-2000 Lines of code (2004)

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513 points xeonmc | 2 comments | 25 Jun 25 19:53 UTC | HN request time: 0.76s | source

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jfengel ◴[25 Jun 25 21:46 UTC] No.44382104[source]▶

In college I worked for a company whose goal was to prove that their management techniques could get a bunch of freshman to write quality code.

They couldn't. I would go find the code that caused a bug, fix it and discover that the bug was still there. Because previous students had, rather than add a parameter to a function, would make a copy and slightly modify it.

I deleted about 3/4 of their code base (thousands of lines of Turbo Pascal) that fall.

Bonus: the customer was the Department of Energy, and the program managed nuclear material inventory. Sleep tight.

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1. free_bip ◴[25 Jun 25 23:18 UTC] No.44382701[source]▶

>>44382104 #

I once had to deal with some contractors that habitually did this, when confronted on how this could lead to confusion they said "that's what Ctrl+F is for."

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2. ctrl4 ◴[26 Jun 25 15:04 UTC] No.44388136[source]▶

>>44382701 (TP) #

Oh boy! This reminded me of one of my worst tech leads. He pushed secret tokens to github. When I asked in the team meeting why would we do this instead of using secrets manager, the response was: "These are private respos. Also we signed an NDA before joining the company"

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