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Recently I moved to a different team and I’m not kidding 1single file has 1600+ lines of code and not a single comment. And docs for entire code base is less than 100 lines. Help me…
While I like the joke, I think it might be obsolete at this point. AI is (unfortunately) here to stay, and giving it a big batch of code and saying “summarize what this does for me” or even “rename the variables for clarity and add comments” works pretty well. As with all things AI, never just trust what it gives you in return, but it can make dealing with this kind of situation 1000x easier.
That is one of very clear legitimate uses for LLMs, similarly they work great for making decompiled code human readable now.
very true and cryptic codebases w/o documentation was the only reason why i was employed for the last 20 years. lol
interviewing & working w the young people hired at my last 2 places who used ai to get work done MUCH faster than i could showed me how much of a dinosaur i was and it was the biggest contributing factor to leaving the field. my experience in the last 10 of those 20 years makes me aware that only software engineers with a prestigious pedigrees (eg well regarded universities and/or well known names in their resume) are given a chance today.
people trying to take a path similar to mine to become a software engineer – poorly regarded state university degree and accepting shitty contract gigs at the beginning of their career in roles that are barely software related – are fucked unless they’re lucky or well connected.
i was SUPER LUCKY to get contract gigs at faang and old-silicon shops to put on my resume and i learned retroactively (and in writing) that, that was the only reason i got interviewed at all.
That’s not even code grief…
Two examples that were far worse:
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My last company wanted software developers. They offered to send me to code boot camp and give me a promotion. The boot camp was primarily python. I complete and get the promotion. New manager tells me the code base I’ll work on is actually c… Umm ok. New manager retires a week later. I spend a few weeks basically teaching myself c. New manager is assigned. He tells me I should basically assist the senior Dev, ok no problem. Find out the code base is actually c#… Should be doable it’s c based atleast. It’s c# framework 4.8 based on winforns… No one in the building had heard of a unit test…the code was released to production on December of '23. Oh and yeah the senior Dev then announced he was retiring. There are no other c# programmers on the team.
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I told this story before recently. On a separate c# code base the “login” function had hard coded credentials in the source, which checked if they existed in a local sql database table with one entry(the hard coded values) and then verified the returned value for “password” was >= than 5. It then logged you in. Didn’t check if the password was correct or even the correct length just that the return of the select statement was greater than or equal to 5 characters… Just for fun remember that false is 5 characters 😂
😱
That’s not the scary part, it’s a fortune 500 international company whose customers could die if the product didn’t work…
the really scary part is that this doesn’t even surprise me
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🫥 Their “repository” is a OneDrive folder copied from the last guy’s laptop
I’ve personally witnessed the seventh entry to this meme: lines of code over 1000 columns wide.
I try to forget, but the horror never fades.
I remember a long time ago, I worked at a java shop and we were cursed to use Eclipse. One coworker was saying his IDE was really slow, and almost unusable. So I come over to look, and the whole freaking codebase was just one giant Java file. It was basically at the limit of what the compiler will allow.
The versioning system is:
- file.php
- file copy.php
- file copy 1.php
Out of these probably the three letter long variable names are the most agregious. Or getting a j*b, depends on the viewpoint.
