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> Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware running with bandaids
by jl6 5y ago
> Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware running with bandaids and bubblegum. Software that more than 5 different teams have had their fingers in, mucking about, and some codebases have orders of magnitude more than that.
And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, the main downside of such systems is that they are slow and expensive to change, not that they are unreliable.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, the main downside of such systems is that they are slow and expensive to change, not that they are unreliable. They are slow and expensive to change because they are maintained because they have been, at great expense and cost in both failures and remediation efforts, made tolerably reliable (but still extremely fragile) so long as things are exactly within certain expectations (which often have been narrowed from the intended design based on observed bugs that have been deemed too expensive to fix), and it is inordinately difficult to modify them without causing them to revert to a state of intolerable unreliability. They are systems that generations have been spent reshaping business operations around their bugs to make them “reliable”.