[ChaoPrayaWave]

After reading this article, I suddenly remembered an elective I took in college called “Software Archaeology.” The professor asked us to reimplement compiler exercises from the 1970s. At the time it felt useless, but later I realized that course taught me more about system design than any modern framework ever did.

[NBJack]

Software archaeology in its most literal form would be a fantastic course addition for anyone going into a company with a medium-large codebase > 5 years old. Especially if you end up at a FAANG or something akin to it.

Being able to navigate not just a codebase but bugs/tickets attached to it, discussions in documents, old wiki pages that half work, extracting context clues from versioning history, tracing people by the team they worked on at the time...digital detective work is a serious part of the job sometimes.

[joquarky]

I just realized that I spent at least ten years as a professional software archaeologist.

That company develops most of the court software used in the US.

And it's very unlikely that they have improved their practices in the three years since I had to leave due to burnout.