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One of my former coworkers was either completely incompetent or outright sabotaging us on purpose. After he left for a different job, I picked up the project he was working on and oh my God it's a complete shitshow. I deleted hundreds of lines of code so far, and replaced them with maybe 30-40 lines altogether. I'm probably going to delete another 400 lines this week before I get to a point where I can say it's fixed.

He defined over 150 constants, each of which was only referenced in a single location. Sometimes performing operations on those constants (with other constants) to get a result that might as well have been hard-coded anyway since every value contributing to that result was hard-coded. He used troublesome and messy workarounds for language defects that were actually fixed months before this project began. He copied code that I wrote for one such workaround, including the comment which states the workaround won't be necessary after May 2019. He did this in August, three months later.

Two weeks of work just to get the code to a point where it doesn't make my eyes bleed. Probably another week to make it stop showing ten warnings every time it builds successfully, preventing Jenkins from throwing a fit with every build. And then I can actually implement the feature I was supposed to implement last month.

Comments
  • 2
    Refreshingly good rant 1st thing in the morning, thank you
  • 1
    @Lenyct I'm so happy that you're happy......
  • 0
    I've been there. It sucks :-/
  • 0
    Well I learned python myself and I am constantly scared that I am exactly that person, I try to keep it clean and efficient but the fear is still there 😂
  • 3
    @hamolicious if in doubt, ask your coworkers for input. That's what this guy got wrong. His code was a mess, and he knew it was a mess, and instead of trying to fix it or asking for help, he spent all his time trying to hide just how much of a mess it was, and then trying to justify the mess whenever we saw part of it.

    I have many more problems with him than just his code. He was also an absolute nightmare to work with. Couldn't take criticism at all, spent valuable time writing code that didn't work properly and was completely unnecessary, while constantly missing deadlines for the real, necessary work, etc.
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