I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.

I find that I struggle more with personal projects, as I tend to take things where I'm not even in the skirts of the learning curve, and consequently redo my work a few times.

▲

swat535 an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.

I have no idea where you work but 90% of companies are not like that. In fact, it's the opposite: filled with awful management, terrible timelines and legacy code.

Engineering had always been a nuisance to them and getting basic approval for maintenance regarding technical debt has been an uphill battle.

▲

JohnBooty 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Wow. That was hardly ever the case in my experience in ~30 years in the industry. I enjoy(ed) what you’re describing too but… how common was this for you?

▲

wincy 2 hours ago | parent [-]

Different 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.

▲

lowbloodsugar 2 hours ago | parent [-]

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.

	▲	szundi an hour ago \| parent [-]
		[dead]

▲

esseph 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

>I am one of those weirdos that found joy in business software. The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom

Where do you work! :)

	▲	swat535 an hour ago \| parent [-]
		I asked the same question, so that I could apply..

▲

skydhash 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> The clear specifications, reasonable timelines, and enough technical freedom, let you focus on clean, secure, resilient architectures.

The nicest thing was when you nailed down the architecture and then you are mostly twiddling your thumbs while waiting for the PM guys to have the next feature idea. Maintenance and bug fixing is a breeze.