Dear Devs,
Regardless of your experience level, I'd like to talk to you this Saturday about being respectful of legacy software at a company where you've been hired.
A lot of it doesn't have tests. Sometimes it's "poorly" written. It's written using an older version of a language that has fallen out of favor. It has dated graphical interfaces. It is slow.
Those are of course only a tiny sample of the complaints I've heard. I've used a lot of them often while chuckling.
But here's the thing...
That legacy software put the company in a position to be able to hire YOU. Take care to learn about that software. Get to know why the engineers made the decisions they did. Write tests to preserve the behavior of the system. When possible, make it better.
Laughing at bad code is easy. Giving it the respect it deserves for creating your job and working diligently to preserve and improve the performance of desired behavior is hard. Good luck.
#LegacyCode
Regardless of your experience level, I'd like to talk to you this Saturday about being respectful of legacy software at a company where you've been hired.
A lot of it doesn't have tests. Sometimes it's "poorly" written. It's written using an older version of a language that has fallen out of favor. It has dated graphical interfaces. It is slow.
Those are of course only a tiny sample of the complaints I've heard. I've used a lot of them often while chuckling.
But here's the thing...
That legacy software put the company in a position to be able to hire YOU. Take care to learn about that software. Get to know why the engineers made the decisions they did. Write tests to preserve the behavior of the system. When possible, make it better.
Laughing at bad code is easy. Giving it the respect it deserves for creating your job and working diligently to preserve and improve the performance of desired behavior is hard. Good luck.
#LegacyCode
