this post was submitted on 23 Jan 2025
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I've heard an ex microsoft employee said in a blog once that the windows team has no seniors. Anyone who has worked there for one or two years has left for better employers. Nobody knows how to refactor or maintain old codebases, so instead, they just write new things on top of the old things. The windows kernel has hardly changed since XP.
This makes sense, most of that explanation in the screenshot reeks of novices working with something they don't understand.
Copying and pasting a current example and changing the names... yep.
Instead of making it worse you could extract it to a new file. Make an interface. Write a unit test. Anything.
The guy wonders why the file is 15k lines long and then describes exactly why.
Right? Like my dude, bare minimum at least write down those steps in a text document so you can reference it the next time you have to add something. Bonus points for putting it on some shared internal wiki or whatever Microsoft uses.
I don't think anybody gets paid enough to write that down. In fact, they might get punished for wasting company time. They could open source it and people would automatically fix these things. Who knows.
Or write a tool that can do all these steps for you, reliably!