• Industrial Automation Engineer (unregistered)

    disagree. even a junior developer should have at least a base level of common sense. this is just unforgivable.

  • DQ (unregistered)

    And he only re-orders one item? So when you've only 9 pencils left and it should be 10: let's order 1 new pencil. Never mind the shipping costs.

  • FrodoB (unregistered)

    I'm staring at this and while the idea of "I'll just increase it by one and it will magically reorder one" is logical in this "completely moronic and insane" way, I simply cannot understand where the "If we have enough of them I'll lower it by one and it will magically throw one out" comes in.

  • SG (unregistered) in reply to Industrial Automation Engineer

    The problem is that junior developers usually lack context. They typically have little experience of solving real-world coding problems, and even less knowledge of the business domain — so yeah, this seems entirely plausible for a junior developer whose training has largely consisted of over-simplified problems just like this one.

    They're not necessarily stupid, but they really do need to be supervised closely until they figure out how things work.

  • Pag (unregistered)

    What if quantityOnHand isn't an int but an object with horrific operator overloads that makes this work

  • (nodebb) in reply to Pag

    Even if that's the case, it's still just ordering one at a time. The only way that could work is if you wrote item.quantityOnHand += item.standardReorderQuantity;

  • Jaloopa (unregistered) in reply to Robert_Morson

    Which part of "horrific operator overloads" didn't you understand?

    operator ++ ()
{
    OrderMoreThings(this.StandardReorderQuantity);
    this._actualAmount += this.StandardReorderQuantity;

    return this._actualAmount
}
  • Robin (unregistered)

    Agree with pretty much all the above. While it's clearly and fundamentally a process flaw that a junior dev can make code changes that go to production without any checking at all (never mind code review, where was QA?) - the fact this dev thought this solved the problem without either testing it themselves or even thinking to ask anyone else if they were doing it right shows they're unlikely to get much beyond junior level even with proper support. (IMO, anyway.)

  • (nodebb) in reply to Robert_Morson

    @Robert_Morson - unless the supposed operator overload is sufficiently complete to know the appropriate increment (box, case, carton) to re-order and treats the increment value as simple a "minimum requirement"... << evil >>

  • Heinebold (unregistered)

    I actually don't believe this. Not even an AI trained solely on CS 101 textbooks would "solve" that this way.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    Maybe they tried to ask how to order more product, and the answer was a telephone-directory-thick documentation manual thrown at them, with instructions to go figure it out themselves.

    Then they put a "TODO" comment while they tried to figure it out, but their superior was having none of it, so they put something in as a placeholder.

    And maybe they got chewed out for not having an "else" section to go with the "if", so they chucked this in.

    So this is all the result of a manager with not enough time to do an actual code review, but only squeezed in 5 seconds to check the code against their coding standards. And a junior programmer who was hopefully realising at this point that this job was not going to be a good fit for them.

  • The Dave G (unregistered)

    Nobody code reviewed a junior's code? There's your problem

  • Argle (unregistered)

    I suppose management can be blamed here, but I was once a junior programmer. At 17 I distinctly remember writing a program to teach metric to small children for the Apple ][. Most of the ideas that went into it were mine. I also wrote a titration simulator for the Commodore Pet for a college course. I wrote all the presentation and animation routines myself. There was a professor who supervised how it was supposed to work out, but I was left to my own devices writing it. Code review? What's that? Git? Wasn't that part of a Monty Python sketch? If I could do all I did when I was legally a child, then the subject of the story could have done something better than what we're seeing. I'm more inclined to think the programmer is an idiot.

  • (nodebb)

    Unfortunately, I wouldn't be surprised that a junior developer wrote this. I recently watched a street person with mic video and young people - around 20 year old - struggled to answer questions like how many seasons are there and what continent are you on. The situation is dire.

  • MaxiTB (unregistered)

    I am more worried that business logic is written in something unreliable like Javascript. So honestly I don't expect any higher quality standards.

  • NotAThingThatHappens (unregistered) in reply to Heinebold

    In contrast to Computers and Vulcans, Humans can be illogical in the most bizare, insane and magnificent ways unimaginable.

  • NotAThingThatHappens (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    I like to believe that these videos are staged, fake or "alternate truths".

  • Anon (unregistered)

    I think there's actually an important lesson hiding here. Something I've learned the hard way, as I transition towards a senior developer role, is that juniors - especially fresh-off-the-vine types - will not actually ask questions unless you encourage and empower them to.

    This just isn't something we're taught in school. In school they teach you to do the assignment exactly as written. You're always given all the information you need, there's almost never any reason to ask questions. So you end up with newbies that can rattle off all the Gang of Four patterns and five varieties of FizzBuzz, but don't even know this is a skill they need. Add on the intimidation factor of being new, and you get stuff like this.

    I don't see this talked about a lot, and I don't know how to address it. Open-ended projects and work studies are nice, but really I think it comes down to the support that juniors get from their seniors when they actually enter the work force. In other words: it's on us.

  • (nodebb) in reply to NotAThingThatHappens

    It gave me a strong impression of being real. Sure, they don't show the interviews that don't suite the narrative of the video, but the mere existence of walking and talking, sane people who don't know what seasons are, does not bode well for our society and its future.

    I do understand though why you "like to believe" these videos are completely fake. It's that, or deep depression and heavy drinking.

  • Richard Brantley (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA
    Comment held for moderation.
  • (nodebb) in reply to Anon

    Alka Selzer and EverClear == Fizz-Buzz... Am I right?

    As a "Senior Developer" (anyone else restoring a bunch of 1968 mini's and teletypes?) I find I quite often learn so much from the most junior of them all..... just a thought...

  • (nodebb) in reply to Anon

    Alka Selzer and EverClear == Fizz-Buzz... Am I right?

    As a "Senior Developer" (anyone else restoring a bunch of 1968 mini's and teletypes?) I find I quite often learn so much from the most junior of them all..... just a thought...

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. TA

    If I had someone ask me those questions, I would probably look really confused for several seconds while I tried to figure out how it's a trick question.

  • (nodebb)

    People just don't think. Back when desktop machines were just starting to take over, I asked a software dev person to write up a little script that would graph a bunch of x-data vs y-data. They gave me something that crashed if fed negative values.

  • Peter D (unregistered) in reply to Argle

    You had the luxury of getting to put most of the ideas of the system. Our junior is interfacing with a giant existing system, with specs like "when we start to run out, order more!"

  • Brian Boorman (unregistered) in reply to Jaloopa
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  • Yikes (unregistered)
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  • Loren Pechtel (unregistered)
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  • (nodebb)

    Not even Amazon delivers that fast!

  • (nodebb)

    It looks less like honest mistake and more like deliberate decision. Some of the managers I know would do exactly that, then try to bury it under some bullshit from inspection, and pin it on someone else to cover their posterior/make someone else do it.

  • Nick (unregistered)

    As an ex-developer of supply chain software, this is even more terrifying than it looks at face value.

    Just suppose, for a second, that the Junior Dev had done it “right” - when fetching an item (let’s assume we’re selling one), we decrement the stock on hand. If the current stock level is below our minimum stock threshold, we place a new order for the standard re-order quantity. That would pass code review without much scrutiny… and would probably go through QA with some success too.

    However, we then hit Production. Stock level is 11, we sell one, we have 10, we sell another, we now have 9 so we order 10 more - they’ll arrive in a couple of days (and our goods-in process will update the stock on hand). Unfortunately, in the mean time, we sell the other 9 - each time, ordering an additional 10 items, because our stock on hand was less than 10.

    On the plus side, a few days from now we’ll have 90 in stock, so we’re not likely to run out for a while…

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Mr. TA

    To be fair, if you went around asking that on the streets of, say, Jakarta or Istanbul you might get some confused answers

  • jd (unregistered) in reply to MaxiTB

    I can assure you that it is equally possible to write horrible business logic code in, say, ABAP.

  • DCL (unregistered) in reply to Nick
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  • Ella Isabella (unregistered)
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  • farhankanju (unregistered)
    Comment held for moderation.
  • (nodebb) in reply to Chris

    So this is all the result of a manager with not enough time to do an actual code review

    Code reviews should not be done by managers, it's way too important!

  • Unkown (unregistered)
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