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Before becoming a developer, I used to work as a sales rep at this company that spent a good amount of time building what they believed to be an innovative state-of-the-art “code generator”. It was basically a scaffolding tool for generating software.

They were using it to auto generate customized iOS and Android native mobile app templates, along with a web backed.

The problem was that the generated code was shit, and the developers on the team basically spent more time fixing bugs than if they had built everything from scratch. But their passion for the product meant they just kept using it.

For some reason they never fixed issues in the original templates, so basically all the bugs that were found, kept showing up with each new app!

I have never seen apps like this that essentially had more bugs than features. Opening more than 10 app screen meant the app would freeze and crash. Sign up forms were actually dummy forms. The list goes on...

All the apps had the same shitty UI. For example, Product pages had a product image area that was like 5% of the screen view!

Last but not least, apps had a backend IP address hardcoded pointing to a server with an IP address that was temporary. So one day they had to restart the server and suddenly all customer apps stopped working and required a software update to work!

It was amazing seeing how a team of 3 developers trying to fix messy autogenerated code, couldn’t accomplish what was essentially a website on an app that I managed to build in my free time.

That’s how I knew it was time to quit my job and code full time.

Comments
  • 6
    I feel that. Good for you on getting out. I had a similar situation once, though not the same scale as yours. At one of my previous jobs we spent months writing a library in jQuery for handling forms as part of lead-generation websites. The forms were multi-part and fairly complex but didn't justify the complexity of the library. It worked for the most part, at least (I helped with that). That said, it was not particularly accessible or responsive. Also, there was a team of web designers who had to use an internal web app to create the sites which used this library, and they probably secretly hated us. Funnily enough, the project ended up being scrapped for another that took it's place, so the library was used for less time than it took to write it. I left that job the first chance I got!
  • 3
    These kind of dream apps usually born at the peak of Dunning Kruger graph, many developers had that wet dream.

    But going full on to build a business with it is another level of ignorance...
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