71

Time for an actual rant:

During an internship I heard from my PM that my assignment for the week after was going to be working on a specific sql query to add some features and fix some bugs.

When talking with colleagues about that assignment later, they laughed and referred to the query as the "query of doom" (QoD), naive as I was back then, I thought that one of my colleagues had the QoD displayed on his screen because the query he was working on looked rather large (about 20 lines). They all laughed and told me I was in for a treat.

Starting my assignment the week after I was horrified to find out the QoD was huge, and by huge I mean, printing that specific query resulted in 8 A4 pages font size 10, front and back.
There were over a 100 union statements, no proper aliases, no documentation, not a single foreign key in the entire database, naming that makes no sense. And everything written manually by 10 different developers over the past years, who all fell of the face of the earth.

And this was only the query of doom. The entire product was a complete clusterfuck of forms with a queries directly behind action buttons, because we weren't allowed to make classes (yes you read that correctly. We couldn't make classes, unless we had a very compelling reason). Everything was created by over 30 different devs who only managed to stay just long enough to get some work done.

And all of this was the result of a PM who didn't believe in frameworks, ORM's, OOP, classes, ... because that made the software slow. To this day he still manages that product, but I'm glad that I quickly decided to move on.

Comments
  • 12
    Jesus fucking Christ.
  • 6
    Wow! That's an A+ rant.
    While you were there were you able to make any headway? Was the PM the type of person you could reason with?
    If your current position better? I know it can't be worse.
  • 5
    "Classes are for school children, this is adult programming!"
  • 0
    rings a bell 😂😂
  • 1
    Currently in Degree year 2, I see no scalafx developement here? Because our lecturer is teaching scalafx and we have to develop final project using scalafx. dammmmm #scalafx
  • 2
    @Jumpshot44 the PM was the kind of person you would slowly start to think murder plots about, because you had a better chance of getting something done from a pile of rocks than him.

    This was many years ago, but the lack of quality and vision still haunts me to this day. I moved on to better jobs, however I learned plenty for the short period I was there, mainly how not to write software and treat employees. I try to be the complete opposite for the team I'm PM of.
  • 1
    '8 a4 sheets' got my head spinning 🙄
  • 1
    Nuke it. Nuke from high orbit.
  • 0
    Sounds like an MFC app I worked on before quitting a few months later.
Add Comment