If You don’t want to tell the company name – tell what city was that and do You know if that company is still operating? :D

I take it Wednesday was your last day? ;-)

tell me this a fictional tale… please…… :D

No I don’t mean someone that knows Java and is learning Python. I’m talking about a person who just started programming or one that was a database person and knew ‘SQL’ but had never programmed.

In my first experience, the person before me, took 2 years and was paid 200k to start with an old program and upgrade it. I took it over from him. It was in a language and development enviroment called Rapid. I had never dealt with or heard of it.

After learning the language and the code base I found he had put a bug into it to go into an endless loop after after a certain date. I also added all of the requirements they wanted and cut the code size by 1/2 in 6 months. I ended up rewritting about 80% of the code because it was really bad. The guy had written 32 different functions to do the same thing except for 3 variables that had changed.

The current company I’m working with on a part time basis on the weekend for about 20 hours. I was actually looking for another full time job when I came across this company. After interviewing with them and seeing there code base I knew I didn’t want to work for them full time so I offered to work for them on the weekends 20hours a week and they let me.

There programmer was just learning C++ and did databases before. The code was a mess. I found things like indexes in arrays that were out of bounds. 2500 lines functions and lots of globals in each class.

At first, I was upset with this person. But now I realize they have given me a great opportunity to make a lot of extra money and gain experience.

I think all of these bad programs can be a good opportunity to make extra money and then move on. You can also keep the people in the company as a good point of contact and reference.

I had a guy at work that stopped using semi-colons in all his Actionscript 2 code because he claimed they increased file size. AS may have been built to not use them some 6 years ago, but the compiler really can’t handle it that well and often would fail to compile his code. And, of course, he saved absolutely nothing on filesize, because the compiler doesn’t keep the ;s…

Right now i am working on a research prototype, in a big company, and its code is even messier. Let me give you two examples:

1. 700 lines of C functions inside kernel and in Xen hypervisor ?

2. 45 Kilobytes of data is copied from one buffer to another with interrupts disabled. wtf ?

And whats worst is, these guys who wrote the code has 6-10 years of experience. One guy is manager ;-).

They don’t use normal spinlocks, they always use irqsave/irqrestore spinlocks everywhere. Yeah, all those ‘Avoid spinlocks’ warnings are not for us ;-)

Aah, im gonna quit soon.

It seems unusual for a small team to take so pride in their work.