alt Hacker NewsDifferent person but I’ve been a SWE about ten years now - my favorite work has been improving the CRUD stuff people have left behind. Like the time I took a proprietary document they were using to document their REST apis and wrote a converter to turn those into OpenAI spec compliant yaml files, taking a single tenant application and making it a secure multienant application so instead of 80 different app services we had two, coalescing all their data sources into one normalized DB. There’s a lot of work I’ve done I’m really proud of. I’ve always found myself being the “in the muck” guy fixing up and bettering legacy code, I’ve always felt that was really rewarding and interesting.
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Sure. If you get pleasure in fixing really badly broken shite, there’s tons of opportunity for that, but no money in it. Only money in new features, which is why the codebase is what it is. I have, on rare occasion, been the fixit guy called in temporarily to fix another teams work or get it out the door: that was fun. Short lived , but fun.
Thats badass! I like doing that kind of work, but I got very jaded about it over the years, because management generally acted as if the engineers took a shit on the conference table in the middle of a Zoom call with their most important customer whenever anybody attempted to address technical debt, as opposed to delivering more more more features. Unless it was billable agency work, in which case they’d hate it even more.
With massive amounts of effort and strong communication it was usually possible to get some tech debt time, but management acted like they were doing YOU a huge favor. It was kind of a career killer, generally.
Alternatively it was possible to get this kind of work done on my own time… but that’s a marriage killer instead of a career killer.
I burned out on trying after decades.