Greenfield vs Legacy Projects

In 14 years I've got to work in greenfield projects exactly once. You are far more likely to end up working in a huge mess of legacy code...

Sure, but your greenfield project today will just be someone else's brownfield project in a couple years

> You will rarely get greenfield projectsIf only I had known that one earlier. I was fortunate enough to work only on greenfield projects for my first fifteen years as a software engineer. However, at some point, I was brought into a brownfield project [1] for maintenance, support, and bug fixes.The difficult part was not related to things like clean code, architecture, and so on, but to the lack of consistent thought processes around the choices made, as well as the fact that there is

Sounds like you aren’t working on a greenfield project, granted most people aren’t. But it’s not like that for everyone.

Greenfield projects are 1% of a SE job.IME “the code is crap, we need to start again” really means “I don’t want to (or worse, can’t) read source code that isn’t mine”.Reading and understanding someone else’s code then making and executing a plan to improve it is a much more valuable skill.If you’re always working on greenfield projects, you’ll never understand what it means to build software with longevity.

It's funny because 90% of my experience has been legacy projects, and the greenfield projects for me were the hardest, because it's really hard to organize as a team to build something from ground up, not kill each other with shovels in the process, and not introduce technical debt early on that will be impossible to pay off down the road.When joining a legacy project, most of the hardest work has already been done for you.

Not all of us have the luxury of our projects being greenfield.

Agreed. Greenfield projects are far more enjoyable, and you tend to learn more. Obviously we can't always do that and succeed, but they did well enough in this case. Preferably they'd go easier on the remarks about existing open source frameworks though.

Friendgineers: We all think working on greenfield projects is the dream. Maybe it is, but the reality is that the number of true greenfield projects is MUCH smaller than we think. Unless no one has ever done anything like you're doing, in any field, you're going to run into expectations at the boundaries. That's when you find that the field isn't as green as you thought.#greenfield #brownfield

Ditto.I was explaining greenfield vs. brownfield to a co-worker (non-developer) between periods of fixing a previous, junior, developers code that was essentially creating a seemingly infinite number of pages on our site.Keeping in mind the above, I also know that deadlines, changing requirements, and lack of a clear goal (due to the previously mentioned items), lead to this. Had I not worked with them, my decade and a half of experience would have strongly suggested that such was the case