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You may have heard the advice "join a union", but nobody meant it like this. Original. --Remy.
The end of the quarter was approaching, and dark clouds were gathering in the C-suite. While they were trying to be tight lipped about it, the scuttlebutt was flowing freely. Initech had missed major sales targets, and not just by a few percentage points, but by an order of magnitude.
Heads were going to roll.
How many times does it take to make something a tradition? Well, this is our third installment of Christmas in the Server Room, which seems pretty traditional at this point. Someday we'll run out of Christmas movies that I've watched, and then I'll need to start watching them intentionally. I'm dreading having to sit through some adaptation of the Christmas Shoes or whatever.
In any case, we're going to rate Christmas movies on their accuracy of representing the experience of IT workers. One 💾 grants it the realism of that movie where Adam Sandler fights Pac-Man, while 💾💾💾💾💾 tells us that it's as realistic as an instructional video about the Turbo-Encabulator.
The holiday season is an opportunity for employers to show their appreciation for their staff. Lavish parties, extra time off, whatever. Even some of the worst employers I've had could put together a decent Christmas party.
But that doesn't mean they all go right.
We've talked about the For-Case anti-pattern many, many times. And while we've seen some wild variations, and some pretty hideous versions, I think we have yet to see the exact example Ashley H sends us:
Nov 25for (int i = 0; i < 4; i++) {
if (i == 0) {
step1();
} else if (i == 1) {
step2();
} else if (i == 2) {
step3();
} else if (i == 3){
finalStep();
}
}
A long time ago, Joey made some extra bucks doing technical support for the neighbors. It was usually easy work, and honestly was more about being a member of the community than anything else.
This meant Joey got to spend time with Ernest. Ernest was a retiree with a professorial manner, complete with horn-rimmed glasses and a sweater vest. Ernest volunteered at the local church, was known for his daily walks around the neighborhood, and was a generally beloved older neighbor.
As the single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures creep across the northeast United States, one's mind drifts off to holidays- specifically summer holidays where it isn't so cold that it hurts to breathe.
Luciano M works in Italy, where August 15th is a national holiday, but also August is the traditional time of year for everyone to take off, leaving the country mostly shut down for the month.
Today's anonymous submitter sends us a short snippet. They found this because they were going through code committed by an expensive third-party contractor, trying to track down a bug: every report in the database kept getting duplicated for some reason.
This code has been in production for over a decade, bugs and all:
We recently asked for some of your holiday horror stories. We'll definitely take more, if you've got them, but we're going to start off with Jessica, who brings us not so much a horror as an omen.
Jessica writes:
When writing software, we like our code to be clean, simple, and concise. But that loses something, you end up writing just some code, and not The Code. Mads's co-worker wanted to make his code more definite by using this variable naming convention:
public static void addToListInMap(final Map theMap, final String theKey, final Object theValue) {
List theList = (List) theMap.get(theKey);
if (theList == null) {
theList = new ArrayList();
theMap.put(theKey, theList);
}
theList.add(theValue);
}
Betsy writes:
I found this snippet recently in a 20-year-old RPG program.
It feels like ages ago, when document databases like Mongo were all the rage. That isn't to say that they haven't stuck around and don't deliver value, but gone is the faddish "RDBMSes are dead, bro." The "advantage" they offer is that they turn data management problems into serialization problems.
And that's where today's anonymous submission takes us. Our submitter has a long list of bugs around managing lists of usernames. These bugs largely exist because the contract developer who wrote the code didn't write anything, and instead "vibe coded too close to the sun", according to our submitter.
Darren is supporting a Delphi application in the current decade. Which is certainly a situation to be in. He writes:
I keep trying to get out of doing maintenance on legacy Delphi applications, but they keep pulling me back in.
Remy's Law of Requirements Gathering states "No matter what the requirements document says, what your users really wanted was Excel." This has a corrolary: "Any sufficiently advanced Excel file is indistingushable from software."
Given enough time, any Excel file whipped up by any user can transition from "useful" to "mission critical software" before anyone notices. That's why Nemecsek was tasked with taking a pile of Excel spreadsheets and converting them into "real" software, which could be maintained and supported by software engineers.