Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

I feel like this is how most legacy code bases are made.

> Never giving me a chance to justify it, or even reading the commit messages, to understand why it was done that way.

This is a surefire way to re-introduce bugs that were fixed ages ago. Understanding why things are the way they are is the first order of business when working within a legacy code base. Was it done this way because the obvious way has a non-obvious edge case? Was it a requirement from the users? Or was it just the fastest way to do it at the time?

You have to have a certain mindset to effectively work on legacy code, and this isn't it. Most more junior developers I've known have a "rewrite" oriented mindset, meaning they don't know how to work within the constraints of what exists and refactor piecemeal. It's a hard to learn skill, generally learnt the hard way.



Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: