Lowest Bidder Squared
Initech was in dire straits. The website was dog slow, and the budget had been exceeded by a factor of five already trying to fix it. Korbin, today's submitter, was brought in to help in exchange for decent pay and an office in their facility.
He showed up only to find a boxed-up computer and a brand new flat-packed desk, also still in the box. The majority of the space was a video-recording studio that saw maybe 4-6 hours of use a week. After setting up his office, Korbin spent the next day and a half finding his way around the completely undocumented C# code. The third day, there was a carpenter in the studio area. Inexplicably, said carpenter decided he needed to contact-glue carpet to a set of huge risers ... indoors. At least a gallon of contact cement was involved. In minutes, Korbin got a raging headache, and he was essentially gassed out of the building for the rest of the day. Things were not off to a good start.
Upon asking around, Korbin quickly determined that the contractors originally responsible for coding the website had underbid the project by half, then subcontracted the whole thing out to a team in India to do the work on the cheap. The India team had then done the very same thing, subcontracting it out to the most cut-rate individuals they could find. Everything had been written in triplicate for some reason, making it impossible to determine what was actually powering the website and what was dead code. Furthermore, while this was a database-oriented site, there were no stored procedures, and none of the (sub)subcontractors seemed to understand how to use a JOIN command.
In an effort to tease apart what code was actually needed, Korbin turned on profiling. Only ... it was already on in the test version of the site. With a sudden ominous hunch, he checked the live site-and sure enough, profiling was running in production as well. He shut it off, and instantly, the whole site became more responsive.
The next fix was also pretty simple. The site had a bad habit of asking for information it already had, over and over, without any JOINs. Reducing the frequency of database hits improved performance again, bringing it to within an order of magnitude of what one might expect from a website.
While all this was going on, the leaderboard page had begun timing out. Sure enough, it was an N-squared solution: open database, fetch record, close database, repeat, then compare the two records, putting them in order and beginning again. With 500 members, it was doing 250,000 passes each time someone hit the page. Korbin scrapped the whole thing in favor of the site's first stored procedure, then cached it to call only once a day.
The weeks went on, and the site began to take shape, finally getting something like back on track. Thanks to the botched rollout, however, many of the company's endorsements had vanished, and backers were pulling out. The president got on the phone with some VIP about Facebook-because as we all know, the solution to any company's problem is the solution to every company's problems.
"Facebook was written in PHP. He told me it was the best thing out there. So we're going to completely redo the website in PHP," the president confidently announced at the next all-hands meeting. "I want to hear how long everyone thinks this will take to get done."
The only developers left at that point were Korbin and a junior kid just out of college, with one contractor with some experience on the project.
"Two weeks. Maybe three," the kid replied.
They went around the table, and all the non-programmers chimed in with the 2-3 week assessment. Next to last came the experienced contractor. Korbin's jaw nearly dropped when he weighed in at 3-4 weeks.
"None of that is realistic!" Korbin proclaimed. "Even with the existing code as a road map, it's going to take 4-6 months to rewrite. And with the inevitable feature-creep and fixes for things found in testing, it is likely to take even longer."
Korbin was told the next day he could pick up his final check. Seven months later, he ran into the junior kid again, and asked how the rewrite went.
"It's still ongoing," he admitted.
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