been fired from two jobs, I would be afraid to join a poorly written project because I would worry that I would fail and then be fired. Learning how to be successful is pretty important and teaches you things you cannot learn from lurching from failure to failure.
    • ArkyBeagle 11y ago
      Maintenance isn't that significantly different from development from scratch. The differences are only in how it's paid for and how you evaluate risks. Development from scratch means much more ... "sales" overhead. Meetings and (ultimately) disposable documentation.
  • collyw 11y ago
    I have just inherited a relatively poorly written application in a new job. I am going to take pride in optimizing it so the pages load in less than a second (some are timing out when there are other users on the system), clean up the crappy bits and make it more maintainable. Sure its no as nice as getting to architect a whole application from the ground up. But the database seems well designed, so it shouldn't bee to much problem to make it faster and prettier and cleaner code.
  • JustSomeNobody 11y ago
    >I've seen people proud of having an opportunity to maintain (note: not to develop, just to maintain) big products. Such product was doing amazing things and was well-written, of course, but would you think you could take pride of maintaining somebody else's work? Most developers wouldn't. There's a stigma against maintenance. Most developers want to be Software Architects! (Said with the pigs in space voice).
    • wwweston 11y ago
      As someone who's been doing mostly maintenance recently, it's pretty clear why: 1) reading a pile of code and trying to figure out how it works and being constrained by someone else's solutions is considerably less fun for most developers than writing something new and making decisions about how the system will be put together 2) It's much harder to point to what you did or talk up your accomplishments. Particularly to management.
      • x0x0 11y ago
        You forgot the bit where you often get blamed for the consequences of decisions you didn't take that are firmly cemented into extant code.
      • JustSomeNobody 11y ago
        Re 1. I think it's actually quite fun to take a piece of code, understand it and change it to meet new requirements. There's a good healthy challenge in that. I think a big part of the reason devs hate it is because they can't read code well. They can write it, but not read it. (I realize I'm generalizing, but it is based on some experiences.) Re 2. This is very true.
      • st3v3r 11y ago
        Not to mention that all of the praise for the project has already been given out. All that there is left is angry users yelling that something isn't working now. It's a pretty thankless job.
      • nitrogen 11y ago