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Comment by justatdotin | Hacker News Reader

I experienced something similar early in my career. I was stunned when the old guy who'd been brought in for one day of consulting explained that he'd renamed his parameters with single characters to guarantee future work.

but the GM had already given us a stern warning to show him respect. also he got around without the use of his legs. If I'd reacted as I wanted to it would not have gone down well...

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> he'd renamed his parameters with single characters to guarantee future work.

Then they hired an intern with compiler experience and suddenly his help wasn't needed anymore

I was recently having a conversation where I speculated that with how bad some programmers are at naming things, some code reviews might actually be easier if you ran them through a code obfuscator first, so you can focus on what the code does rather than being tricked into making invalid assumptions by misleading names.

This gives me a great inspiration for a programming puzzle and learning method:

Replace all variable/function names with generics. Your only job is to give names to every variable (trying to figure out what each does). After you're done you can compare to de-obfuscated names to see if they do what you expected (if they're named sensibly).

Build the MVP!

A bit much on my plate. Care to join in?

well, kinda. anyway, legless ahole only got one day of high-rate consulting for his trouble.

Code review should throw his work back at him and tell him to name his variables properly

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