I too have had the pleasure of working on a project that had tens of microservices without defined interfaces, sharing a database (and occasionally reaching into other service’s tables directly) with hundreds of thousands of lines of code and an Angular SPA. Oh and about a dozen poorly-written tests in total.
It was obviously a complete trainwreck, but it worked enough to convince multiple executives at different companies to actually pay for this crap. Sure it went down every week and was leaking data left and right, but it looked legit.
I clearly don’t appreciate the architecture or the reliability of it, but the tenacity of the people able to build such a monstrosity day in and day out, somehow wrangling it into shape against all odds. That’s the sort of mental willpower I wish I had.
Arrogance is a hell of a drug. The Dereks I met were all, in their own way, insufferably arrogant. Probably to pave over insecurities, but I don't really care as to the causative mechanism. The effect in each case was that they are so full of themselves, that they displayed an inexhaustible energy in maintaining and defending their Rube Goldberg shitfests.
And yet by all accounts management thinks he is great and chances are Derek is out there somewhere in the world right now as a well-paid journeyman. That’s where this industry is bonkers: it can’t tell good from bad, productive from unproductive, and it creates trauma and distrust for everyone.
Yeah, I need a better vocabulary for this. It's like seeing someone who has the height to play for the NBA, and they spend all day on the court, but somehow never take the time to learn how to dribble or shoot.
This is all very true, but whats weird is they seem to lack the pain response from their own creation. This hell of accidental complexity doesn’t seem to bother them, which means they can somehow handle it. I suspect this is what the author meant.
I hadn't reasoned my way to this exact mechanism, but I need to reflect on this. You're right that they seem to have no pain response to their own work. Unfortunately, I don't have a theory of mind for this because I feel like my own work leaves me in agony about 50% of the time.
I suspect the idea of effort being valued in itself has something to do with it. The more effort it takes, the more worthy must be. The alternative is to admit that the work was wasted, is wasted, and will continue to be wasted until the org dies or someone gets so disgusted with the status quo that they invoke the gods of sunk cost, flushing the whole thing down where it belongs.
Yeah. I've seen these types too, and what I find when I start working on fixing their sorry excuses for systems is that they don't even work. Because they're not geniuses, just like I can't work with their crap confidently because the spaghetti is too complex to keep track of, they also can't do that.
So once you write a test harness in order to make sure your refractors don't break things, you start to notice that the things you're testing are wrong. The code doesn't work correctly, it is littered with bugs.
Actually just finished a refactor like that. In a fairly small refactor I found multiple things that weren't working correctly. It was sending duplicated messages, it was incorrectly labeling messages with duplicate sequence numbers, and lots more.
I wrote equivalent code to replace it, spending roughly half the number of lines and getting rid of a complete shitload of unnecessary method parameters and other pointless stuff. Also fixed a hot path with an unnecessary O(n^2) complexity (where n could be pretty high) and a bunch of other dumb crap.
Met this kind of person three times so far, been asking myself the same question. I suspect they live too much in their own head.