alt Hacker NewsThe rapid decay of WTF/day over time applies to both new employees and new customers.
> currently working on a legacy system
"Legacy" is the magic word here! Those customers are pissed, trust me, but they've long ago given up trying to do anything about it. That's why you don't hear about it. Not because there are no bugs, but because nobody can be bothered to submit bug reports after learning long ago that doing so is futile.
I once read a paper claiming that for every major software incident (crash, data loss, outage, etc...) between only one in a thousand to one in ten thousand will be formally reported up to an engineer capable of fixing the issue.
I refused to believe that metric until I started collecting crash reports (and other stats) automatically on a legacy system and discovered to my horror that it was crashing multiple times per user per day, and required on average a backup restore once a week or so per user due to data corruption! We got about one support call per 4,500 such incidents.
The customers aren't pissed, we're doing demos to new departments and lining up customizations and expansion as quickly as we can. We're growing faster than ever within our largest customer.
I also didn't say there are no bugs or complaints, I said the system is more stable. But yes, there are fewer bugs and complaints, especially on the critical features.
I didn't use the word legacy to mean abandoned, just that it's been around a long time, we're maintaining it while also building newer features in newer tech, as opposed to my previous company which was a green field startup.