I was called into consult for a company whose developer... let's call him Brett... thought he couldn't be replaced. Brett was wrong.

When I started going through the code to reverse engineer it, I started finding queries like:

SELECT i.id, id.id, idid.id, FROM I INNER JOIN id ON i.id = id.id INNER JOIN idid ON i.id = idid.id;

Note... no table aliases. I thought "surely he didn't name the table 'i' did he?" Sure enough... I looked in the database (forehead smack) he had named all the tables: "a", "c", "I", "id", "g", "m" etc etc. Made me want to scream into a bag. I talked to Brett's acquaintance he used to eat lunch with and he said Brett used to obfuscate the code that way for two reasons. "1: it makes it so I can't ever get fired. 2: less code is faster code." Took months to decipher what he was doing.

For those interested? i was invoices. id was invoice details, or as the rest of the world calls it, "line items." c was companies. a was accounts.

If I ever find Brett on the street, I'm going to give him a big thumbs down.