Bulldozer00's Blog

I’m currently working on a really difficult assignment that’s starting to put me into an arrogant and self-righteous mood. My task is to add a customer-demanded feature to our flagship product that requires pervasive change throughout 400,000 lines of legacy embedded C++ code. Our flagship product is a software-intensive, distributed real-time sensor system that’s used to provide safety-critical surveillance information to our customers.

This is actually the third try at getting this task done. The first two attempts by other people fizzled out with nary a whimper. They were in way over their heads and thus, the work that they left behind is useless to me. So here I am, reverse-engineering 100s of thousands of lines of algorithmically deep code to:

• try and figure out what the current code base does
• try and understand why the code does what it does
• determine what changes need to be made to which code sections in order to implement the feature

This task is hard, really hard, but I’m up to it. The work requires long periods of sustained immersion in the code base and the mental absorption and retention of many fragile and diverse associations. Way more than Miller’s famous 7 plus or minus 2 limit of individual human capacity. I’m not getting any deep help and I’ve got two (yes two) managers taking “status” and watching the schedule . Other well-meaning product team members do help out when I ask them, but they just provide tidbits of help here and there. Help from the managers? Fuggedaboud it. It’s not their “job”, and they don’t have the expertise to help out even if they wanted to (which they don’t). Don’t get me wrong. They’re both good people and I like them very much, but they just can’t help, period.

Alas, I feel that I’m virtually all alone on this effort and it’s making me arrogant, self-righteous, and mad. Why’s it making me mad? Because I don’t feel appreciated and I feel that no one, save for one other person, has any idea of the inherent difficulty baked into the project.  I look at what I’m doing, compare it with what others around me are doing, and then I ask myself “why did I willingly sign up for this type of work – again“? When the job gets finished, I’ll in all likelihood just get an “atta boy” and the same average raise as everyone else – just as has happened several times in the past. Thank God that I’m internally motivated to grow and learn.

Boo hoo, poor me!