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Totally sucks. Code reviews and factual evidence of production maintenance concerns might help. (Mgmt is likely to dismiss concerns as whining unless there is

Totally sucks. Code reviews and factual evidence of production maintenance concerns might help. (Mgmt is likely to dismiss concerns as whining unless there is clear evidence of a problem.) Can you change the variable names and throw some of the sanitized insanity into a gist?

jlengrand 13y ago
This is an envy I fight every day when refactoring the code. I mean there is stuff so bad that even my non programmer friend laughed at. But naming the guy, or putting the guy's name out there would be a fault from my side, which I don't want to make :). But I really do see frightening stuff, trust me :).
- midas007 13y ago
  I trust you. (You wouldn't have written it.) In a small shop, a single person can easily be a huge liability. There's usually nowhere to hide because everyone has to be delivering on overall execution. If cofounders are from enterprise, this might've been lost in translation.
  - jlengrand 13y ago
    Exactly, the only other person able to react was my manager. And he does not have enough programming skills to understand the real danger. But my point if not so much about this guy and the problems we had. My question is more : What could / should be done to avoid this kind of developers to do more harm in other companies.
jlengrand 13y ago
I'll give an example here just for you : boolean a = true; boolean b = true; And every where through the code : if(a == false){ b = true } if(b == true){ a = false } Then you use either b or a in the code, depending on your feeling of the day. ANother great example, is inter thread communication, being performed using a boolean in database. The boolean is checked using a while true loop, in each process. The database was hit several thousand times a second, by each thread. In the end, it appears that the variable is just a shared value.
- WoodenChair 13y ago
  Based on the boolean example, I'm curious whether he was purposely writing bad code, just to mess with you. He may have really not cared for his job or been out to be purposely malicious for some other reason.
- midas007 13y ago
  Makes me wonder. Has this ever person built anything themselves that scaled? Because at this rate, the database is going to be an even bigger bottleneck that it usually is. There are plenty of people with decades of bad habits because there wasn't code review, peer coaching or treating coding as a "magical" [0] artisan profession. Something to be constantly refined but never completely mastered. [0] SICP, of course.

jlengrand 13y ago

This is an envy I fight every day when refactoring the code. I mean there is stuff so bad that even my non programmer friend laughed at. But naming the guy, or putting the guy's name out there would be a fault from my side, which I don't want to make :). But I really do see frightening stuff, trust me :).

midas007 13y ago
I trust you. (You wouldn't have written it.) In a small shop, a single person can easily be a huge liability. There's usually nowhere to hide because everyone has to be delivering on overall execution. If cofounders are from enterprise, this might've been lost in translation.
- jlengrand 13y ago
  Exactly, the only other person able to react was my manager. And he does not have enough programming skills to understand the real danger. But my point if not so much about this guy and the problems we had. My question is more : What could / should be done to avoid this kind of developers to do more harm in other companies.

jlengrand 13y ago

I'll give an example here just for you : boolean a = true; boolean b = true; And every where through the code : if(a == false){ b = true } if(b == true){ a = false } Then you use either b or a in the code, depending on your feeling of the day. ANother great example, is inter thread communication, being performed using a boolean in database. The boolean is checked using a while true loop, in each process. The database was hit several thousand times a second, by each thread. In the end, it appears that the variable is just a shared value.

WoodenChair 13y ago
Based on the boolean example, I'm curious whether he was purposely writing bad code, just to mess with you. He may have really not cared for his job or been out to be purposely malicious for some other reason.
midas007 13y ago
Makes me wonder. Has this ever person built anything themselves that scaled? Because at this rate, the database is going to be an even bigger bottleneck that it usually is. There are plenty of people with decades of bad habits because there wasn't code review, peer coaching or treating coding as a "magical" [0] artisan profession. Something to be constantly refined but never completely mastered. [0] SICP, of course.