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Yeah from the title I thought this was going to be about leetcode problems, but this is truly something that comes up regularly. Where are these dev jobs where

Yeah from the title I thought this was going to be about leetcode problems, but this is truly something that comes up regularly. Where are these dev jobs where _don't_ have to figure out some mysterious issue in a barely maintained GitHub repo semi-regularly?

evoke4908 2y ago
Yeah, I feel like jobs that don't require you to reverse engineer a bunch of stuff are the exception, not the inverse. Hall, I do greenfield embedded programming. Most of the code I touch is completely new; the entire codebase has been replaced and rewritten by me over the last three years. Not one other developer has contributed any significant amount of code. Even then, in this scenario, I'm still reverse engineering some arcane undocumented code at least once a week. Nobody ever documents their libraries properly so I have to rip everything apart to see how it works. Or I need to adapt some vendor example code or a GitHub repo into a slightly different form. Even just existing in the ESP-IDF environment I have to dig into the core code to figure out what the hell it's doing and where these error messages come from. If you can't read someone else's Gordian knot of undocumented code, I'd argue you are probably not very good at writing code. Reading bad code is a vital part of learning to write good code, and is generally just a fundamental core skill that every programmer needs to have.
- tayo42 2y ago
  How are you defining bad code? Imo unreadable and undecipherabe code is one subset of bad code.
  - dahousecat 2y ago
    I would argue, that in that vast majority of cases, the readability of code is the single most important metric.
    - amluto 2y ago
      If I encounter third party code that is terminally broken, I don’t really care how readable it is, except insofar as I can probably tell it’s terminally broken faster if it’s more readable.
VyseofArcadia 2y ago
> Where are these dev jobs where _don't_ have to figure out some mysterious issue in a barely maintained GitHub repo semi-regularly? Oh, my job is one of those. Our code is in Perforce.
- anankaie 2y ago
  This is the most Software Engineer answer. Emphasizing only the distinctions that make no difference :D
  - honestAbe22 2y ago
    [dead]
icedchai 2y ago
A repo would be nice. I was recently given a 500 meg .zip of "backend stuff" and asked to figure out what's going on. No repository, no history, the read me is useless, the APIs look like they were built by rabid animals...
- dudleypippin 2y ago
  My favorite description of this sort of setup is "coded by vandals".

evoke4908 2y ago

Yeah, I feel like jobs that don't require you to reverse engineer a bunch of stuff are the exception, not the inverse. Hall, I do greenfield embedded programming. Most of the code I touch is completely new; the entire codebase has been replaced and rewritten by me over the last three years. Not one other developer has contributed any significant amount of code. Even then, in this scenario, I'm still reverse engineering some arcane undocumented code at least once a week. Nobody ever documents their libraries properly so I have to rip everything apart to see how it works. Or I need to adapt some vendor example code or a GitHub repo into a slightly different form. Even just existing in the ESP-IDF environment I have to dig into the core code to figure out what the hell it's doing and where these error messages come from. If you can't read someone else's Gordian knot of undocumented code, I'd argue you are probably not very good at writing code. Reading bad code is a vital part of learning to write good code, and is generally just a fundamental core skill that every programmer needs to have.

tayo42 2y ago
How are you defining bad code? Imo unreadable and undecipherabe code is one subset of bad code.
- dahousecat 2y ago
  I would argue, that in that vast majority of cases, the readability of code is the single most important metric.
  - amluto 2y ago
    If I encounter third party code that is terminally broken, I don’t really care how readable it is, except insofar as I can probably tell it’s terminally broken faster if it’s more readable.

VyseofArcadia 2y ago

> Where are these dev jobs where _don't_ have to figure out some mysterious issue in a barely maintained GitHub repo semi-regularly? Oh, my job is one of those. Our code is in Perforce.

anankaie 2y ago
This is the most Software Engineer answer. Emphasizing only the distinctions that make no difference :D
- honestAbe22 2y ago
  [dead]

icedchai 2y ago

A repo would be nice. I was recently given a 500 meg .zip of "backend stuff" and asked to figure out what's going on. No repository, no history, the read me is useless, the APIs look like they were built by rabid animals...

dudleypippin 2y ago
My favorite description of this sort of setup is "coded by vandals".