4 ms·

I don't think it's an attitude that anyone takes pride in. I can very much relate to the parent. You join a company, find out that their code-base is in an abys

by kohanz 13y ago

I don't think it's an attitude that anyone takes pride in. I can very much relate to the parent. You join a company, find out that their code-base is in an abysmal state (I would wager this is the case at most enterprise outfits with aging code) and go to work. Initially, you try to sound the alarm to your superiors, put in overtime to try and improve the code-base "bit by bit". However, over time you find out that those who are calling the shots (driven by business priorities) absolutely do not care, because the code does, more or less, what they say it will. Your co-workers have either always written poor quality code or have long-since resigned themselves to doing so. Remember, you can be in situations where "technical debt" can take months, even years to culminate into stuff hitting the fan, so management can remain blissfully unaware of what is brewing for long periods of time. I've been in these situations before, where your pride for writing good code is eventually beaten down by your surroundings and the conflicting priorities of management. I've always been uncomfortable in these situations and found a way to leave, but I don't think that means that I have a "terrible attitude".

GFischer 13y ago
Thank you. Yes, I work for a subsidiary of a large corporation, the main system is built on a 20-year old deprecated development environment called Forte 4GL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL ) with more than a million lines of code. Technical debt is humungous, but nobody cares since they just put more programmers to work (it's indescribably inefficient). I did manage to migrate one of the core subsystems (policy issuance and data entry) to .NET, and I'm pretty proud of that, but my work wasn't recognized by management, which spends all the time in politics (and advancement is only a function of office politics, etc.). Management is pretty short-sighted, prioritizing short-term shiny new things over fixing problems that will blow up long term. So after 5 years I'm leaving, I should have left much earlier but well paying, stable jobs are not so easy to get in my country, and I didn't want to emigrate and was afraid of change. My prediction is that the mismanagement will blow in managements' face when the next economic crisis hits (currently my country is in an economic bonanza which masks bad decisions and mismanagement).

by kohanz 13y ago

GFischer 13y ago

Thank you. Yes, I work for a subsidiary of a large corporation, the main system is built on a 20-year old deprecated development environment called Forte 4GL ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forte_4GL ) with more than a million lines of code. Technical debt is humungous, but nobody cares since they just put more programmers to work (it's indescribably inefficient). I did manage to migrate one of the core subsystems (policy issuance and data entry) to .NET, and I'm pretty proud of that, but my work wasn't recognized by management, which spends all the time in politics (and advancement is only a function of office politics, etc.). Management is pretty short-sighted, prioritizing short-term shiny new things over fixing problems that will blow up long term. So after 5 years I'm leaving, I should have left much earlier but well paying, stable jobs are not so easy to get in my country, and I didn't want to emigrate and was afraid of change. My prediction is that the mismanagement will blow in managements' face when the next economic crisis hits (currently my country is in an economic bonanza which masks bad decisions and mismanagement).