3 ms·

I have worked on one 30 year old system that was written by people that knew what they were doing it was then maintained by at least 20 different people that h

I have worked on one 30 year old system that was written by people that knew what they were doing it was then maintained by at least 20 different people that had no idea what they were doing very little of the altered logic makes any sense and 95% of the time consists of trying to reverse engineer what they were trying to do then fix it up without breaking other parts of the codebase as many of the logic bugs interact with each other and end up cancelling out with the garbage generated by LLMs... I suspect all development is going to turn into this

Guthur 3y ago
My thought exactly, and compounded that we will now have far less practiced coders as they all generate the banal they should be learning with.
nonethewiser 3y ago
Or maybe it can help you understand the code
- blibble 3y ago
  9 times out of 10 there is nothing to understand the logic is simply broken
pydry 3y ago
You mean one day rich executives are going to be in desperate need of and highly reliant upon skilled developers who can understand and maintain their mission critical systems? Sounds awful. I was hoping for the future where we would all be out of a job.
- bryanrasmussen 3y ago
  check the wages for Cobol developers in your area recently? on edit: https://www.zippia.com/cobol-programmer-jobs/salary/# https://www.zippia.com/cobol-programmer-jobs/salary/#
  - pydry 3y ago
    Those aren't FAANG wages but they aren't awful wages for most of the country either. It also used to pay better, although at this point I'm pretty sure operating COBOL is just a sign that you're unwilling or unable to invest in upgrading your <1990s IT. The remaining companies operating COBOL systems likely aren't even able to pay top dollar.
    - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
      Ok, well if that was the case then the original description of rich people paying to maintain out of date things would probably fall into the same scenario - although my experience is whenever I have checked COBOL over the years the wages have never been particularly impressive. on edit: amusingly, there is a relevant front page discussion right now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055986
      - pydry 3y ago
        >Ok, well if that was the case then the original description of rich people paying to maintain out of date things would probably fall into the same scenario Not really. We're comparing a programming language that has been legacy since the 1990s and has been gradually phased out over a period of 30 years and a process that accelerates the creation of legacy code in any language. COBOL was always going to die eventually. I think, if anything, the fact you can still net over 100k writing it in 2023 kinda proves my point.
- thfuran 3y ago
  I was hoping for the future where I could get paid to work on something slightly less unpleasant than my most byzantine nightmare.
- blibble 3y ago
  those changes were probably the most stressful thing I've ever done, with several billion dollars a day reliant on them, with absolutely no rollback possible we had two new starters and one long term employee quit after being asked to work on that codebase (and ended up having to do it myself at extremely short notice... worked though)

Guthur 3y ago

My thought exactly, and compounded that we will now have far less practiced coders as they all generate the banal they should be learning with.

nonethewiser 3y ago

Or maybe it can help you understand the code

blibble 3y ago
9 times out of 10 there is nothing to understand the logic is simply broken

pydry 3y ago

You mean one day rich executives are going to be in desperate need of and highly reliant upon skilled developers who can understand and maintain their mission critical systems? Sounds awful. I was hoping for the future where we would all be out of a job.

bryanrasmussen 3y ago
check the wages for Cobol developers in your area recently? on edit: https://www.zippia.com/cobol-programmer-jobs/salary/# https://www.zippia.com/cobol-programmer-jobs/salary/#
- pydry 3y ago
  Those aren't FAANG wages but they aren't awful wages for most of the country either. It also used to pay better, although at this point I'm pretty sure operating COBOL is just a sign that you're unwilling or unable to invest in upgrading your <1990s IT. The remaining companies operating COBOL systems likely aren't even able to pay top dollar.
  - bryanrasmussen 3y ago
    Ok, well if that was the case then the original description of rich people paying to maintain out of date things would probably fall into the same scenario - although my experience is whenever I have checked COBOL over the years the wages have never been particularly impressive. on edit: amusingly, there is a relevant front page discussion right now https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055986 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36055986
    - pydry 3y ago
      >Ok, well if that was the case then the original description of rich people paying to maintain out of date things would probably fall into the same scenario Not really. We're comparing a programming language that has been legacy since the 1990s and has been gradually phased out over a period of 30 years and a process that accelerates the creation of legacy code in any language. COBOL was always going to die eventually. I think, if anything, the fact you can still net over 100k writing it in 2023 kinda proves my point.
thfuran 3y ago
I was hoping for the future where I could get paid to work on something slightly less unpleasant than my most byzantine nightmare.
blibble 3y ago
those changes were probably the most stressful thing I've ever done, with several billion dollars a day reliant on them, with absolutely no rollback possible we had two new starters and one long term employee quit after being asked to work on that codebase (and ended up having to do it myself at extremely short notice... worked though)