this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2025
195 points (99.5% liked)
TechTakes
2150 readers
88 users here now
Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
This is not debate club. Unless it’s amusing debate.
For actually-good tech, you want our NotAwfulTech community
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
At a new job I asked about the crash rate of the mobile app during the interview, and they brought up a dashboard showing it was very low. I wasn't paying enough attention, but they were showing me the daily crash rate, and the day rolled over in UTC time, and had apparently just rolled over in the middle of our day, so not a lot of crashes yet. It actually had an abysmal crash rate. Structured / designed poorly at the core.
Fixing that app took years. Some of it was definitely soul deadening, but there was also something good about turning it all around and people seeing the positive impact as things kept getting better.
I like tackling a spaghetti garbage dump of code, and bringing it some structure and crash resistance.
It can be good, but depending on how much it is, can get pretty monotonous fixing the same problem repeatedly. This was a multi year thing in this case.
Hopefully you at least got some measure of free reign with it. The main times I find cleanup jobs soul-destroying is when I'm getting micromanaged or otherwise harassed by clueless managers.
But given space to breathe and work, I often enjoy tidying up code messes. Gives me the same sensation as when I used to rewire spaghetti data closets in college.
Ya, they let me do it how i wanted and I mostly got to choose what I'd work on next for the clean up task.
It was great to start, but it's size just eventually made it tedious. Oh, I'm doing this again, and I know exactly what my week is going to look like, because the other screen I just did is wrong in exactly all the same ways from top to bottom.
If a new feature was needed in an area and it wasn't urgent I'd say I'm fixing that area first, and then make the new feature. If there were serious bugs that needed fixing, unless it was a easy hotfix with other priorities, I'd fix that whole area instead first.
Edit: Watching the crash rate tick down with all the progress though was great.