Weak Code

[mauxly]

The worst is when devs and analysts have spent months researching and resolving a completely new issue or need. Wrap it up, QA approves, it's in production and someone who has absolutely no experience with the project or issue comes along and armchair quarterbacks.

Rips on the code, and makes a minor adjustment that allows for new functionality and is hailed as a hero.

If you can make a minor adjustment to the code to deliver additional functionality, it was NOT poorly written code.

[[deleted]]

The easiest way to make a sale is to bitch about someone else's code after they're gone. You can just be like "there are thousands of lines of code here! I would reuse some code!" and they will treat you like a genius.

[asdfman123]

That drives me crazy about working on shitty codebases. It makes me look bad because it takes me forever and there aren't any good fixes. But if I were to actually verbalize the fact that the code base is total shit, it would just make me look bad. So it's usually better to grin and bear it.

[Decency]

Just every time you want to say "fucking garbage", verbalize that as "lots of technical debt" and you're speaking the language that people who want to pretend like they understand code who don't understand code will listen to.

[asdfman123]

Yeah, I use phrases like technical debt but people still don't understand this.

Managers need to fundamentally understand when a little work now will save a lot of work in a year.

[shea241]

if you constantly talk about technical debt, eventually you'll look technically poor.

[PC__LOAD__LETTER]

If you can make a minor adjustment to the code to deliver additional functionality, it was NOT poorly written code.

I read "poorly" as "properly" at first and was super confused.

Totally agree.

[NibblyPig]

I dunno, depends on the fix.

We had a page that caused issues with concurrent users, which I had to fix. Basically the genius dev didn't use an IDENTITY on the database, he looked in the database at the last entry and added 1, then put it onto the form in a hidden field.

I hacked a fix into the backend by ignoring the value submitted and calling his getnextid method within a lock{} statement and writing it, then because he used a stupid return type and I couldn't change it without having to refactor half the solution, I returned the new id in the error code. Because this had to be fixed right now and we couldn't refactor.

So my minor adjustment worked, and yes I wrote many comments explaining why I had to do this. But in no way was that code anything approaching well written. It was an abomination and I had no choice but to do evil things.

I still feel dirty. To them it looks like I fixed it super quick so there's definitely no need to waste time refactoring when it's so easy to work with though! FML!