Ask HN: Ridiculous Coding Practices by companies you have worked for

Your point 2 is far from ridiculous. We do it that way so the business logic exists and is enforced in one place rather than being scattered around this desktop app and that website and so on. Only the most trivial applications can afford to put all their business logic in the middle tier.

Also I'm not allowed to use OCaml in production systems because too few people at the company speak it. Annoying for me, but again far from ridiculous.

We're limited to what we can do/use by the technical depth/breadth of the 'architects' (mid-level devs at best) that we have. Pretty much limits us to java 1.4 and earlier and libs that have been open source for at least a decade.

I'd written some script in ruby to help us automate some maven grunt work and they said they'd rather spend 6 hours doing it manually than run ruby as they hadn't vetted ruby.

The last two points seem to be pointed towards architecture decisions, not necessarily coding practices. I see coding practices more as language selection, indentation styles, the forced use of asserts or null checks, etc. ... Things that say how you write, manage or release code.

As for the very last point, maybe someone had some data to show that sub-domains increased response time. Alternatively, maybe subdirectories inadvertently introduced less code re-use at the company. Who knows. In business, sometimes there are stupid rules simply because someone thought it was cool. You either abide by it or bring forth some data to show why the rule is wrong (or could be better).

Our HTML dev team builds the HTML/CSS so that we can complete our UI specs, then when we hand off the final HTML/CSS and UI spec to our big money development team, they rebuild it from PSDs. They use the same CSS structure framework, so there's no good reason, but we basically pay for the same work twice. If we send code, they throw it out.

We worked on a web application. The web-code (asp) and business layer (vb) were under source control. We used visual source-safe, which was ridiculous enough (though not my main gripe).

My main gripe is that while those two parts of the project were under source control, the database definition was not. So, while we could revert back to a previous version of the code, there was no way to revert back to the database schema that the code relied on. We were able to autogenerate database creation scripts (which we would use for deployments) but management would never let us check those script in under source control (which would have solved a lot of problems). The manager was a guy who liked to let wizards auto-generate code for him, and the idea of maintaining a sql-script that contained several thousand lines of code was just too much for his brain to handle.

Our entire system was written in ColdFusion. I was asked to add a feature. That feature was to be embedded in the ColdFusion system within the nested includes and infinite scope of tag mush.

It had to be written in PHP. Why? Because we were moving to PHP.

So I wrote it in ColdFusion and used PHP REST webservice to get the data.

I still to this day do not understand why that system is now part ColdFusion, PHP, Flex, and Perl. :)

Great company though, excellent people to work with.

I remember a couple jobs ago, back in 2004 we were stuck using JDK 1.1.8 because the IDE we used didn't support anything better, like 1.4.2. The IDE was MS Visual J++ so you can imagine my pain.

Does a ridiculous lack of any coding standards whatsoever count?

All business logic placed within stored procedures that others can modify.

All main application development by the technical director and no-one else.

We were explicitly barred from using tools that were not published by Microsoft. Even if Microsoft didn't make a tool to solve the problem. Instead, we were encouraged to create our own, on our own time, outside of regular business hours.

The same place barred the use of code generators, the use of snippet macros, and they barred admins from creating automated scripts/utilities to automate gruntwork. They likened it to taking a math test without a calculator -- you should be able to do it by hand if you can supposedly do the job.

The same place also required that comments were not to be made in source code files. They should only be made in source control check-in comments.

The same place felt refactoring was an unproductive activity unless it corrected a specific "bug". Scalability and performance issues weren't considered valid bugs - it was fast before, so why would it ever be slow now? Blame would be put on the hardware until network ops bit back. Then you would be lambasted for your application not scaling 4 orders of magnitude on the same hardware when that wasn't part of the original requirements.

One place I worked for did not allow developers to use the bug-tracking system. Instead, someone from QA would place printout of open bugs in a bin. You were required to take the bug from the bin, back to your desk, and when completed, fill in a form by hand detailing the explanation and attach the appropriate colored paper strips in the right order so it could be triaged appropriately.

The same place migrated customer data to their product by hand. Using Excel. We jokingly referred to this process as "electronic handcrafting". The reason was because it was faster and resulted in fewer reported defects after deployment. Someone in that department got fed up, so she had me create ETL processes for the four most common competitor products. Time-to-install went from 4 weeks to 4 days and the error rate dropped 98%. It won over the COO and some staff, but made me enemies with plenty of others.

At the same place a sales manager convinced the COO that RAID1 should be considered a viable backup and disaster recovery solution. We were tasked with making it so RAID controllers would not back up certain types of files.

Another place I worked for as a contractor insisted that their web app was written in ColdFusion. Despite not having any other contractors past or present, and the market not having any ColdFusion developers. The reason ended up being is it because it "sounded cool". Needless to say, they have an app still running on ColdFusion 4.

I've worked in too many places that are adamant that "backups" are all the database version control they need.

I've worked at a place that would expect me to develop APIs for certain products and systems we had, yet refused to allow for a requirements gathering phase. I was actually fired trying to explain that I can't build something when I don't know what I was building. Reason was so the new CIO could bring on a contracting firm run by a friend of his. Three other people have since quit in response.

Extensive use of Hungarian Notation ("i" before integers, "sz" before C-strings, and the kicker: "ob" before objects).

No use of STL, using a hand-rolled dynamic array instead that grew by a constant size instead of doubling.

Extensive amounts of application logic written right in the GUI builder's generated event handlers, for the company's very large flagship product.

  $ss_username = ss_from_us($us_username_field);

  $ss_username = $us_username_field;

I was once banned from using ternary operators, that was weird

  $row[6] = $src?str_replace($src,($table[$src]?$table[$src]:$src),$row[6]):$row[6];

    <?="I","smarty pants"?"don'tget":"see";?>it.

  seen them in tabular format ? you know they're great :
  have you seen them abused   ? you think you know     :
  have you thought about it   ? you think you know     :
  get the gist from this      ? good                   :
                                I can't help you       ;

  (cond
    ((seen-them in-tabular-format)  '(you know they are great))
    ...)

I've been discouraged from putting code in reusable modules because it would mean one central location for everything to break. The rationale was that if every routine was copied and pasted where it was needed then introducing an error in one place would not affect other places.

I am leaving a company that uses a certain lightweight language to build web apps using CGI. There is no way to load libraries except by recompiling the runtime, and we do not have the C source code for that runtime in our possession. This means every library out there (even for the particular language we use, thanks to the fact that we're using a 9-year-old version of the language, and the inability to load binary libraries) is NIH'ed out from the start! Interfacing with external tools is broken because the function that runs system commands has been changed to be async with no access to the standard streams of the process it creates.

The product that is built on top of this is designed to let people build applications using flowcharts with a visual editor... but the "programming" that is the result of this system is essentially spaghetti code with GOTO, numbered labels, and a single global scope. Nodes in these flowcharts are labelled with 100, 110, 200, etc. by default and are laid out automatically, so there's no way to understand a routine at a glance. Variables in a flowchart get clobbered by other "subroutines" when they are called. Everything is indirections on indirections on indirections. I could go on... but you can get the idea by looking at this: http://imgur.com/ZKCU.png

This is all seen as advanced next-generation modeling that provides massive productivity gains over standard programming practices.

At one job I introduced SVN and Tortoise to try to bring version control to the project. A few weeks later we were using Visual Source Safe because the contractor goons couldn't grasp anything but VSS's Visual Studio integration. They also moved to doing development on one shared drive so that updating the whole tree could clobber someone's changes that weren't checked in.

I was also instructed to not use document.getElementById(), since the IE de-facto "standard" was to just refer to the element by its name (or whatever was going on back then).

I once had a boss that forbade regular expressions, including split().

The task was parsing datasets in a variety of formats (one per vendor, hundreds of vendors.)

The only acceptable way was substr. Everything else causes "memory fragmentation," apparently.

The language was Perl.

I was paid over six-figures to share a computer with another programmer all day long even though studies have shown that to halve productivity.

Rumor has it theres a coding standards manual floating around at IBM that forbids the use of pointers. In c++. Yes indeed.

  template <typename T>
  class NotAPointer {
    T* m_pointer;
    T* set(T* p) { return m_pointer = p; }
    T* get() { return m_pointer; }
    NotAPointer(T* p) { set(p); }
  }

I was told not to use constants on the left hand side of an expression e.g., if("hello"==strVar) and was made to change it throughout my code. Needless to say I quit after making that change.

Promote code that's indented 3 spaces instead of 2: rejected by QA.

Promote code that deletes the entire production Customer Database if the user hits "Esc" on Form 11 by accident: no problem. Unless it's indented 3 spaces instead of 2. Then it's rejected.

I actually once worked for a large insurance software company. They had a desktop workstation application that was entirely written in C. It consisted of about 2000 DLLs, which were used to get a kind of primitive polymorphism. Most of the money came from "customizing" the app for clients, and most of the labor for that came from local community colleges, where they had an intro to C programming class where they implemented a doubly-linked list. As a result, these "local talent" programmers would only use doubly-linked lists for collections, and would re-implement it every time they needed a new collection! As a result, every customized app had about 500 re-implementations of a doubly-linked list! (There were more collections than that in the entire app, but the core was written by competent programmers.) And yes, the same mistakes were made each time, and it was re-debugged every time.

I was there on a project where the client's IT department had implemented a universal library for doubly-linked lists. None of my fellow programmers understood how it worked (clever use of macros to get pointer offsets) and management would only use it for that particular client.

(They charged hourly for the "customizations.")

Version control done wrong:

Version was code written onto a CD-R

Control was a person who got a full 60K Salary for monitoring a room with a bunch of file folders with different versions of the software. When you made a commit you burned a new CD and brought to Tim on the 5th Floor.

You can't make this stuff up.

Excel spreadsheet for version control

Our company spent US$50K on an Oracle database and my boss forbade me from using triggers, because he wanted the application to be database independent. Never mind that we used Oracle syntax in our queries.

80 characters per line limit....ridiculous when we live in the age of cheap widescreen monitors.

I worked at a place that for the most part banned vowels from database column names.

I hope you feel better knowing that you probably bank there ;)