Hacker News Reader

Comment by piramida | Hacker News Reader

Beautiful code! I mean, if you program for an enterprise, one of the ways to secure your job is to generate few hundred thousand lines of crap like that and have enterprise heavily use the end product (you need to make it work first).

Then you will become indispensable. Managers will never know if your code is unmaintainable because software you wrote is inherently complicated or because you are an "awesome" programmer. New coders hired to maintain your codebase will admit failure quickly, or propose costly "total rewrites", so it becomes cheaper to keep you around.

Sadly, all this from experience on the receiving end. We ended up throwing away similar code and firing original developers, but we spent ungodly amounts of time at meetings first.

View on HN

Its a perfect storm. Lots of lines of LOC indicating massive productivity, complete unintelligibility to other coders indicating your rock-star status, and a completely intractable architecture guaranteeing your job security.

WTF clueless or diabolically brilliant?

"lines of LOC"? Is this a new recursive definition for LOL?

Sadly, its a word for word take of a little pamphlet on productivity I got on the first day of a consulting gig in 2003. At first I thought it was hilarious, then I tried to explain it to them, then I took to using it ironically like a grown man in Vision skatewear, then in a sad bit of learned helplessness it stuck in my brain, emerging to embarrass me on this future date.

I am ashamed.

Here's an example of 2 LOLOC:

LOC

'lines of LOC' sounds to me like a phrase meaning 'lines and lines of frivolous code of which the only value is incrementing the LOC count'.

It is even scarier. It occurs if the number of lines of code someone produced spans across several lines. And if you want nightmares, extrapolate LoC and LoLoC into LoLoLoC. shivers

That looks like an example of PNS Syndrome to me.

I've sadly encountered code like that at work :(

The core app for the company I work for (a FORTE UDS piece of legacy code called OSIRIS) has similar strings embedded in the database, for things such as determining the user's profile (why make a lot of columns when you can have one column represent a lot of values). It's obscure as hell.

This post reminded me I need to find alternatives soon - though it's hard to quit because the company I work for pays slightly above average wages for my country and has job security.

Jawdropping code I agree ;)

Recently I found this link which was an attempt to justify TDD/BDD methods to program something then to unfactor it and make it significantly more complex. Not as awesome as the TDWTF post though.

http://rubyconf2008.confreaks.com/unfactoring-from-patterns....

There was a company I worked for, that is very very large, that was coming out with "new technology" that had hundreds of thousands of lines of C code just like this.

Most of the code was approximately 20 years old. The original architects are probably dead.

And so was that project in about a year and a half... so I quit. I'm much happier now.

I work for a company were a predecessor made this kind of terrible code. Nobody can understand how it works. And as the product works, most people say: "He was a Genius".

But the amusing part is the was proposed a full job and he refused it for a better paid one.

Until now, it is a bit miraculous he's product didn't exploded while trying to maintain it. And each time I propose to rewrite some part, it is refused because it seems too _risky_ to touch this code.

The worst is everybody is aware of the fact that this code cost very much. But nobody want to (or can) pay a bit extra immediately to redo the complete project with "clearly" some new bug that will certainly appear.

I've seen H1Bs from India using this technique.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com