In the world of software development, you have customers, who request and ultimately use the software, and development organizations, who build and test said software. Of course, it's never that simple. At some point, the customer has to try using the software in order to sign off on it.

At least in a sane business arrangement. Sometimes, things get all twisted around.

Francis was at the start of what was sure to be a challenging and rewarding journey towards a degree in Computer Science. One of his first classes was a group study course built around cross-departmental education. It forced together a Business major named Suzanna to play the role of Project Manager, Francis and Carlos, another CS student, as developers, and a Music major named Johann, as a tester. Assignments and interaction with the instructor were all online, but the group met in person to work on their project.

Andrei had just moved to a new country, and was looking for work. With the ideal job not immediately forthcoming, he jumped when an interesting opportunity opened at a small tech company: OldIsNewCo.

OldIsNewCo was one of the pioneers bridging the gap between old methods of communication (e.g. paper) and new methods of communication (i.e. the Internet), and was looking to overhaul their entire infrastructure. Their existing backend was built in C++, and according to The Big Boss: “C++ developers are expensive and hard to find. PHP developers are plentiful and cheap. Therefore, we need to re-implement everything in PHP.”

This seemed fishy to Andrei right from the start, but he figured it would be a good opportunity to brush up on his C++ and PHP skills and experience, and “a job’s a job”. So he accepted the position and met with his development tour guide to start diving into the sources and seeing how the backend applications worked.