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People that have never interacted with a legacy system don't understand how the legacy system works and think they know how to fix everything. If you haven't h

People that have never interacted with a legacy system don't understand how the legacy system works and think they know how to fix everything. If you haven't had to deal with people like this before you just didn't write software for long enough. Pretty common in junior devs or people that believe clean code.

bjoli 2y ago
I also believe there is a difference of expectations. The legacy system is often written to work with all edge cases that pop up, and in government software also to conform to the law. If you don't know the requirements you are bound to see something that is inefficient.
- mlinhares 2y ago
  That has been every single legacy system i've seen and the last time i worked with the government was 20 years ago. Once something runs for long enough, with millions of people using it, you will acquire corner cases and if you try to rebuild it from scratch you'll just introduce all the corner cases again, but now one incident at a time.
  - Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
    Not only edge cases but a whole lot of backwards compatibility for both data and other even older systems.
    - mlinhares 2y ago
      At a previous job there was a huge incident because the order of events was changed, one was arriving a couple minutes before now and it completely broke a considerable amount of downstream consumers.
hombre_fatal 2y ago
I once saw how hairy and massive the SMTP implementation was at one of my first jobs and figured I could write my own much simpler drop in replacement. The first word of SMTP is Simple, after all. Why would they write all that extra code that my weekendware PoC didn't need?
- mlinhares 2y ago
  The hubris of the junior developer hahaha, its still great though, that's what educates you that software is more than a couple lines of code jumbled together, i think everyone should go through something like that at leas once.

bjoli 2y ago

I also believe there is a difference of expectations. The legacy system is often written to work with all edge cases that pop up, and in government software also to conform to the law. If you don't know the requirements you are bound to see something that is inefficient.

mlinhares 2y ago
That has been every single legacy system i've seen and the last time i worked with the government was 20 years ago. Once something runs for long enough, with millions of people using it, you will acquire corner cases and if you try to rebuild it from scratch you'll just introduce all the corner cases again, but now one incident at a time.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 2y ago
  Not only edge cases but a whole lot of backwards compatibility for both data and other even older systems.
  - mlinhares 2y ago
    At a previous job there was a huge incident because the order of events was changed, one was arriving a couple minutes before now and it completely broke a considerable amount of downstream consumers.

hombre_fatal 2y ago

I once saw how hairy and massive the SMTP implementation was at one of my first jobs and figured I could write my own much simpler drop in replacement. The first word of SMTP is Simple, after all. Why would they write all that extra code that my weekendware PoC didn't need?

mlinhares 2y ago
The hubris of the junior developer hahaha, its still great though, that's what educates you that software is more than a couple lines of code jumbled together, i think everyone should go through something like that at leas once.