4 ms·
Nature of things unfortunately. I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the
by quickben 9y ago
Nature of things unfortunately.
I did my internship at Nortel. A decade later and having worked from small shops to IBM and beyond, nothing comes close to the quality of people/code that I saw at Nortel.
From another perspective:
It is up to you to carry the torch now.
- AndyMcConachie 9y agoSoftware gets shittier because speed of development and time to market continues to outweigh any reason for quality. Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :( What is the incentive for quality?
- kstrauser 9y agoBe careful of the large selection bias there: you're looking at the 20-30 year old code good enough not to have been replaced 18-28 years ago.
- Shaanie 9y agoSurvivorship bias, to be precise.
- nitrogen 9y agoSo what's a good example of the code of today that will survive the next 30 years?
- dredmorbius 9y agoGet back to me ... in 30 years.
- quickben 9y agoNo incentive beyond personal satisfaction these days. Most people write and jump ship, which is so sad.
- zaphar 9y agoMany people don't have the luxury of write and jump ship. The vast majority of my career was not greenfield development. It has almost all been maintaining pre-existing software. Some of which is more than a decade old. The challenging part of us in the software maintenance job is to balance a need to refactor with a need to add features. It colors your opinion about a lot of things. You start to evaluate methodologies, technologies, frameworks, and even library choices by their impact on long term maintainability. I frequently find myself at odds with a primarily greenfield developer in tool choice because I'm looking forward into the future and it doesn't look pretty.
- fgonzag 9y agoGreenfield developers look at me funny when I say we should just use Spring or .net for new projects. I actually have to maintain my projects for years, and I've been burnt many times before.
- BuckRogers 9y ago+1 for industrial-strength solutions. I came to the same conclusion and for most projects there's not really a lot of good choices there outside of those two.
- pcwalton 9y ago> Code written 20-30 years ago almost always looks cleaner to me than the code I'm working on today :( You aren't looking at the average workaday C program from that era. I guarantee you that OpenSSL, for example, does not look cleaner than code of today.
- astrodust 9y agoNortel was an unbelievable loss. To this day you still see Nortel phones in every corner of the world. If they hadn't over-extended themselves they'd probably still be on top of that market. Even more disappointing was that RIM/Blackberry had every opportunity to take that mantle (business/enterprise IP telephony) and didn't even try.