Worst programming experiences/ shit you've had to deal with

>be me
It was horrible

>junior year sotware engineering intern
>Refactoring large codebase, mainly moving shared code to a library and rewriting garbage.
>Menu system implemented as a weird ordered map. I suggest it should be a stack since it's an ncurses terminal menu.
>Full time guy (let's call him shithead) assigned to work with me on it says he'll take care of it.
>Litterally a month passes by with no commits from shithead
>I'm having to maintain two versions of the menu system while waiting on him.
>Everytime I ask about anything I get dismissive remarks telling me it will be done that day/week
>Can't complain to supervisor. everyone says it's a bad idea since he's full time and I'm an intern. Looks bad on me.
>One day shithead says getting it to work is tricky.
>No fucking way that's true
>That day I clock out at 5pm and just try to do the thing he was assigned.
>Mfw it takes less than an hour
>sit on the code as a branch until I go back to school
>Supervisor comes to me last day and asks "user, do you have any code that's not in review or pushed?"
>"Yes, I have that thing shithead has supposed to have been doing for a month"
He got fired/let go a month or so later. Good, fuck that guy. I think he litterally did nothing after speaking with members of his team after the fact.

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what did shithead do daily?

That's an amazing question, we were in different cubes so I never got to keep an eye on him.

He definitely sat on his computer a lot, and he ate lunch.

Also he went to scrum meetings in the morning, but again, different team so...
No clue

>UNI
>Hi user I know you are good at C++ and so am I having done several projects in it so how about we do this 100h+ project together?
>He didn't know what a pointer was
>He didn't know what inheritance was
>He didn't know what a header file was
>He didn't know what a makefile was
>He didn't know what recursion was
>He didn't know what a memory leak was
>He didn't know how to step through c++ code for debugging

Once the academic board found out he was literally thrown out since he apparently had lied like this in an attempt to ride on others abilities before. Had to put in the effort of 2 people and still managed to get an A.

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>Some people just aren't able to code I guess

There was a blog post floating on Jow Forums a while back, it was a teacher at some college who had students write proto-code during the first day or week of the semester and those who managed that got a grasp of programing while those who didn't, didn't improve as the semester went on. He compared that first exercise with midterms and it was basically the same students who fell in each category.

if NOBODY in that group improved then the teacher probably sucked.

What was the project about?

Not that nobody in the group improved but those who couldn't understand proto-code didn't seem to learn programing. Can't blame it all on the teacher, you wouldn't expect a lizard to do math.

>people who did well continued to do well while the people struggling didnt get help
what a fantastic teacher no wonder he posts here

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Classic "make a game using these technologies and patterns with atleast X amount of features from this list".
Actually one of the courses most people agree on being very informative. The way they set it up you get a huge workload if you don't plan and understand the patterns.

>Systems Programming course
>final project is an assembler, have to work in group
>partner wants to do it in Java when 90% of the classes in our college are C++
>eventually I talk him into C++ but he barely knows his shit
>end up doing nearly all the work, mainly because I wanted to make sure everything worked
>didn't get done with the assembler but I figured that was fine since most people probably didn't either
>every other fucking group got farther than us
>still somehow got an A in the course

Fuck curves. That was the most bullshit course I've taken by far. Half the class dropped by the end because the course number was way lower than it should've been.

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Failed to make fizz buzz on interview

I saw someone who named one of their variables "BlackPanther", among other things. This was in a junior-level college course for a final project.

I have a person in my class with an extreme need of being different. He had named all his variables Int1, Int2 etc and proudly showed his usage of goto to the teacher. Some people shouldn't be allowed to program

Under the hood everything uses goto

but goto considered harmful

>be me, TA for Systems Programming class
>student who I know confronts me about comments I left on one of his projects
>I had written many comments about how incredibly difficult his code was to read and debug
>kid had previous experience in C++ and the course was in C, and it was very obvious he was trying to show off how much he knew about C++ and not trying to write readable code
>also not a single comment in 300+ lines of code
>anyway, he confronts me about my comments, which he's not supposed to do outside of class
>tell him I'm not giving him a better grade for his code that doesn't work and is unreadable
>next lab comes around, it's a piglatin translator (to teach about how strings and pointers work in C)
>kid approaches me again and is all excited that he commented his code well this time
>I'm really happy about it, always great to see people getting in better programming habits
>open up his code that night
>above one of his functions, there is a 20-line paragraph explaining in very verbose language how this very simple block of code works
>calls it an algorithm
>run his code with no arguments just to make sure it prints "usage: ./piglatin " or something along those lines
>instead, it says "Hi there! Welcome to PigLatin! To get started, enter some text on the command line when running the program. We'll then take your text, and translate it to Pig Latin! This is done by using... etc."

This kid also regularly starts conversations with people to try to lord over them how much more he knows about "coding" than them.

Fucking hate yuppies.

> I support a pretty obscure proprietary OS from a shitty evil company.
> one that probably 98% of Jow Forums has never heard of as its not a UNIX or DOS derivative.
> I have to port some code from a another vendor in that has obfuscated portions to protect patents/intellectual property.
> Porting going pretty well until I hit bug in the obfuscated code, causing a crash.
> Get support from said vendor of obfuscated code. They say what I am doing should work and I am doing something wrong.
> I insist I have checked all possible causes and I'm doing nothing wrong
> 3 weeks of debug later I get the full code from vendor and track the bug down.
> The C code makes no sense how its failing
> objdump time
> Its a fucking compiler bug in the shitty compiler I am forced to use by the evil OS company.
> 3 week of work down the drain because GCC was not supported.

On the bright side I suppose neither myself nor the vendor we bought the code from were wrong.

GCC may not make the fastest code or have the best warnings but at least its output binaries fucking work.

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As a supplemental Instructor for undergrad CS courses, its fucking cancer how many people seem to be absolutely incapable of understanding programming

I noticed this back in my CS101 course. Some kids just really got it and some just couldn't. Of course among the kids who got it there were various shades of competence and skill and experience and so on, but some people just absolutely can't get it, no matter how much time the TA or professor spends with them.

What color are those usually?

need to see the blog
can someone provide the link?

lmao he sounds like a douche but you deserved that one

> 27 nested if else statements for each character

Now I've done some shit in the past, but not that awful

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>Uni project
>making a search engine in java
>Webcrawler, text analyser, searcher, inverted file and UI
>assigned with long term friend
>getting along just fine with other projects
>assign parts to work on
>lecturer forced a 50/50 split on challenging parts
>get assigned webcrawler and inverted file
>friend got searcher and Text analyser
>lectuerer gave out a porter stemmer and a stop word lost to use for the TA, so half the hard parts of it are already done
>took friend 4 months to try to implement an already made class
>spent hours at his house working on my parts whilst he sat blankly at the screen calling the porter stemmer trash
>meanwhile I've finished all of my sections and finished off the searcher
>end up having to forcibly remove him from his computer so I could sit down for literally 30 seconds to make the TA and implement it into the rest of the code
>tfw he gets to take credit even though I've told the lecturers he did nothing on it
>tfw if i didn't help it was a fail for both of us
Group work is complete cancer

>stabbing your long term friend in the back like that

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> be me at a new job at some shit tier state organization
> hired to automate things but I'm a civil engineer major who knows how to program
> everyone uses excel (not necessarily a bad thing if its being used correctly) but excel is being used for everything and i mean everything
> excel: a shitty data store coupled with even shittier spaghetti code.
> try to tell my superiors excel can't do this correctly especially without a centralized access / end point, suggest a web api or some other way of centralizing a data store
> not excel, don't know or don't care to understand anything else, even though I attempt to articulate I can get the backend to shit out data in whatever format (in excel) they want.
> could potentially be stuck maintaining 30 different spread sheets managing all the changes when a centralized backend or shared drive could minimize it to one or no spread sheets

>Some people just aren't able to code I guess
lel, any retard can code. You just have to make them care.

dude, sounds like you are both idiots from my limited frame of the problem. Recursion would be slow too. If the loops were timing out- the programmatic exact recursive solution would overflow the heap. The calculator should have been broken into components that calculate partial sums based on materials. And then you have to make sure that you idiot proof the input process most importantly so that circular references don't happen. Like maybe an input interface that says, oh you used part A, we're going to include necessary part B C and D to that component sum of part A.

>High School CS
pretty sure most people didn't give a shit or were busy with teenaged nonsense

and high schoolers probably didn't

forgot it wasn't running for hours, but got stack overflow. it wasn't me who wrote the input. it's my friend. i only do the material processing.

Kind of the same with me.
We weren't forced to split 50/50, I still did most of the work, but the teacher caught on that he's floating along. He still passed too.

He and I liked watching Family Guy and there was some character that was lazy or something. Whenever I'd bring that character up, he'd stop laughing and be a little serious.

What else was he supposed to do? Turn in this:
void caesar_encrypt(char* str, int key){
while(*str != '\0'){
if(*str >= 'a' && *str= 'A' && *str= 'a' && *str= 'A' && *str

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>pic
holy shit. is that how he check prime numbers?

in a numerical analysis class using matlab, people would copy and paste code blocks however many times they needed it to run instead of just writing a loop. nobody was expected to be a good coder, but also that wasn't acceptable lol. one guy tried to play the race card when the prof finally came down hard on all the autists.

people have to give a shit though. some people will wear you down with persistence into giving answers or whatever.

Assuming you guys don't have a product team then to think about this shit before they make you write it.

Here's something no one told me. I work for a big tech company you definitely have heard of. My team does a lot of 'stuff', and due to the complexity of most of the products, our changes have to go through a large number of other 'groups' reviews.

As of about a year now, I am like 80% sure entrenched bureaucracy is probably going to be the death of this company. People who sit in meetings all day (or make meetings for every little thing), people/groups who make pushing a change through require ridiculous requirements to pad out their groups 'usefulness', people who require explanation for extremely complex topics outside their groups realm of responsibility, ect.

I actually really hate it, as most of these people have worked at the company for a long time and make a considerable amount more money then I do. I in this case, I'm the sucker.

>Ok class please make a loop that lists all the multiplication tables from 1 to 10
>Make 5 lines of code with a nested for loop
>Half the rest of the fucking class writes print statements for the 100 motherfucking multiplications

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i had sw engr class like that. it was poorly executed though. we basically just negotiated the requirements down repeatedly.

Can confirm this. I've taught got 8 years now and without fail the intro class breaks down 99% in line with my pre-class exam results where I have them do a little pseudo code exercise demonstrating they can dismantle a process into basic steps. I genuinely believe there's some derivative of iq thst pertains to this kind of logic and it's almost entirely genetic. I've tutored and coached fairly hard working edge case students and they never got it, ever. Has nothing to do with method because I and other professors have tried it all. There are just some brains that grok logic and others that just don't.

>Be a TA for an Operating Systems class
>In the assignment I'm grading they're supposed to implement a shell, but all that really means is reading some text input, forking and executing whatever command the input specified
>It's of course started from bash and asks you to support some basic shit like ls and cd and all that
>Someone put this in their readme
>"My program segfaults after the first command, but after that everything works fine."
I want to believe he was fucking with me, but this dude failed the course.

>Systems Programming course
>largest project is a disassembler
>be me and only weakly acquainted with some of my peers
>they all form a group without me
>some peers are eager to work with me
>cool.jpg
>meet-up to split up the work
>they have no idea how to approach it so i draw some diagrams, make a skeleton and ask them to write the simpler functions
>nobody knows C
>try to explain things to them throughout the semester and give them resources
>they learn nothing
>literally ask me if i'm going to be a programmer and admit they probably can't because its difficult
>ask them to just make test data, show them the examples in the text, and explain how to enumerate cases and identify classes
>they give me a word doc with one test data
>write scripts to generate and evaluate tests
>finish the project myself

Ayyyy, I have to work with a large consulting firm and that's 100% going on right now. It's fucking ridiculous that they can get away with it while we're making pennies in comparison.

300 loc file doesn't needs comments.
Only about 30% of people have any capacity for programming. Doing reverse bell curve, that works out to iq over 110 (or sub 90 lel).

>work at factory
>EVERYTHING is made in excel
>the frontend is outlook
>We have a shit-tier access97 database that can only be accessed through WinXP be it a VM or on metal and ONLY by 6 people or less at the same time
>our piece of shit fileserver shuts down every week

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Most people over iq 110 generally lack sufficient visuo-spatial iq. I'd say it's 10% of society or less.

BRAINLET DETECTED

>Most people over iq 110 generally lack sufficient visuo-spatial iq. I'd say it's 10% of society or less.
elaborate

Coddling someone is worse for them.

not him, but i think it means you need to be able to translate lines of code to some kind of visual mental model to make sense of it and work with it fluidly.

if a student can't visualize the code's flow of execution, they will have a VERY hard time when it's actually time to code something from scratch

probably browsing Jow Forums

>New employee at work
>They get tasked with optimizing section of code
>Give them a tour of that functionality, tell them what to optimize and a general strategy for doing it
>One week later
>PR is made
>No new performance statistics
>Literally just slapped threads in randomly with excessive usage of rwlocks
>Code doesn't even compile
>2 days later
>Code compiles but now deadlocks
>Turns out shit for brains never ran their code
>Have to actually say "the code has to compile and run before making a PR"
>Walk them through their code to point out what's wrong and how they can fix it
>3 days later
>Performance statistics finally out
>At least the reported statistics made a significant difference
>Can't get same thresholds on any test machine
>"It's because I downloaded compiler optimizations"
>Literally just the linter for their IDE
>Do the performance stats myself and find that it's a 10x slow down
>Say fuck it and give them some bullshit task while I do it myself the correct way
Fucking sunk cost fallacy man

Who the fuck is in charge of hiring new people?

The retards over at HR

>they hire a new dev
>he is trying to implement an automated payroll system
>With motherfucking FoxPro
>He has been at it for more than 6 months without success

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>been at it for more than 6 months without success

is this kind of thing generally tolerable at most companies?
i'd imagine an employee would be talked to or moved to another project if they don't have any progress to show in a couple weeks, let alone 6 months

to be fair developing isnt his only job
And programming is seen as an arcane art in this shithole

I think we work at the same factory

Hopefully not

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That's pretty Boomer like, enjoy having to slowly explain to them why everything isn't a viruses

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The similarities are uncanny, user
But I won't probe further because I don't want to know.

most of my former classmates never understood what a pointer was, and when I mentioned using a pointer to a pointer they looked at me like i was speaking french

give me a tip or i wont be able to sleep tonight

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>The similarities are uncanny, user
>But I won't probe further because I don't want to know.

DONT DO THIS TO ME

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>be refactoring large php codebase
>come across a report generator
>it is supposed to allow special users to select data they want and generate sql queries and run them into new reports
>places URL to new named reports on a special page
>it actually works but the code is from 2004
>weird ass syntax and parsing
>come across a file called "definitions"
>several thousand lines long
>it contains a parser, tokens, a function called "assemble"
>no blank newlines
>vague variable names
>read it for an hour or so
>eventually figure out that the developer actually wrote functions to translate SQL into a different query language
>translated from the generic query language (?????) back into SQL to retrieve columns and do stuff like group by and having and stuff
>mfw he wrote a tokenizer and parser that converts to a different query language which he then tokenizes and parses to generate SQL to retrieve from our databases
>there isn't a single fucking mysql_real_escape_string in the entire fucking thing

i want to meet this man and either shake his hand or just stare in awe

def isPrime(num):
def SieveOfEratosthenes(size):
array = [True] * size
for each in xrange(3,int(sqrt(size))+1,2):
if array[each]:
array[each*each::2*each]=[False]*((size-each*each-1)/(2*each)+1)
return [2] + [each for each in xrange(3,size,2) if array[each]]
def rabinMillerPrimalityTest(num):
s = num - 1
t = 0
while s % 2 == 0:
s = s // 2
t += 1
for trials in range(5):
a = randrange(2, num - 1)
v = pow(a, s, num)
if v != 1:
i = 0
while v != (num - 1):
if i == t - 1:
return False
else:
i = i + 1
v = (v ** 2) % num
return True
if (num < 2):
return False
lowPrimes = SieveOfEratosthenes(1000000)
if num in lowPrimes:
return True
for prime in lowPrimes:
if (num % prime == 0):
return False
return rabinMillerPrimalityTest(num)

Someone once set all the account pins to our test account pin in production. Remember kiddos always make sure you WHERE up those update statements!

this
blog.codinghorror.com/separating-programming-sheep-from-non-programming-goats/

If we've learned anything from the data and years and years of fiddling with teachers and teaching methodology, it's not the teachers - it's the kids.

somebody has to know how to manage the lazy people.

if hes your long term friend, why you try to snitch on him like that. Id understand if he was a random or didnt try at all.

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white. But i go to a very predominantly white school where the minorities are usually hard-workers from abroad (or jocks, but they weren't in CS). DESU it was usually the jockier types who didn't get it. Or women.

Behold.

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>that 4th on the right
kek

>Long term friend
I don't mind carrying the cross once in a while for brainlet long-term friends. When I do this they always treat me like a God and honestly with my full blown autism, I enjoy it when normies revere me

gonna save this ss lmao

if I go through HtDP and SICP, will I avoid this

A company I worked for dragged me into a dev team writing a ticket management program for Support. It was a huge pile of shit amateurishly written in VB6 with hidden text fields to hold values, a GUI with misshapen, ugly as shit elements that could not be resized at all, and with so many bugs and security holes that I'm surprised it fucking ran at all. And every effort I ever made to reimagine and remake the damn thing from scratch was shot down.

I still have nightmares.

>repeating code

void caesar_encrypt(char* str, int key){
while(*str != '\0'){
if(*str >= 'a' && *str= 'A' && *str

VB6 nightmare
bitch please
try coding in VBA's MS Access

Reading any programming book will ensure that you avoid this.

Well, the VB6 part was bad enough, but the true nightmare was that the entire team was incompetent as living fuck and made what was the biggest mess of a program I've ever encountered, and I've encountered some huge messes.

But you're not wrong.

my first job when i just graduated was coding in VB5 + MS Access 97. we use Access for UI and VB5 for the business logic. it was truly nightmare. i hate Access till this day. current job sometimes require me to code in Access 2010, fortunately it's quite rarely.

I think I just threw up a little in my mouth.

Old VB sure brought out the shit programmers back then.

i grew up in basic language. from gwbasic to vb3 till vb.net. not gonna bash basic, but it's easy to write buggy code in vb.

how do i avoid being this guy
i'm starting work in a few months, and i never wanted to be a SWE and said my preference was networking & security (and hopefully not actually in charge of writing a lot of code), but i'm worried i'll get placed in a role like that anyways

respect

I refuse to believe this is real.