• (nodebb)

    The worst WTF in this story was the final "fix" for the problems.

  • Hanzito (unregistered)

    Yeah, I was having 'Holy Schomly" laughs while reading, but the end is depressing. Financialization is the undoing of the world.

  • King (unregistered)

    I love happy ends!

  • (nodebb) in reply to R3D3

    It wasn't so much a WTF as purest evil.

  • (nodebb)

    the devs were underwater and the backlog of feature requests and bug fixes were growing. So Initech bought the vendor, fired most of the developers, and handed it to an Initech team.

    Yeah, that always goes well.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Is today's article actually related to this much older one? https://thedailywtf.com/articles/codename-cloudy-viper

  • Pabz (unregistered)

    "It's just some bugfixes," management said, "what could go wrong?"

    Yes, the word "just", especially combined with manglement logic, can certainly be the cause of a lot of pain!

  • Sauron (unregistered)

    This is "vulture software development".

  • dpm (unregistered) in reply to King

    Have you ever seen one?

  • markm (unregistered) in reply to jeremypnet

    If the code base is a messed up as this, but the product cannot simply be ended, new management faces two bad choices: Fire the original developers and lose the knowledge and experience of how to make it sort-of work. Or keep the original developers, at least some of whom are utterly incompetent.

    Or you might try to split the difference and keep an experienced and knowledgeable cadre while firing the rest. I suspect that usually the result is the worst of both alternatives; typical managers will interview the developers and lose the nerds and the ones with the least time on the project, while retaining the slickest of the senior developers - that is, the ones whose ability to impress management without actually being competent allowed them to gain control of and totally screw up the project in the first place. You'll also retain many developers who were competent when hired, but may never recover from the many years they spent doing it wrong as directed from above. And you've definitely lost anyone who could begin fixing the problems.

    You might attempt to deliberately reverse this: Keep the nerds, fire the slick guys. Fire the ones with the most years on the project, keep the ones that have barely been there long enough to know how to re-compile and release the software. It might work, but judging by many other WTF stories, it's most likely that the senior incompetents always kept that secret to themselves...

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    Alas, more SOP when WTF....

  • Richard Brantley (unregistered)

    I have been part of an acquired company when the purchaser did absolutely no due diligence on what exactly they were buying. It continues to confound me how some firms will pay millions of dollars without even thinking to inspect the product they're getting, only to be shocked when they learn the ugly truth.

  • Duke of New York (unregistered)

    There is no product in such bad condition that it cannot be sold to someone who makes it worse.

  • dpm (unregistered) in reply to markm

    That's a nice approach, but it would utterly fail in this scenario; actually, any approach would fail. Copying the entire codebase over for each customer with no source code control? That's nothing but a huge nuclear fireball --- there's no way to save it. Starting over is the only viable plan, though I admit it's only relatively better.

  • Klimax (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Well, code snippet is identical...

  • (nodebb) in reply to Richard Brantley

    I was part of a company that got acquired, and there was again a failure of due diligence. But instead of being a technical problem, it was a financial/contract problem: my company spent a couple of $million chasing a contract work $100k, because we had a relationship with a parent company of our customer. It turns out that ALL of the (customer) child companies hate the (customer) parent company, so having a relationship with the parent company was very nearly worthless -- and buying my startup was a very bad deal.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Anonymous

    Which in turn, according to a comment there, has the same code snippet as found in https://www.thedailywtf.com/articles/Ancestors.

  • David (unregistered) in reply to Richard Brantley

    ...And then send in the lawyers in a desperate attempt to find someone else to blame.

  • (nodebb) in reply to prueg

    One could day that this one line of JavaScript has a lot of ancestors... especially Daily WTF ancestors.

  • Hobbies (unregistered)

    This sounds scarily like a company that I used to work for.

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