I spent a good fraction of my career taking over and trying to fix code bases that my company refused to scrap and replace outright because they didn't want to admit their worthlessness. Complete rewrites would have taken maybe a tenth of the time I spent.

My favorite thing to encounter (which was nearly universal) was the phenomenon of a young programmer fresh out of college encountering SQL for the first time, deciding he hated it, and writing a huge mess of code to handle auto-generating the necessary SQL. I remember taking over one C# application that had classes named "AND.cs" and "OR.cs" which just took a String as a parameter and returned that String with " AND " and " OR " appended to it, respectively. In about an hour, I replaced three months of this guy's work that had bottlenecked the project with like five SQL statements.

It's insane to think what the civil engineering world would be like if it had the career structure of the software world.

[–] sp3ctr4l@lemmy.dbzer0.com 7 points 22 hours ago* (last edited 22 hours ago)

Jesus Fucking Christ.

I've done a lot of SQL/Database type work as well, and yep, I've been the person learning their insane spider web of db structures, and then either trying to enforce some kind of actual defined standards going forward, or in some instances, succeeding at restrucuring the dbs, transitioning them, and convincing corporate that this actually needed to be done.

It's insane to think what the civil engineering world would be like if it had the career structure of the software world.

Points at understaffed ATC tower, collapsing bridge that hasn't been even evaluated in a decade, general state of roadway disrepair and constant re-repair, also the new highway/overpass/lane expansion being built to 'solve traffic' despite doing that literally never working

[–] lordbritishbusiness@lemmy.world 8 points 23 hours ago (2 children)

First thing I tell my interns: "The guys that made that database are smarter than you, they got PhD's for the algorithms the database uses. You are going to use SQL properly, and query properly, because the database will always do it better than your python code."

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 7 points 23 hours ago

Job interviewer: "What's the best sorting algorithm for {whatever}?"
Me: "The SORT BY clause in SQL."

[–] AldinTheMage@ttrpg.network 3 points 20 hours ago

Nah, we'll just SELECT * from both tables and loop through the arrays in JavaScript to associate the records.

[–] Gumbyyy@lemmy.world 3 points 21 hours ago (1 children)

Holy shit, have we worked with the same guy?

[–] ChickenLadyLovesLife@lemmy.world 3 points 17 hours ago* (last edited 17 hours ago)

This guy's code once fired a 125 mph knuckleball a foot above a 10-year-old kid's head. Probably not the same guy.