30

They've literally left me with nothing to do. I'm doing nothing. I can't be happy doing nothing.

To illustrate the chaos: Everyone on the team was trying to figure out some defect. No one knows what is going on in the code. It's unlike anything I've ever seen.

I found an API call with a misspelled endpoint. It was wrong since the code was written two months before. There's no way it ever worked. Obviously no one tested the code because they would have immediately seen that the call returned a 404 every time.

I fixed it. That was my only PR in about a month. It was literally one character.

The next week that PR got reverted. Apparently the app works better if the API call fails. No one said what goes wrong if the request is made, just that it "causes problems."

That's how bad it is. No one knows why anything does or doesn't work. People write code that doesn't work, never test it, and the application works better in some unspecified way if that code never gets executed.

The last straw for me was when an architect told us that if we want to improve our skills we need to learn how to read and debug stuff like this.

1) Not to be immodest, but I'm good at figuring out bad code.
2) Just because I can doesn't mean I want to do it all day instead of actually developing software
3) He trivialized the really important skill, not making a mess like this in the first place. If his idea of skill is to sling crap without tests at the wall and then debug it, how is he an architect?

I tried really hard but I can't keep a good attitude. I don't want to become toxic, but why would I consider working that way? I try my best to be good at this. Writing decent code means a lot to me. It should mean a lot to them. Their code is costing them hundreds of thousands of dollars. Maybe millions.

I can't write good code and add value if all I do is debug bad code.

So I'm out. I'm going to another project. Have a nice life.

Comments
  • 9
    Ahhhh... Welcome to "Enterprise Coding"

    https://youtu.be/FyCYva9DhsI

    From the people that brought you enterprise fizz buzz

    https://github.com/EnterpriseQualit...
  • 0
    If it was written incorrectly since the start and nobody raised the bug then the obviously knew about it and took the lazy way out, which is just to reroute the api call to the correct place.
  • 0
    @cmarshall10450 They didn't reroute it. The call just wasn't connecting. It was a 404 every time. I wonder if it's possible that they knew it didn't work and made the typo on purpose. But it's typical for this project. It's not just the lack of sufficient unit testing. Sometimes people didn't even check to see if it worked at all - not by any means.

    There were unit tests for some stuff, but nobody ran them. You can tell because sometimes the code changed but the test didn't so the test fails. Sometimes the tests wouldn't even build.
  • 0
    Get another job but don’t quit this one. Prioritize the other job and see how long you can ride it out, only doing what they tell you to do at this one.
Add Comment