I took a position as a programming resource
to fix an existing application, the inhouse boy who wrote it was busiy f**king up something else.
One of the things they wanted me to 'fix' was having more than one order per customer.
The people responsible for the initial mess managed to cover me in their glory before the contract finished.
It's one of my all time favourite technical debt examples now. The design was done on the basis that each customer onkly has one first order.
The crap design, incestuous coupling, poor lifetime management, huge memory leaks and juvenile crap like a link to the billing system by surname, turned out to be an obvious indictator of how important they felt the job was.
If they'd have let me look at the code first, I would have doubled my rate and set a very low expectation.
Oh and UI was a multi tabbed effeort based on the spreadshhet they used to collect the data on.
Just to cap it all, one the furkers gave me a bad but unofficial reference and left me out of work for a month and a half. Doesn't sound too bad but that's half of the total time I've been out of work since 1981...
