What do you guys do?
Posted by Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit | ExperiencedDevs | View on Reddit | 82 comments
I’ve only been in the field for a handful of years and pretty much all I’ve worked on are migrations from legacy. I’m so bored and am so sick of using the same tech stack to replace existing legacy code using the existing logic. Is this what it’s like most places? I genuinely don’t enjoy this anymore and was hoping to hear what projects you are working on. Maybe give me some hope and potentially motivate me to find another job.
boneskull@reddit
Security software R&D. Big brain shit will keep you interested. No PMs. It’s nice work if you can get it.
mailed@reddit
Like malware research? Or in the tools realm like EDR/CNAPP/SIEM or similar?
boneskull@reddit
https://hardenedjs.org
NonProphet8theist@reddit
What's your day-to-day like? How do you get something like this? I do full-stack web dev with JS as of now and I'm getting kinda bored with it.
boneskull@reddit
I write a lot of code. Some experimental, some prototypes, some not. The projects I work on are used by our actual products; we experiment and research ways to make our software better/faster, etc. Some pairing on tough problems. Not a lot of meetings.
I got this job by parlaying OSS contributions over much of a decade into a strong network.
AIOWW3ORINACV@reddit
Ah ah ah! You didn't say the magic word!
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
That sounds really cool, I just don’t think I’m smart enough.
boneskull@reddit
It’s not computer science. But there’s a lot to learn, if you like learning.
mailed@reddit
I did almost nothing interesting for my first 6 or 7 years. Just really bad desktop/web/mobile development on technology that is long gone from the mainstream.
In the decade since then I've done a bunch of web stuff, old school database and BI stuff, some infrastructure stuff, RPA stuff, cloud migrations, digital native cloud infrastructure, random Microsoft Sharepoint/Dynamics/Power Platform stuff, more modern data and analytics engineering, now about to fully jump off the cliff into security after getting into SIEM/SOAR work.
Time and opportunities man. You'll have both. Just keep putting in the time...
kokanee-fish@reddit
Every day I hate this industry more, and become more desperate to find a way out. I hate myself for getting into software. I feel doomed. I feel like humans are the most aggressive parasite that nature has ever seen, destroying everything beautiful and good that has ever existed, and software is the most effective tool that we parasites have devised for extracting value and accelerating our grand self-destruction.
Locellus@reddit
Chill out mate!
If this was true, software is only extracting value from other parasites, right? So less parasitic and more competitive. Parasite one gets resources from nature, parasite two extracts values from parasite one… doesn’t sound much like a parasite to me, as there is no host.
Don’t worry about our self destruction, the sun will destroy the earth in a few billion years, you’ve got about 70… try to find some meaning in your life - it’ll probably come from relationships with people, not from looking at people theoretically.
Chin up mate, it’s the weekend, have a coffee or a beer or whatever and find some horizon to look at :)
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
Dear god lol I don’t hate it that much. I just work for a shit company. If I could work in a hybrid or remote environment, I think I would be happier.
Quick-Benjamin@reddit
This is why I contract.
Right now I'm helping to make a distributed video streaming app.
Before that, I was hired to level up a teams devops practices and increase velocity. So, lots of pipelines, automation, IAC, automated testing, etc.
Before that, it was a greenfield web app.
Before that, it was a really cool data science platform. The selling point was that it automatically created the compute resources the scientists needed and would tear them down when they were done.
Before that, it was a security cleared contract that I can't talk about. Very interesting though.
That's going back a few years now.
However. My phone used to ring every day with recruiters offering me work. I'm lucky to get a call a month these days.
bstpierre777@reddit
Have been writing software for networking/telecom devices of different flavors for almost 30 years. Different processors, OSes (including none), architectures, protocols. It’s a constantly moving target so yes even though there’s still a lot of repetition, it stays “interesting”.
local-person-nc@reddit
Laugh at the fact that a feature would take me a week to do that it takes my entire team 2 months to do but because I would get paid the same either way meh.
FabulousRecording739@reddit
I've seen a simple file upload feature take north of 6 months to be delivered.
Recent-Blackberry317@reddit
I’m in the process of watching a team of software devs absolutely shaft a customer who doesn’t know better. They’re over 2,000 hours in with $700k of the clients money down the drain and have a barely functional piece of shit prototype front end. It’s fucking disgusting.
RandyHoward@reddit
Yeah I e seen so many business waste money like that it’s unbelievable. I have a client I do side work for, and I built a web app for one of their clients. Now they’re telling me they want to load test the application. When I asked them what their traffic expectations were they told me they expect about 100 visitors per day. I told them that low amount of traffic is hardly worth load testing, but told them I could run a simple test for a very small fee to appease them. They came back at me with, “We want to run a bunch of tests. Start at 50 concurrent users and test it in increments of 10, up to 1000 concurrent users or until it breaks.” I was flabbergasted. I explained to them that I will charge a fee per test that I run, and amount of testing will easily exceed six figures. For a site that they only expect 100 visitors per day. I’m still arguing with them about how much money they will waste on this pointless exercise. My client said, “but they want to give us money, why wouldn’t we take their money?” My response was that I’ll gladly take their money but would rather it be for building cool new features than see them utterly waste it on something pointless.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
That’s fucked
Idea-Aggressive@reddit
How is that even possible? It’s hard to believe
Recent-Blackberry317@reddit
Believe me, I said the same thing. No technical leadership to hold people accountable
niveknyc@reddit
I would have did it for $500k and only fucked it up half as much
Recent-Blackberry317@reddit
It’s so egregious, a college student could build a better prototype in a week or two.
Tired__Dev@reddit
So I got shafted at work and didn’t get to pick the stack for my team (I’m staff). The stack wasn’t picked on anything but someone’s personal preference and it’s not very well supported stack. Project has gone for 3 years, multiple devs fired or quit, and there’s now someone rising to take my old position.
I have personally built better projects in 4 to 5 months on my own. I solely could do, and have done, what a team of about 12 could do on my own. That’s project managers, product managers, UX, and a dev team.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
I’ve learned to do this the hard way. Nothing like working your ass off and getting more points completed than the team combined, only to be rewarded with more shit work.
throwaway0134hdj@reddit
Underestimate and over deliver is definitely the way to be.
rende@reddit
Shifting to startup life and learning to do marketing and sales myself or hire people because working as a dev in enterprise the ceiling is too low
bjenning04@reddit
I used to do all sorts of fun stuff, mobile dev, web dev, Java/Ruby/other services. Now I do nothing but analyze and file paperwork for all the 3rd party dependencies my team uses. I feel like Peter from Office Space, but my job sucks more.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
😂😂 I’m sorry!! Why the shift? Please don’t say AI
bjenning04@reddit
Oh, and not related to the shift in my work, but this company is one of the major players in the AI race.
bjenning04@reddit
Our company was acquired by a much larger company. I still enjoy WFH, but that’s about the only thing I enjoy about this job these days. Just biding my time until the job market improves.
BeastyBaiter@reddit
Currently I'm an RPA dev, been doing this for about 7 years. It's getting a bit repetitive but it isn't soul crushing just yet. The high level of RPA is we connect systems that don't naturally connect (limited or no API support) and do business logic along the way. I've done one migration from on prem to cloud and I'm looking forwards to the day they decide to do the reverse cause cloud sucks imho.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
I don’t think I would enjoy this either to be honest, maybe just the first time. I want to be challenged but not completely in the dark.
BeastyBaiter@reddit
The interesting part is the learning the tasks to be done, as they are highly varied. Can be anything from accounting, to payroll to using AI tools to sort inbound emails and run sub-processes based on type. Currently I'm building a bot to do regression testing on a new custom made pipeline control system we are rolling out. Doing a mix of UI testing, confirming data calculations and a stress test by hammering the system with a bunch of bots simultaneously. The coding for this is all pretty mundane, but the solution architecture is fairly unique. Also learning about how pipelines are controlled in the process.
Honestly though, that project is a bit unusual. The bread and butter is random accounting tasks like GL entries and reconciliation of various things.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
I take it back, that actually sounds like a lot of fun.
DragnBite@reddit
Every code that was not produced by you or is older than week is already debt.
bluetista1988@reddit
All code becomes legacy code.
so-that-is-that@reddit
Even if the code is written by you, it becomes debt after a while.
DragnBite@reddit
Please read carefully there is “or” that means what you said
BuzzAlderaan@reddit
It becomes debt as I’m writing the code.
tcpukl@reddit
Ive written video games for 30 years. What I'm working on now has been announced and it's getting an amazing reception so far. I can't wait for the release in the next year.
This latest game has been a long journey.
davenirline@reddit
Doing it for 15 years now. Money is not much the work is always interesting.
LossPreventionGuy@reddit
I feel bad for people who aren't building shit they care about.
my jobs got its (mostly office-politics-based) problems but I'm building shit customers love, our official Facebook is full of people saying we changed their lives, showing photos, it's awesome.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
That’s awesome!
Missing_Back@reddit
What’s the game???
kevin7254@reddit
GTA6
Missing_Back@reddit
Sure pal
bstamour@reddit
I work on low latency data systems for the finance industry. It's not trading, but we use similar hardware/software/os tuning techniques to not fall behind the markets and their torrents of messages.
There's still a lot of legacy stuff to contend with, but it's fun (at least in my opinion).
FamilyForce5ever@reddit
Having worked on keeping up with FIX messages, it turns out you need very little to keep up with single digit billions of messages per day - just Kafka and Kubernetes is more than sufficient, as long as you're fine with single digit seconds of latency from the network overheads involved (and that probably could have been significantly reduced if we chose to self-host instead of using multi-zone AWS).
bstamour@reddit
How many venues were you capturing at the same time with that setup, if you mind me asking?
YahenP@reddit
I do everything I'm paid to do. Most of the time, it's meaningless stuff. But I get paid for it. Now is not the time to choose.
Frenzeski@reddit
Yesterday i spent the morning talking with our cloud vendor about DR and high availability. Today i spent designing a re-architecture of a system that supports 100k rps so it can support 2-10x scale.
Last week i was at a security conference and in between I’ve been responding to incidents and meeting with customers.
I found startups/scaleups are a lot more dynamic
FamilyForce5ever@reddit
I'm doing migrations and optimizations. It's not bad - I like the fact that it's a smaller company with some really stupid past decisions that I can get distracted on and fix easily. I noticed that we were using AWS instances optimized in a way that we weren't making available in EKS, so it was literally a 1 character change in Terraform that saved the company more than my salary annually lol.
niveknyc@reddit
One day, when every legacy system has been migrated to the cloud, we'll be out of a job, friend.
Skarzogg@reddit
No ... the stuff that got migrated first will become legacy and the cycle continues.
The wheel of time continues to turn.
500_successful@reddit
Then we would need to migrate everything from cloud to on premise, will be another tons of story points to burn.
niveknyc@reddit
I hope to be dead by then
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
Lmao
PaulPhxAz@reddit
Oooh, yes, the cloud solves all.
thepeppesilletti@reddit
Join the Product Engineers side, my friend
Thick-Koala7861@reddit
I build tools so other teams can utilize and make more money at the cost of worsened economy for everyone else. But hey, the tech is cool though..
UntestedMethod@reddit
It all gets repetitive. Over the years, I've worked on loads of different projects using a plethora of different languages and frameworks. It all gets repetitive. No matter which tech stack or company you work for, it all comes down to the same grind. Sure mixing it up once in a while can give a sense of freshness for a spell, but it doesn't last. It all gets repetitive.
At this point, the technology or flavour of tasks matter much less to me than quality of life and fulfillment. What I value most now is my compensation package, work-life balance, amicable colleagues, and a sense of purpose in the company's mission.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
Thanks for the response. I’m battling with job security vs work-life balance. My current job sucks. I’m in the office 5 days a week in business clothes, no flexibility at all. Your parents could die and they literally do not care. We will have a massive snow storm and they make up come in. They place greater value on working in an office than their employees safety. It’s wild.
UntestedMethod@reddit
That sounds extraordinarily bad.
Metworld@reddit
Working in startups for fun (and money, if you're lucky) or big tech for money (and fun, if you're lucky).
fakehalo@reddit
Maintainung said tech stack in the cloud, good enough for for me.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
We haven’t even made it to the cloud lmao. We started the migration and then all the devs on the team quit 😂. Supposedly, 2026 will be our year, but they’ve been saying that for 3 years. We’re still using Java 8 as well.
TopSwagCode@reddit
Thats the neat thing about software development. There is tons of different job types. I work in innovation department researching all the new tech. Building prototypes and MVP. Help design new systems. Different tech stacks, but mainly web / cloud native. Javascript, python, c#
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
This sounds like an awesome job. Are you guys hiring lol
smartengin@reddit
I worked previously on greenfield projects related to the space industry that was fun though it was stressful at times but I was creating and learning new stuff all the time, now for different reasons, I moved and so stuff similar to yours, bug resolutions, writing tickets and stuff like that, pays the bills but I also don't feel the same fulfillment I felt at the start of my career.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
That does sound fun.
konm123@reddit
Military defensive and offensive systems
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
That’s awesome
Kitchen-Location-373@reddit
I get why you'd feel that way because the industry (architecture wise) has been "frozen" for about 10 years now. earlier in my career, everything went from mainframe to physical servers to VMs to public cloud to containers to kubernetes. now for about a decade it hasn't really advanced from there. and with all those changes, languages were in flux too. because a new/different language would make more sense with that architecture change.
I think this is a big part of why it's so difficult being a junior these days. seniors are better situated now compared to the 2010s, 90s, 80s, etc. because they have so many years of experience in tech that's still mainstream. it used to be that you could kind of "age out" and younger person learning the best practices of the day could legitimately be better than an older person set in their ways. but when the ways never change it's fine to be set in them.
so, yeah, what I do day to day is build out the same general architecture I've been building out at like 4 companies in a row now. microservices running on kubernetes with managed postgres for a databae and rabbitmq, kafka, or something for async. and some frontend framework like react that's deployed to a CDN. deviating from that general architecture for cost reasons or vibes has failed every time over recent years. of course some things run serverless for async stuff. or some smaller scoped things might be more monolithic. but generally every shop is about the same these days.
Blip-Blip-Blop_@reddit (OP)
You made very good points, thank you.
morricone42@reddit
Checkout temporal, it's a breath of fresh air and solves a lot of accidental complexity we got used to over the years. I'll never greenlight another message queue (unless required for high throughout).
throwaway0134hdj@reddit
Most projects are brownfield from my experience unless you’re at some startup that’s building from the ground up.
latchkeylessons@reddit
I'm in management and most of my experience across multiple companies is just tacking on additional features to varying levels of decaying codebase. I'm surprised you are having so much exposure to migrating legacy code. I'd love to have more support from the companies I've worked for to do so. It's always painful for everyone adding new stuff to old code that's falling apart.
SofaAssassin@reddit
kevinossia@reddit
Distributed media processing systems. Lots of fun, very challenging.
Last-Daikon945@reddit
After working 2-3years on pretty legacy-ish(NextJS13 page router), I know it's not legacy legacy but still, I'm finally in charge of NestJS+Nextjs internal CRM-ish dashboard. So yeah, a breath of fresh air.
justUseAnSvm@reddit
What do I do?
Well, I take a look at my team's KR, go through all the data manually, realize the KR isn't actually possible, and try to blow it up.