klekih

And how much time did you spend automating those things? Is it worth? i.e Is the time spent on cooking minus time spent on automating a positive number?

I think this depends a lot of where you have tried this. As far as I'm concerned the university I'm looking to apply to for a PhD is far from this type of concerns. It has other problems, of course, I don't expect the PhD to be a lean experience anyway.

I hope it is. If I'll find a subject which I'm passionate about, within a correct environment and context, it can be a good and fruitful experience.

So I'm working on a project, within a product company, where 3 of the main components were written by an outsourcing company. From time to time I had to solve support tickets for those components.

Now I use this C# code I found there as "do-not"s. Let me give you few examples: classes with 24000 (yeah, 24 thousands) lines. Tens of classes in the same file. Methods with hundreds of lines. Switches in switch in while in while(true). Operations (push and pop) on same queue from different threads and lot of commented code with synchronizing logic which shows they just didn't understand how threads can share a bloody queue object. Copy-paste of logic because why do you have classes. Use statics, you dumb. And the most evil thing, the best and worst example is a class which uses an array[] with fixed size but behaves like a List with dynamic size. No generics. No use of .net classes.

I can't imagine how those projects were signed by the main architect while he asks, during usual code reviews, for nitpicks: change the name, move the property upper with a line, etc.

I think the time and money spent to fix various things within those componentes could have been greatly reduced if not that messy haywire code.