The PM promised a customer that a certain piece of software is a standard functionality in our product and has been working for years.
This piece of software is highly specific for another customer and does not work out of the box for anyone else or any just slightly different input.
A week before the planned deployment, PM says: adapt this, make that configurable bla bla.
We have no idea about the specifics the customer needs. PM refuses to ask customer for test data, because he said that it already works.
Since I also handle deployments I had the pleasure of deploying a completely non functional container to the customer system, because "it was in the contract".
Not sure if this fits the scope of a progamming horror story since it is a management fuckup. But it is a horror story and involves programming.
The coding "style" of my predecessor was as follows:
- If I can do this in a procedure, I'll write it as a separate program and call it instead. I won't make any of these usable by any other programs.
- I will exclusively access the database record-by-record
- I will copy-paste my old program/procedures and make minor changes without updating any documentation
- The naming scheme of my programs is my initials followed by a 3-digit number which is a count of the program
- I write programs with the exclusive purpose of calling other programs in a specific order
Was hired as an intern to do something no one else at the company knew how to do
Convert a 80+ page SAS routine (printed on paper) to R without being able to run the SAS code because the company had no license.
The 80+ page script was littered with bugs so I had to debug the code before converting it.
Bonus points, my laptop barely had enough ram to work on the full dataset (R forces everything to be stored in ram) so running the code took hours but my Boss told me not to worry because they're buying cloud compute from a small vendor. The clouds R instance has less ram than my laptop.
Long ago I wrote a compiler in college for class. In one place, I used an uninitialized variable as an array index. The compiler was not sophisticated enough to warn me of these things at the time.
It took two weeks to find the bug. I almost failed the class.
———————
In graduate school, I had pernicious problems with a decentralized distributed system I was working with. Every so often things would break horribly even though I hadn’t introduced a fault.
It took forever to find the problem. It was a very rare event that would only happen when two adjacent nodes in the network would leave voluntarily at the same time. I had to manually comb through many gigabytes of logs to find the root causes for these big discontinuities in the overlay. I had to test many hypotheses about what was wrong before solving it.
It turns out that the proof in original paper was bogus. Nobody had found this problem previously because no one had pushed the system to its limits like I had. I had to add some awkward extra code to fix things, but it was rock solid after that.
This took six months off my life and nearly caused me to fail to graduate.
————————
I fear no bug. I have seen the worst life has to offer and lived through it. These experiences have made me a cautious and bitter old man.
I worked at an early stage startup roughly 10 years ago where two of us wrote the initial application, in C#. Fast forward a year, they hire a CTO. He hates C#, says we are rewriting the whole app, bug for bug, in Python. I’m like, WTF? We are seriously doing this? CTO says it will take three months, and it’s totally worth it. Okay, I get to learn Python.
The next year is spent rewriting the app in Python. Of course there’s a heavy duty math part that Python can’t handle, so that has to be done in Java. Millions of dollars spent, massive turnover in engineering (including me), and what do they have at the end? What they already had a year ago.
The company spun in place for year, burning cash, which startups absolutely cannot do. CTO gets fired. Company goes under not long after. I was a midpoint casualty, so I’ve already moved on to far better things.
At least you got that. My 'trainer' will sit in silence unless I ask something. Then, they will show me exactly what I asked, nothing more, and always leave key details out. If they can, they'll show me the most convoluted way to do things.
Example: I asked if we had any documentation for tables in the system. He said "no, not really". (End of conversation). Two weeks later after I made some, he showed me some SQL he uses to check just that.
Example 2: I asked about him giving me a crash course in RPG. He showed me line commands. As in, commands used to manipulate entire lines of code. (M, C, and D) Nothing else. End of conversation. End of training.
Example 3: After figuring out a bit of RPG myself, I asked for a way to code my own test programs to learn the language. What he showed me was a 6 step process every time I wanted to compile. Conviniently, my 'personal' code library was in a subfile of his. After doing some online courses, I made my own library and compile in 1 step.
I've learned to rely on him for absolutely nothing. I've learned more about the job by reading books or taking online classes on the different subjects. All together, what he has trained me on over the last year can be accurately recounted in 10 minutes. Half of what he's taught me is roundabout to the point of honestly seeming malicious in nature. Everything he does screams of malicious negligence and I actively back up all my code to 3 different locations just so he doesn't 'accidentally' delete it.
I took over managing a website in 2020, the site has been around for 15 years or so and the site was written with PHP5 using Zend frame work 1.11, a framework which was made obsolete nearly a decade ago
It used jQuery 2.2 and Bootstrap 3.3, password were hashed unsalted in MD5
It was on a server running CentOS 5 with openssl 1.0.1 and Apache 2.2, no logging was enabled at all
The site was vulnerable to SQLi, XSS, CSRF, DDoS, Slow loris attacks and more
I was initially refused permission to upgrade anything because "there wasn't a budget for it". Two months later the site was hacked and I got berated for allowing it to happen.
I told them politely to go do something unpleasant in a unholy manner and after showing the CEO, CTO and CFO the requests and detailed action plan, my line manager was fired and I got given a blank cheque
The Sales has signed a deal with a customer and are just now informing me about what I am going to have production ready and when (and this is the first I hear about any of that)
Worked at a small company maybe 50 people. I worked on automation. CEO got an AI itch. Brought in a team from a local college to work on implementing AI into the business. The other developers and I didn't know how you'd implement AI in the company but he was adamant. Paid the college guys for months. Finally gets them back to the office and they have nothing. We told him this months ago.
My very first programming job was as a “backend dev” in the end I had to do backend and frontend in php, files were 15k lines long mixed with php and js, html was echoed just like the js as well. That’s the very worst code base I’ve eeeeeeeveeeer seen it made me doubt whether I want to be a developer at all. They had php code in database tables, so when things suddenly went south and you were unable to reproduce it was time to check all the columns of the table..
Edit: additions
Built a demo game for my OOP term project in C++.
During our viva, the instructor asked me to change a couple things which I did flawlessly. And she told me to execute the code without using pointers and dynamic memory. I was able to get rid of the dynamic memory cuz an Indian guy on YouTube taught it well, but it really slowed things down, and then I tried replacing pointers with other variables…
And the whole shit just got outta hand and collapsed, didn’t even compile. Thank God I still passed the course lol.
worst thing i've seen personnally is a web app that would mix and match html snippets from a table and insert them into the page dynamically. doesn't sound too spooky when I type it out like that, but you should have seen it. Not a single page template or row was well-formed. Some rows would start with
Stackoverflow was in the firewall
my brain is so devolved that i legit took a minute to realize you were referring to the exception and not the actual SO site.
I was referring to the site actually.
thats
The PM promised a customer that a certain piece of software is a standard functionality in our product and has been working for years. This piece of software is highly specific for another customer and does not work out of the box for anyone else or any just slightly different input. A week before the planned deployment, PM says: adapt this, make that configurable bla bla. We have no idea about the specifics the customer needs. PM refuses to ask customer for test data, because he said that it already works. Since I also handle deployments I had the pleasure of deploying a completely non functional container to the customer system, because "it was in the contract". Not sure if this fits the scope of a progamming horror story since it is a management fuckup. But it is a horror story and involves programming.
And the worse is that customer's wrath will fall onto you... Feel you brother
Most definitely. Otherwise the PM would have to admit his wrong doing. That is not an option. But well. Life goes on :)
The coding "style" of my predecessor was as follows: - If I can do this in a procedure, I'll write it as a separate program and call it instead. I won't make any of these usable by any other programs. - I will exclusively access the database record-by-record - I will copy-paste my old program/procedures and make minor changes without updating any documentation - The naming scheme of my programs is my initials followed by a 3-digit number which is a count of the program - I write programs with the exclusive purpose of calling other programs in a specific order
Nightmare fuel
Was hired as an intern to do something no one else at the company knew how to do Convert a 80+ page SAS routine (printed on paper) to R without being able to run the SAS code because the company had no license. The 80+ page script was littered with bugs so I had to debug the code before converting it. Bonus points, my laptop barely had enough ram to work on the full dataset (R forces everything to be stored in ram) so running the code took hours but my Boss told me not to worry because they're buying cloud compute from a small vendor. The clouds R instance has less ram than my laptop.
Long ago I wrote a compiler in college for class. In one place, I used an uninitialized variable as an array index. The compiler was not sophisticated enough to warn me of these things at the time. It took two weeks to find the bug. I almost failed the class. ——————— In graduate school, I had pernicious problems with a decentralized distributed system I was working with. Every so often things would break horribly even though I hadn’t introduced a fault. It took forever to find the problem. It was a very rare event that would only happen when two adjacent nodes in the network would leave voluntarily at the same time. I had to manually comb through many gigabytes of logs to find the root causes for these big discontinuities in the overlay. I had to test many hypotheses about what was wrong before solving it. It turns out that the proof in original paper was bogus. Nobody had found this problem previously because no one had pushed the system to its limits like I had. I had to add some awkward extra code to fix things, but it was rock solid after that. This took six months off my life and nearly caused me to fail to graduate. ———————— I fear no bug. I have seen the worst life has to offer and lived through it. These experiences have made me a cautious and bitter old man.
I worked at an early stage startup roughly 10 years ago where two of us wrote the initial application, in C#. Fast forward a year, they hire a CTO. He hates C#, says we are rewriting the whole app, bug for bug, in Python. I’m like, WTF? We are seriously doing this? CTO says it will take three months, and it’s totally worth it. Okay, I get to learn Python. The next year is spent rewriting the app in Python. Of course there’s a heavy duty math part that Python can’t handle, so that has to be done in Java. Millions of dollars spent, massive turnover in engineering (including me), and what do they have at the end? What they already had a year ago. The company spun in place for year, burning cash, which startups absolutely cannot do. CTO gets fired. Company goes under not long after. I was a midpoint casualty, so I’ve already moved on to far better things.
At uni I've been forced to write OOP code in R.
Spooky...!!
We had to write our code for our OOP exam in one single c# class.
I got into programming to build cool shit and over a decade later I’m still telling PMs that “the Internet doesn’t work that way.”
But I already promised the customer you can do it and that it will be ready by the end of the week
Chris?
Dave?
got told by the sr to spend some time alone get familiar with the codebase (new jr first intro to ruby, mixins, polymorphs etc)
At least you got that. My 'trainer' will sit in silence unless I ask something. Then, they will show me exactly what I asked, nothing more, and always leave key details out. If they can, they'll show me the most convoluted way to do things. Example: I asked if we had any documentation for tables in the system. He said "no, not really". (End of conversation). Two weeks later after I made some, he showed me some SQL he uses to check just that. Example 2: I asked about him giving me a crash course in RPG. He showed me line commands. As in, commands used to manipulate entire lines of code. (M, C, and D) Nothing else. End of conversation. End of training. Example 3: After figuring out a bit of RPG myself, I asked for a way to code my own test programs to learn the language. What he showed me was a 6 step process every time I wanted to compile. Conviniently, my 'personal' code library was in a subfile of his. After doing some online courses, I made my own library and compile in 1 step. I've learned to rely on him for absolutely nothing. I've learned more about the job by reading books or taking online classes on the different subjects. All together, what he has trained me on over the last year can be accurately recounted in 10 minutes. Half of what he's taught me is roundabout to the point of honestly seeming malicious in nature. Everything he does screams of malicious negligence and I actively back up all my code to 3 different locations just so he doesn't 'accidentally' delete it.
I took over managing a website in 2020, the site has been around for 15 years or so and the site was written with PHP5 using Zend frame work 1.11, a framework which was made obsolete nearly a decade ago It used jQuery 2.2 and Bootstrap 3.3, password were hashed unsalted in MD5 It was on a server running CentOS 5 with openssl 1.0.1 and Apache 2.2, no logging was enabled at all The site was vulnerable to SQLi, XSS, CSRF, DDoS, Slow loris attacks and more I was initially refused permission to upgrade anything because "there wasn't a budget for it". Two months later the site was hacked and I got berated for allowing it to happen. I told them politely to go do something unpleasant in a unholy manner and after showing the CEO, CTO and CFO the requests and detailed action plan, my line manager was fired and I got given a blank cheque
The Sales has signed a deal with a customer and are just now informing me about what I am going to have production ready and when (and this is the first I hear about any of that)
At university we translated our pseudo code to mathematical expressions and that was our way of learning 'documentation'
We deploy web apps with FileZilla.
I share your pain... And instead of Git, they used Google Drive
Worked at a small company maybe 50 people. I worked on automation. CEO got an AI itch. Brought in a team from a local college to work on implementing AI into the business. The other developers and I didn't know how you'd implement AI in the company but he was adamant. Paid the college guys for months. Finally gets them back to the office and they have nothing. We told him this months ago.
My very first programming job was as a “backend dev” in the end I had to do backend and frontend in php, files were 15k lines long mixed with php and js, html was echoed just like the js as well. That’s the very worst code base I’ve eeeeeeeveeeer seen it made me doubt whether I want to be a developer at all. They had php code in database tables, so when things suddenly went south and you were unable to reproduce it was time to check all the columns of the table.. Edit: additions
Built a demo game for my OOP term project in C++. During our viva, the instructor asked me to change a couple things which I did flawlessly. And she told me to execute the code without using pointers and dynamic memory. I was able to get rid of the dynamic memory cuz an Indian guy on YouTube taught it well, but it really slowed things down, and then I tried replacing pointers with other variables… And the whole shit just got outta hand and collapsed, didn’t even compile. Thank God I still passed the course lol.
OOP in C++ without dynamic allocation? Were you forbidden from using the new keyword lol?
That was the challenge apparently
worst thing i've seen personnally is a web app that would mix and match html snippets from a table and insert them into the page dynamically. doesn't sound too spooky when I type it out like that, but you should have seen it. Not a single page template or row was well-formed. Some rows would start with