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Comment by olalonde | Hacker News Reader

Come on, you guys advertise this job post every month on HN. Hard to believe you haven't found the right candidate(s) yet...

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Looks like they want to have only the best candidate, but for maintaining a horrible codebase. Obviously a position that's hard to fill.

I'm exaggerating the horribleness of the codebase for effect. Lots of it is in good shape, and we've been working on incremental rewrites to fix up the worst legacy spots. There are certainly bad bits, but they're also working bad bits, whose badness largely comes from being hard to bend to new use-cases.

However! I see a lot of developers who would have a hard time fixing a bug / making a small change in an area which has a lot of legacy cruft present without going and rewriting the whole thing. Now, they are right that rewriting it is probably the best course of action from a codebase-health viewpoint... but it's not necessarily the actual best use of their time. If code is working then it's not an urgent priority that it get rewritten.

To be slightly trite, "perfect is the enemy of good."

That's why we'd like to get developers who are okay with the idea of working on a codebase that contains legacy code. And that's why I'm a little bit over the top about it.

We've hired something like 4 people since we started talking about it here, I think.

Heh, yes. Developer team size is up to 23 now according to our about-us page. My estimate in that post was totally off.

Sorry, but this seems very odd to me that a developer would be almost 50% off in estimating their own team size, then post a second comment correcting it only halfway, and finally getting the correct answer by looking at your 'About Us' page?

What kind of working environment do you have that in a team of less than 25, a member of that team can be that far off-base?

Lots of communication via Skype chats in which I don't pay attention to the count of people in the room, and developers split into a bunch of small product teams so I don't have personal dealings with most of them on a daily basis.

Also I'm bad at estimating these things apparently. :P

It doesn't seem that unreasonable to think that they have a continual need for additional developers.

They're also not the only company that has a "We're Hiring" post in each of these threads which strikes me as a good thing--assuming the term of employment for new developers is longer than a month. :)

they do that with every job they advertise..I tend to not to believe them

Believe what?

Well, my claims about the working environment being filled with puppies and kittens are obviously a bit hard to stomach.

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