mbrodersen

Excel is brilliant.

In my view there is no such thing as “tech debt”.

The way I look at it, there will always be a delta between the code you have and the business features you want/need. Independently of whether the code was written 30 years ago or yesterday.

So the only question worth asking IMHO is how best to reduce the delta while maximising the business value/cost ratio.

If you talk about “tech debt” without talking business value/cost then you are indulging in “what would be fun to do” and not “what is the best next step for the business”.

The biggest lie by the way is “it will improve maintenance!”. Maybe for you (because you spent years rewriting it and know it inside out) but not for the unlucky next person who has to take over your code.

Another lie is using words like “Modern!” and “Brand New!” as if it is a good thing. I want the old software that has proven itself for more than 30 years. Not the “Modern! New! Shiny!” crap that has been implemented by bright eyed inexperienced beginners, is full of bugs, implemented using a “Modern!” framework that will stop being maintained in a year, and has 5% of the features of the “old” software.

“was previously fired from her job for sleeping in her car behind her place of employment.”

The cruelty of managers never stops surprising me. As long as she is doing her job and is presentable etc. what’s the problem? Worst case just ask her to park her car somewhere else?

Agree. I was offered a green card and a 6 digit salary to move to the US. I declined and instead moved to Australia. One of my best decisions ever.

In my experience there is a strong correlation between your ability to communicate clearly and your ability to write clean maintainable code.

The 10x developers I have worked with are all excellent communicators. The worst developers I have worked with most definitely weren’t.

Aussie here. Speak for yourself mate. The tech I am working on in Melbourne (Rostering/Pairing) is world class. We are routinely beating international companies 100x our size.

I work for a company where meetings are extremely rare. We only do formal meetings when everything else fails. It is one of the most efficient/productive companies I have ever worked for.

The least efficient/productive company I have ever worked for had formal meetings all the time. What takes a week where I work now would take 6 months there.

So no I don’t agree that meetings are automatically productive/useful in general. I am pretty sure you can measure how productive a software company is by the following formula:

Time spent working on projects divided by Time spent in meetings.

I have such fond memories of the ZX-Spectrum. I learned how to program machine code using it (hand translates from Z80 assembler) when I was 11 years old. No internet. Nobody I could ask for help. Just a book explaining how to do machine code programming on a ZX-Spectrum. The satisfaction of getting this working was amazing to me.

Perhaps start with fixing the planet we are currently living on?

Not my experience at all. I have worked for two really fucked up companies. But the rest were OK and my current job is pretty good.

Not my experience at all. We have zero problems maintaining large 20+ year monoliths written in C++. It’s all about how you architecture the monoliths and how you refactor as needed to improve it.

If you don’t have the skills to create maintainable monoliths then you will guaranteed create an even bigger micro-services mud pile.