5 ms·
There’s been a lot of love for this book, but I found the title to be jarring. When I was given the book to read, I was doing a lot of maintenance work, and was
by milesvp 7y ago
There’s been a lot of love for this book, but I found the title to be jarring. When I was given the book to read, I was doing a lot of maintenance work, and was doing a lot of ‘duct tape and bailing wire’ kinds of fixes to keep the systems functional, while slowly addressing the root causes of downtime and issues. To me this was truly pragmatic programming, but nothing in the first few chapters even tries to deal with the levels of pragmatism I needed in my day job that had far too many night time wake up calls. I couldn’t finish it. Any wisdom the book may have was lost to me, and I’ll likely never pick up the book again, I associate it with too much PTSD from that time in my life...
- mieseratte 7y ago> I couldn’t finish it. Any wisdom the book may have was lost to me, and I’ll likely never pick up the book again, I associate it with too much PTSD from that time in my life... I have that problem with a few unfortunately good albums, but never would have thought that might apply to someone with a book.
- nautilus12 7y agoWhats with companies constantly throwing people in the trenches and forcing them to be in constant maintanence mode all the time? I feel like they are just asking for burnout and turnover. If its that bad, give it to someone to greenfield some painful part of it rather than spend their life on the hamster wheel.
- jshowa3 7y agoYou'd be surprised how much companies operate in silos without any training, design, or planning. Most of the time, you're just throwing crap together at the last minute. Doing things without saying no.
- ok_coo 7y agoSink or swim is poor management, but if you're young, at your first tech job or haven't experienced anything better, how would you know? My first dev job was so terrible, I almost quit this career entirely.
- dmix 7y agoIf you're not saying no often as either a designer or a developer then you should be concerned.
- diminoten 7y agoBecause companies like to make money, and they can't make money when systems fail. If maintaining a codebase causes burnout, maybe software isn't for you.
- Falling3 7y agoThat just sounds like a deliberately obtuse misreading of the parent's comment.
- diminoten 7y agoHowso?
- Supermancho 7y agoI don't think you understand what "maintenance" means here. If you make them well enough for the job, you haven't succeeded at your job. If you make them well enough for the job and you don't need to constantly watch for failures, you have succeeded at your job. If you can't say "this is as good as it can be done" for a given piece of software, you might have room to grow.
- diminoten 7y agoI understand just fine, it just sounds like software is too hard for some folks, and while that's okay, but there are those of us who aren't burned out by doing our jobs.
- diminoten 7y agoThe book isn't meant to be read front to back, the "most relevant" parts of the book for your situation aren't magically going to appear at the beginning. Try reading it again, this time thinking of each chapter as its own, separate story. Don't fall into the trap of "This is popular so I'm going to express criticism". If you want to, you can extract a great deal of wisdom from this book.
- cuddlecake 7y agoDon't fall into the trap of "This is criticism of something popular merely because it is popular"! Hehe, no offense, just talking to myself.
- diminoten 7y agoSounds like you may have.
- copperx 7y agoI haven't read it, but I've heard a lot of praise for Refactoring by Fowler for being immediately useful during maintenance.