4 ms·

It seems you are assuming that software is usually written well, or as well as it can be. It's much more likely to be the opposite.

jldugger 5y ago
Would be unsurprised if some poor engineer got assigned the project, realized it was an untractable mess of scunthorpe, and decided to check some boxes and move on to some ticket of higher value.
MattGaiser 5y ago
This seems like the kind of thing that would be horribly specced and be a user story along the lines of "the user must not be allowed to make an inappropriate username." The engineer would write something for every test case the product manager complained about, anything else computationally easy, and call it a day. I once had to implement an audit logging system. What was supposed to be logged? "Important actions." Nobody on the team could define it. We just logged every database write along with the username responsible and called it a day. Nobody ever followed up or inspected it. Same deal. Both exist mostly for compliance.
- h2odragon 5y ago
  Bad, old memory: "Every transaction must have a line written to the printer" Tracking down "why is the antique system suddenly slow". Power went out, system came back up fine, everything but the one ancient but vital app is fine. Dig, dig dig, there's this old dot matrix printer in another room (because it used to be loud and annoying) that no on has fed or looked at in years. It finally died with that outage, and it not accepting data was the problem. It had cheerfully printed the ribbon through, then fed out the rest of the box of paper it had, and that might've been several years before i saw it. The roller the paper was supposed to ride had been eroded. The metal rods the print head rode on had a perceptible bump at the ends of the normal stroke. The fix was a little dongle for the printer port that held the appropriate "i'm alive" lines up. hardware /dev/null. I'm thinking it was 25 pin rs232 because I remember a lot of cussing over it.
  - nickelpro 5y ago
    Holy cow how old was this system, circa 1975 or something?
    - Symbiote 5y ago
      I saw a dot matrix printer logging the chemical composition of the flue gas at a chemical research place in about 2002. That kind of thing is probably fairly common in the industry.
      - cameron_b 5y ago
        Dot matrix printers still make up a lot of the flight manifest printers at airport gates. Listen for them right before they close the doors. They print off the list of passengers checked in as boarded
    - h2odragon 5y ago
      I want to say it was probably installed in '85 and I saw it in '94; but i wouldn't swear to those dates. I'm pretty sure it was the only dot matrix printer with a serial port i ever saw. Even daisy wheels were parallel port by the time this went in; but they had a like 50ft cable to move it to the other room. Someone worked hard and paid large to set that up originally.

jldugger 5y ago

Would be unsurprised if some poor engineer got assigned the project, realized it was an untractable mess of scunthorpe, and decided to check some boxes and move on to some ticket of higher value.

MattGaiser 5y ago

This seems like the kind of thing that would be horribly specced and be a user story along the lines of "the user must not be allowed to make an inappropriate username." The engineer would write something for every test case the product manager complained about, anything else computationally easy, and call it a day. I once had to implement an audit logging system. What was supposed to be logged? "Important actions." Nobody on the team could define it. We just logged every database write along with the username responsible and called it a day. Nobody ever followed up or inspected it. Same deal. Both exist mostly for compliance.

h2odragon 5y ago
Bad, old memory: "Every transaction must have a line written to the printer" Tracking down "why is the antique system suddenly slow". Power went out, system came back up fine, everything but the one ancient but vital app is fine. Dig, dig dig, there's this old dot matrix printer in another room (because it used to be loud and annoying) that no on has fed or looked at in years. It finally died with that outage, and it not accepting data was the problem. It had cheerfully printed the ribbon through, then fed out the rest of the box of paper it had, and that might've been several years before i saw it. The roller the paper was supposed to ride had been eroded. The metal rods the print head rode on had a perceptible bump at the ends of the normal stroke. The fix was a little dongle for the printer port that held the appropriate "i'm alive" lines up. hardware /dev/null. I'm thinking it was 25 pin rs232 because I remember a lot of cussing over it.
- nickelpro 5y ago
  Holy cow how old was this system, circa 1975 or something?
  - Symbiote 5y ago
    I saw a dot matrix printer logging the chemical composition of the flue gas at a chemical research place in about 2002. That kind of thing is probably fairly common in the industry.
    - cameron_b 5y ago
      Dot matrix printers still make up a lot of the flight manifest printers at airport gates. Listen for them right before they close the doors. They print off the list of passengers checked in as boarded
  - h2odragon 5y ago
    I want to say it was probably installed in '85 and I saw it in '94; but i wouldn't swear to those dates. I'm pretty sure it was the only dot matrix printer with a serial port i ever saw. Even daisy wheels were parallel port by the time this went in; but they had a like 50ft cable to move it to the other room. Someone worked hard and paid large to set that up originally.