3 ms·

Something every software engineer should learn before their insufferable egos solidify.

• lanstin 5y ago
  Maybe a good interview question for experienced developers should be "tell us about a time when you attempted something in software and failed at it." In my case it was being given a 10 or 20 KLOC C server that had memory leaks all over and segfaults all over the place (written by a friend) and told to make it prod ready.
  • sidlls 5y ago
    That's a rough one. Mine was fixing some physics/flight aerodynamics software that had been generated by a Fortran-to-C compiler (e.g., http://www.netlib.org/f2c/ http://www.netlib.org/f2c/). It was in inscrutable mess and couple-years-out-of-academic-physics-turned-SE me thought I'd be able to do it easily since I had so much Fortran and C experience. I failed quite hard at that.