You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a legacy project

Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by fjjjrjj on Monday February 17, 2025 @11:24AM (#43080544)

And the only better experience than that is killing a new greenfield project before it gets to production because the old software was good enough and the problems were organizational in how the software was being used.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by 4ndrewl on Monday February 17, 2025 @11:51AM (#43080853)

The best code is the code that doesn't exist.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by antisthenes on Monday February 17, 2025 @12:10PM (#43081095)

Certainly the most secure code. Not sure about best.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by ticklemyelmo on Monday February 17, 2025 @12:16PM (#43081166)

Better on every axis: security, performance, resource consumption, reliability, verification, documentation...

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by greenchair on Monday February 17, 2025 @12:49PM (#43081504)

exactly..which is also why lines of code written is one of if not the worst possible metric of productivity. easy to game too.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by escapecharacter on Monday February 17, 2025 @01:17PM (#43081776)

I marked my transition to senior engineer when my net lines of code flipped to negative.

Not that I game that obviously, it just occurred naturally for a ~4 month period

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by bell-cot on Monday February 17, 2025 @12:49PM (#43081510)

> Better on every axis...

How 'bout job security?

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by rzzzt on Monday February 17, 2025 @02:04PM (#43082229)

Anyone can write no code.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by MonkeyClub on Monday February 17, 2025 @06:47PM (#43084374)

But it takes a master to not write the write piece.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by lawn on Monday February 17, 2025 @12:56PM (#43081582)

I thought it was pretty funny how we had this large project that was supposed to replace a legacy system (that was mostly a bad hack that got pushed to production).

But when it was finished it failed to meet the basic requirements for the only customer that used the system.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by lmm on Monday February 17, 2025 @07:48PM (#43084801)

Once you're senior enough those cases won't be funny any more, just sad.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by lawn on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @12:02AM (#43086231)

I have a very dark sense of humor sometimes.

But yes, it's sad.

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Re:You're not a senior engineer until you've worked on a leg... by Cthulhu_ on Tuesday February 18, 2025 @08:43AM (#43089352)

I wish this happened tbh. I've seen one where the greenfield (Scala, AWS, etc) is still living alongside the old good enough software they went back to (C# / .NET) ten years on.

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