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Comment by otagekki | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Don't bitch about legacy software

Bitching about legacy software is often necessary if you want something to change: pay off technical debt, additional time, migrate third party software to a newer version.

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Agreed. I've spent most of my career cleaning up other people's messes. Bitching about legacy software a) makes it clear that the prior practices are not acceptable and can't continue (no tests, ignoring edge cases, ignoring users, all the standard stuff that makes up legacy code) b) helps keep you sane.

The difference, which I hope the original author was alluding to, is that experienced dev accepts that legacy software is a part of life that has to be accepted, and dealt with, and that fixing it / keeping it on life support is frequently the right answer. Whereas junior's see it and run screaming or say there's no hope and it needs to be rewritten from scratch even though they don't really know the details of what "correct" behavior is.

You’re writing tomorrow’s legacy code today, so be kind about “other people’s messes” because you’re going to be the recipient of that same criticism one day.

That’s a different thing, though. Proposals for change which are backed up by examination of the costs and benefits are welcome. Pointless complaints like “why are we still using PHP for this system, we should retire it” without any analysis of why is much more like “bitching”, is annoying, and something that I’ve noticed almost all less experienced developers do.

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