4 ms·

Do you really want to end up in a situation where you're in a position of maintaining someone else's ancient codebase? I guarantee you this is not a path to any

by metreo 7y ago

Do you really want to end up in a situation where you're in a position of maintaining someone else's ancient codebase? I guarantee you this is not a path to anywhere but misery.

unnouinceput 7y ago
As a freelancer who does this 2 out of 3 jobs, I can tell you is definitely fun if you like challenge as in debug for 3 hours to only realize the old coder in 80's never initialized a structure and a newer tool was used to create the modern platform. And when you come on-board for maintenance/upgrade you are not told this from nobody. So misery or challenge, depends on your point of view, but the other side of the coin is..well, the coin itself, it's huge :). You get paid handsomely.
- metreo 7y ago
  Reportedly, there are definitely more interesting challenges. We are seeing this in academia quite frequently where the older professors have some hard worked program in BASIC from whenever and they try really hard to get someone to maintain it's existence since otherwise their efforts really do disappear. For the person taking this on it's tedious, thankless and of dubious tangible merit to the participant who should be focused on their own contemporary work. Have the reports of high pay been confirmed, AFAIK the push now is for volunteers.
ProZsolt 7y ago
I really like working with ancient codebases. There is no more satisfying thing than deleting 10k+ line of spaghetti code. Yes, you have to spend days or even weeks to figure out how it works. Hunt down edge cases, bugs. If you like playing detective you will like it. I rather work on a huge legacy codebase than rewrite the same CRUD app in the JS flavor of the week.
jpindar 7y ago
I have some experience at porting ancient software to more modern languages, and I found it very satisfying. Maintaining it as it is, without the authority to document and refactor it might not be as much fun though.

by metreo 7y ago

Do you really want to end up in a situation where you're in a position of maintaining someone else's ancient codebase? I guarantee you this is not a path to anywhere but misery.

unnouinceput 7y ago

As a freelancer who does this 2 out of 3 jobs, I can tell you is definitely fun if you like challenge as in debug for 3 hours to only realize the old coder in 80's never initialized a structure and a newer tool was used to create the modern platform. And when you come on-board for maintenance/upgrade you are not told this from nobody. So misery or challenge, depends on your point of view, but the other side of the coin is..well, the coin itself, it's huge :). You get paid handsomely.

metreo 7y ago
Reportedly, there are definitely more interesting challenges. We are seeing this in academia quite frequently where the older professors have some hard worked program in BASIC from whenever and they try really hard to get someone to maintain it's existence since otherwise their efforts really do disappear. For the person taking this on it's tedious, thankless and of dubious tangible merit to the participant who should be focused on their own contemporary work. Have the reports of high pay been confirmed, AFAIK the push now is for volunteers.

ProZsolt 7y ago

I really like working with ancient codebases. There is no more satisfying thing than deleting 10k+ line of spaghetti code. Yes, you have to spend days or even weeks to figure out how it works. Hunt down edge cases, bugs. If you like playing detective you will like it. I rather work on a huge legacy codebase than rewrite the same CRUD app in the JS flavor of the week.

jpindar 7y ago

I have some experience at porting ancient software to more modern languages, and I found it very satisfying. Maintaining it as it is, without the authority to document and refactor it might not be as much fun though.