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> But you’re about to accuse Bill — Bill! — of writing spaghetti code. Bill, who started with your company when they had carrier pigeons instead of emails, and
by knodi123 10y ago
> But you’re about to accuse Bill — Bill! — of writing spaghetti code. Bill, who started with your company when they had carrier pigeons instead of emails, and who singlehandedly built the original version of the software with nothing more than COBOL, baling wire and duct tape. Just who do you think you are, anyway?
Ugh, I had this problem once. The guy who wrote our company's web store did it in pure javascript (no libraries) and C (not even c++) on the back end purely for credit card processing. He didn't believe in googling something that he could figure out how to do himself, and consequently he never encountered a single best practice.
In the end, he was so resistant to change that our boss had to fire him. He went from being the alpha-dog with a decade of seniority who was treated with utmost respect, to fired, within about two weeks of me volunteering to rewrite the e-store and the CEO accepting my offer.
On the one hand, I wish I'd known how to handle that more diplomatically. On the other hand, thank god I don't have to work with such an irritable primadonna. He was the only employee allowed to work from home, because he was deathly allergic to computers (no joke), and had a special setup at his house where the computer was isolated in one room, monitor pressed up against a window, and only a keyboard and mouse in the room with him.
- Slackwise 10y ago> He was the only employee allowed to work from home, because he was deathly allergic to computers (no joke), and had a special setup at his house where the computer was isolated in one room, monitor pressed up against a window, and only a keyboard and mouse in the room with him. Story aside, I'm intrigued by this. Was he allergic to PCB dust or something? Or is this some sort of joke or reference wooshing over my head...?
- douche 10y agoThis sounds like some sort of bizarre psychosomatic thing, like Chuck from Better Call Saul and his "allergy to electricity"
- knodi123 10y agoMy take was it was either that, or a bullshit excuse to allow him to work from home. One the one hand, several other employees assured me his crazy home setup was legit. On the other hand, he would sometimes have to work a couple of days in our office during big events, and he seemed fine.
- knodi123 10y agono joke or reference, just a weird problem he claimed to have. I had no desire to get to know him well enough to learn more about it.
- xworks 10y agoPerhaps his system was better and you just didn't understand it and used a couple of buzzwords to get him fired.
- knodi123 10y agoYeah, and perhaps I'm a lobster pretending to type on a keyboard. The guy was a fucking moron. The user database was a flat file array stored, unencrypted, passwords and all, in users.js. I told him that was a huuuge security hole, and he said "What, you think hackers are just going to browser through our source code, looking for anything worth stealing?" The entire store database- users, products, orders, etc, were stored in flat JS arrays, and all of them were downloaded to the user's browser so the store could run client-side, "because then our site can scale infinitely since we're only serving static files!". Only the credit card transactions were transmitted to our server. Thank god he knew better than to store credit card info, because our entire array of servers (that he was in charge of) were hijacked by russians and turned into warez FTP sites.