Frustration at standard of programming at work

Question

I wanted to get some of your opinions on this issue. I am getting frustrated at the programs I am supposed to work with at my workplace. I am working as a junior software developer in a small company. A lot of times I need to "re-develop" apps - upgrade them. and so I need to understand what the apps currently do, migrate databases and such.

So my recent assignment, the old one not done by me:

The database for the reports has columns named e01 through e10 and in each cell (this is using access) has data like:

Achieved[-[|]-]Achieved[-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-

Ok, I know it's some kind of delimited data but how do I know what each value represents? There is no documentation so I read code, and I feel this is stupid. I waste so much time and end up with nothing much. Its working with very badly developed code/db.

BTW, by the number of columns (10) * number of delimiters you can count how many fields I need to create this report right. That's very tedious.

What will you do? Quit and get a job that has better quality software/clients seems a good choice? I mean, reverse engineering such an app seems like a waste of time. I rather learn to reverse engineer windows 7! Make it less bloated.

Answer 1

Find another job where you have more opportunity to learn proper things. Meanwhile, since you are here and since you are re-developing the app, you can help your existing company by creating some better designed software so that the one succeeding you doesn't end up doing the same things.

Answer 2

Stay there for several months, so you learn a very important thing: Why bad code hurts so much. Then get out and work in a company that at least tries to develop decent software. If you stay there too long, you will adopt bad habits.

Answer 3

The bad news is that you're almost always going to find poor levels of coding. Sometimes you may have to look hard. Sometimes not!

The good news is that it's an opportunity to learn and implement better mechanisms. It will hone your analysis and debugging skills. It's important to make sure that people (management?) know that you're having to work with poor code, and that you're doing something to improve the situation.

The best scenario is that you gradually change your environment, and become a better and respected software engineer. The worst scenario is that people keep generating poor quality code for you to re-engineer, in which case your new skills will be useful in finding new employment.

Answer 4

Welcome to the real world! I'm afraid that this will most likely be the case at most jobs. Every work place will have 'bad' code without documentation and the only way to figure out will be to analyze the code itself. If you are lucky someone else will know how it works. Like other people say see it as a lesson of how important it is to document what you do and once you have figured out how something works you should document it. That is time well spent instead of whining how 'bad' everyone else is. It might not be fun, but this is work and you are paid to do it.

Answer 5

Read Joel's Getting Things Done When You're Only a Grunt article and start working on doing the best you can on your job. If you can teach yourself how to learn, even in the worst of situations, that's a skill that will come in handy for the rest of your life.

Answer 6

At first! Communicate much more! Thats the key to so much more fun, less frustration and more compliment! Tell the people around you from your pain, maybe they can help you. Tell your line manager / boss about your problems and how you feel with this.

If they don't know about your pain, they can't help you. That is what every boss need, information.

" there is no docs so i read code "

Tell it to your project manager! Maybe he knows who can help you or who has written this piece of software.

quit and get a job that has better quality software/clients seems a good choice?

Wow! If you already think about this, you don't seem to have much fun with your job. If you're pissed of, think about it. But everywhere you go, you'll see bad pieces of software which need refactoring or reengineering. My opinion: You have the chance to increase the quality of a piece of software! Use it. If your project manager will prevent you from doing the right thing (refactoring, increase quality/reliability...), say him clearly what you think about it. Quitting should be only the last instance of what you do.

i mean, reverse engineering such an app seems like a waste of time

Tell it to your project manager! He has to care about your problems. He should make you feel right ;) To identify project risks is his job! Tell him you need more functional input. Talk about maintenance charges! Ask for a big refactoring of the whole application or parts of it (Middleware to hide the shit in the backend).

i rather learn to reverse engineer windows 7! make it less bloated

Huh! Try it ;) I think you don't have a chance to.

Have a look at "Run length encoding" if you want to compress this fluff: [-[|]-][-[|]-][-[|]-]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Run-length_encoding

Answer 7

A lot of the jobs you are going to find would be like this.

Advice to you would be try finding a new job at somewhere they are doing something bleeding edge, like a startup.

For your current problems, make it easier for yourself by creating the stuff that would eventually make life easier. Like creating the mapping from e1 to e10, etc. Do this once and don't tell your boss that you did, this would mean you have loads of time that you could use in learning new stuff whilst the boss expects you to take a long time because of the poor code.

Answer 8

Work on projects with other programmers. Be the best programmer on some projects; be the worst on some others. When you're the best, you get to test your abilities to lead a project, and to inspire others with your vision. When you're the worst, you learn what the masters do, and you learn what they don't like to do (because they make you do it for them).

source : http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Answer 9

don't expect that by running(changing job) you will get to better code, unless you are lucky. I have seen DB code of some major local retailers and it was funny. Lucky it worked properly - but it was huge mess.

Answer 10

Code looks like BrainFuck... To be honest, I have over 20 years of engineering experience and this doesn't look that bad. It seems some kind of delimited data with [-[|]-] as delimiter. I guess there might even be some data between the [] parts of those delimiter and it might be some kind of multi-level data structure. With this kind of code and data, you'd better ask someone else in the company to explain to you what it means. If no one knows then you can try to find out yourself or just talk to your manager and ask them what it is supposed to do and rewrite the whole thing from scratch.

Don't give up your job simply because you can't understand it. Consider this a mighty challenge and try to solve it, asking as much help as you need to do your job. Whatever you do, provide plenty of feedback to your manager about the things you can't solve. As you say, you're a junior so you still need to build your experience. It is expected that you ask plenty of questions to get your job done right.

Basically, software development is almost always teamwork. Make good use of the whole team!

Answer 11

i am considering changing picking up 3D Modelling, Texturing, Rendering and such as an alternative career path, possibly game development/design, will that be a good idea? i guess at least in 3D there wont be any bad code ... except maybe in the 3D scripting side ...

but just considering, as an alternative ... IT/Programming is what i seem to do quite well - the dislike for all this bad code stuff

Answer 12

1. It takes a good programmer to fix bad code
2. Fixing bad code is good experience and can make you a really good programmer

There's this junior programmer out here who has given his seniors quite a complex by unflinchingly taking up the most hopeless code and fixing it a little bit each day. This is code we had given up on and it works fine now.

Of course, we all have our limits. :)

Answer 13

My first job coding was at a place that seemed pretty modern -- huge corporation, working on a Web app in .net/C# with SQL Server behind it. Three-level architecture (presentation, mid-tier, data access), all sound design principles.

Then I got to the code. Total mess -- javascript everywhere doing nothing, 1100 instances of Catch ex As Exception, race conditions everywhere. You could make an innocuous change and find it broke six other things because the code was depending on the execution path you were on to take less than, say, three seconds, and if it took four, the whole page blew up trying to access an element that wasn't there, or thereabouts. It was nearly impossible to change anything without some kind of side effect. Come to find out I was a new developer on a project that had recently been brought back in house from outsourced development in India. And of course, the outsourcing shop was essentially told, "make it work, we don't care how".

Tell you what though -- learning what exactly was hosing a lot of that code up taught me a lot about best practices. Learn what practices to follow by observing the mistakes and issues that result by kludging things together. You may not want to stay there long, and it may be agonizing, but you will gain valuable insight from the experience. And if you can manage to rework all the crap code into good code, there's a possibility you might profit from it. If not, take the lessons you learn and allow a half-decent employer to reap the rewards.