The Daily WTF

Paul R. shows us a classic example of the sort of case statement that maybe, you know, never should've been implemented as a case statement:

Ah, consumer products. Regardless of what the product in question is, therre’s a certain amount of “design” that goes into the device. Not design which might make the product more user-friendly, or useful, or in any way better. No, “design”, which means it looks nicer on the shelf at Target, or Best Buy, or has a better image on its Amazon listing. The manufacturer wants you to buy it, but they don’t really care if you use it.This thinking extends to any software that may be on the device. This is obviously true if it’s your basic Internet of Garbage device, but it’s often true of something we depend on far more: consumer grade routers.Micha Koryak just bought a new router, and the first thing he did was peek through the code on the device. Like most routers, it has a web-based configuration tool, and thus it has a directory called “applets” which contains JavaScript.Javascript like this:

Drew W. writes, "If I'm already at (undefined), why should I pay $389.99 to fly to (undefined)?"

Matthew H was given a pretty basic task: save some data as a blob. This task was made more complicated by their boss’s core philosophy, though.Never. Bother. The. Customer..“Right, but if the operation fails and we can’t continue?”Never. Bother. The. Customer.“Okay, sure, but what if they gave us bad input?”Never. Bother. The. Customer.“Okay, sure, but what if, by hitting okay, we’re going to format their entire hard drive?”Never. Bother. The. Customer.As such, for every method that Matthew wrote, he was compelled to write a “safe” version, like this:

LINQ brings functional programming and loads of syntactic sugar to .NET languages. It’s a nice feature, although as James points out, it helps if your fellow developers have even the slightest clue about what they’re doing.

Dima R. wrote, "Running out of space on this old XP machine. I know, I'll just uninstall TurboTax 2014!"

Imagine, if you will, that you have 64-bits of data. From this 64-bits of data, you need to extract a nibble, which contains the value that you care about. Now, I’m sure you’re imagining an integer with some bitmasks to extract the data, which is a perfectly sane approach. Tomasz inherited some code from his company’s German office. It took the approach of taking the 64-bits and storing the 64-bits in an eight element byte array. Then, it extracted the values from that array with code looking like this:

In the U.S., individuals are expected to file federal and state tax returns once a year by April 15. The tax forms are quite complicated, and have all sorts of sub-forms and schedules to support and detail the numbers on the main form. The tax code of the U.S. is approximately 74,000 pages of special cases.For many items, the same data needs to be entered on multiple forms, usually as the starting point for different calculations that depend upon the same information; these are duplicated again on both federal and state returns. It follows that tax preparation software needs to put the relevant numbers in all the places that they are needed.Why? Because if it doesn't, the preparer needs to manually copy numbers to each of several places, leading to all sorts of omission/accidental editing issues. Just to make it needlessly complicated interesting, in many cases, the numbers need to be transformed via some formula before copying, and the formulas vary from form to form, and from state to state. Complicating this process is the fact that tax forms stating your earnings from employers and financial institutions can be re-issued with new values if tax laws are changed too close to the end of the year. This means that new numbers need to be entered, propagated, calculated and checked on your tax forms, usually after they were initially prepared.If you're preparing your own tax returns, then they probably aren't all that complicated, and there isn't too much copy/pasting to be done. If you have multiple businesses in different states/countries, multiple properties, use multiple banks/brokerages, etc., then there are many, many forms and worksheets detailing the same information, leading to a whole lot of copy/pasting of data. When the complexity of what must be prepared gets beyond a certain point, you go to a professional preparer who will just enter your information once, and the very expensive professional tax software will put the numbers on all the relevant forms automatically. This way, it only takes a few minutes to enter the data, hit calc and a mountain of completed tax forms spews forth from the printer.Julie is a highly experienced accountant, and was partnering with a large, national chain of tax preparers that used their own in-house tax preparation software. They had a large IT team of several hundred assorted developers and support staff. Each year, they'd wait for Congress to decide on changes to the tax laws, and then begin the process of implementing those changes in their software so that they could get it to the accountants in time for tax season.Unfortunately, Congress doesn't take programming time into account when they bicker back and forth over changes to the tax law. Last year, Congress passed a whole slew of changes at the very last minute, leaving insufficient time to implement all the changes in the software (at least not without the usual magic happens here programming of experienced developers). The solution that the blockhead managers came up with was to only implement part of each change prior to distributing the software. They called this "being agile".When Julie started to prepare tax returns, she realized that the inputs to the same calculation were different on different forms. The numbers were not being propagated to the places that needed them, or worse, were being propagated incorrectly. Additionally, some calculations only performed the first 10 steps of a 12 step form. Upon raising bugs, she was told We know about these issues and have no plans to fix them!Wait, manually propagating numbers and checking every calculation defeats the purpose of using the software in the first place; the numbers can't be close, they have to be exact and consistent across forms!The debate about the importance of exact and correct calculations went back a forth and while until it was escalated sufficiently high to warrant an official response:Our software is only intended to guide you in the general direction of preparing tax returns. It only needs to be reasonably functional, not "useful".Julie, at this point, was desperate, so she contacted an insider at the company. "Is there *any* chance this is going to be working in time for tax season?""Oh, man… noooooo," her contact said. "A lot of the developers are on contract, so somebody ran the numbers comparing the hours of development time against paying penalties from audits. They figured out that they could do about… 90% of the changes. It's cheaper to just pay the penalties later."Julie is no longer partnering with this conglomerate. [Advertisement] Application Release Automation for DevOps – integrating with best of breed development tools. Free for teams with up to 5 users. Download and learn more today!

Melody got tapped to do a code review on a pull-request from a veteran team-member. It was… an interesting PR, in that very, very little changed. The code was terrible before anyone touched it- for example, the C-file started with 355 lines of variable declarations inside of the main method.It was, in fact, down around line 354 where Melody noticed the change.

"Oh boy! I wonder how they'll top this for the end-of-week bonus prize?" writes Zak.

We do our best to anonymize submissions, but there’s always a chance that some dangerously identifying detail slips through. Every once in a while, a submitter contacts us to ask for a modification. More rarely, a submitter’s employer contacts us.Our rule is to make edits more or less as requested, then move on without comment. There’s nothing about an article so sacrosanct that it’s worth going to war over. However, we recently got a request that was itself too much of a WTF to pass up.An old Errord—practically antique—contained a picture of a freaked-out Windows login screen, submitted by someone we’ll call Johnny. The post contained Johnny's name, username, and an Active Directory Domain. It did not identify the company Johnny worked for. But the company—we’ll call them “Lagomorphic Cogitations”—recently performed a security audit and sent us a message:

Every line of code tells a story. It never just… appears. Someone made and crafted that code. There’s a story, and an explanation for how that code could be. The world, even the bad, awful corners of it, makes sense and can be understood.For example, Luke sends us this block.

For a change of pace, the code in this CodeSOD isn’t the real WTF. Our Anonymous submitter works for a company that handles meeting scheduling for corporate customers. This entails shipping off loads of HTML-emails, and that means using a relatively terrible WYSIWYG editor that generates code like this:

Michael R. wrote, "So, https://TfL.Gov.UK...does that bus go on the 'Information Superhighway'?"

As you know, Hired has been sponsoring the site for the past few months. I went “behind the scenes” to have a brief chat with Michael Mitchell, a full stack web engineer focused on their “Candidate Experience” features.To ease in, I started with the only truly important question about life at Hired: how’s the coffee. “It’s amazing,” Michael replied. “We have an operations coordinator that worked at a few large coffee roasters, so she takes care of coffee and makes large batches of cold-brew for the office.” That last is an important one- I’ve had too many cups of “iced” coffee that were just, well, hot coffee with ice in it.Michael was an electrical engineer before becoming a web engineer; while high voltage might kill you, NPM will make you wish you were dead. “I’m partial to the story Overpowered,” Michael said. While he never used angular momentum to destroy a hard disk drive, he did build the automation for an industrial packaging line. That automation was entirely run through a single Arduino.“I wasn’t a complete idiot,” Michael said. “All of the safety critical systems were hardwired in a fail-safe manner, and didn’t depend on the Arduino.” It operated for years without incident, and as the line grew, that Arduino ended up running a multi-million dollar business. Eventually, the support contract for the line went elsewhere, and the company taking it over wanted to know what that tiny little board running the line was, and how they could interface with it. “I told them to rip it out and replace it with a PLC, because they really didn’t want to hear the answers to those questions.”Michael isn’t in the business of hacking together millions of dollars of business on hobbyist equipment anymore. Their current stack- mostly Ruby/React.js, with Postgres on the backend, and a bit of Scala/Python data-science for matching/ranking- doesn’t have any of those kinds of hacks. “Our code review process is fairly well enforced- culturally, not through tools. Probably, the most horrific stuff I’ve done is commit some pretty tortured CSS.”Despite that, there are lots of growing pains. When Hired was in its early startup phases, it was “move fast and break things,” but as their customers grew, they needed to shift gears. “When you have large client teams relying on your product, moving a button can break an entire HR team’s workflow.”The upshot is that Michael works with a strong team. “Everyone here is incredibly collaborative and easy to work with.” How do they build the right team? Using Hired, of course! At least half of the engineering team were placed through Hired. “The founders started Hired because they had issues hiring good talent for their previous companies. The company was practically founded to dog-food its own product.”Speaking of, Michael’s team is tackling a lot of work- in addition to two web engineers, they have two mobile engineers and a single designer. Five people supporting web, iOS, and working on delivering an Android app. “That’s with only four engineers, so I’d say our bottleneck is mainly engineering resources. We’re currently Hiring!”Hired was also Michael’s chance to dodge a bit of a bullet. When he was last job hunting, he was shopping around, and interviewed with another startup. The CEO may have been the subject of many an article here: the “I know better than you, and you’re lucky I’m even talking to you,” sort. Michael explains:

Writing quality database code is a challenge. Most of your commands need to be expressed in SQL, which is a mildly complicated language made more complicated by minor variations across databases. Result sets often have a poor mapping to our business logic’s abstractions, especially in object-oriented languages. Thus, we have Object-Relational-Mapping tools, like Microsoft’s EntityFramework.With an ORM, you use an object-oriented approach to fetching your objects, and could write something like: IList<HJFRate> rates = db.HJFRates.where(rate=>rate.typeOfUse == typeOfUse) to return all the rows as objects. There’s no concern about SQL injections, no need to process the result set directly. While ORMs can generate poor SQL, or create really inefficient data-access patterns, their ease-of-use is a big selling point.Which is why Bob Zim was surprised to find this EntityFramework code in a C# web-service:

“Mrs S” works for a large software vendor. This vendor has a tendency to quickly increase staffing to hit arbitrary release targets, and thus relies heavily on contractors. Since they’re usually doing this during a time crunch, these contractors may have a… dubious skill set.They also don’t care. There is no documentation, no tests, and no explanation. They are just paid tho write the code, not maintain it. They’ll be on another contract before long, so it’s some other schmuck’s problem.Which is why “Mrs S” found this code, which takes a version number, as a pair of integers, and converts them to a string, but still couldn’t tell you why it does any of the things that it does.

John A. writes, "Um, you know, I don't think this was a brilliant idead."

Given the common need to have getter/setter methods on properties, many languages have adopted conventions which try and make it easier to implement/invoke them. For example, if you name a method foo in Ruby, you can invoke it by doing: obj.foo = 5.In the .NET family of languages, there’s a concept of a property, which bundles the getter and setter methods together through some syntactical sugar. So, something like this, in VB.Net.

Zenith’s company went ahead on and outsourced 95% of their development to the lowest bidder. Said bidder promised a lot of XML and MVC and whatever TLAs sounded buzzwordy that day, and off they went. It’s okay, though, the customer isn’t just taking that code and deploying it- “Zenith” gets to do code reviews to ensure code quality. The general flow of the post-code-review conversation goes something like:

John S. worked with a customer who still owned several Windows 2008/R2 servers. Occassionally during automated management and deployments, these machines threw exceptions because they weren't configured for remote management. One day, John caught an exception on a SQL box and remoted in to address the problem.The RDP login process always felt like accessing a portal into the distant past. This time, just after the ancient Windows interface appeared, a Notepad document popped open. John skimmed the so-called Readme.txt file—then read through it again (grammatical errors preserved):

"You know, usually these statements are just marketing B.S., but I think this guy's got the right idea," wrote Philip K.

"I tried to export my game to HTML5, but I guess it just wasn't meant to be," Edward W. writes.

"I guess we're not allowed to thank the postal carriers?!" Brian writes.

Bryan T. had worked for decades to amass the skills, expertise and experience to be a true architect, but never quite made the leap. Finally, he got a huge opportunity in the form of an interview with a Silicon Valley semi-conductor firm project manager who was looking for a consultant to do just that. The discussions revolved around an application that three developers couldn't get functioning correctly in six months, and Bryan was to be the man to reign it in and make it work; he was lured with the promise of having complete control of the software.Upon starting and spelunking through the code-base, Bryan discovered the degree of total failure that caused them to yield complete control to him. It was your typical hodgepodge of code slapped together with anti-patterns, snippets of patterns claiming to be the real deal, and the usual Assortment-o-WTFâ„¢ we've all come to expect.Once he recognized the futility of attempting to fix this mess, Bryan scrapped it and rewrote it as a full-blown modular and compositional application, utilizing MVVM, DDD, SOA, pub/sub; the works. Within three weeks, he had it back to the point it was when he started, only his version actually worked.While he had righted the sinking ship, it was so successful that the project team started managing it, which proved to be its undoing.Given the sudden success of the project, the department head committed the application to all the divisions company wide within three quarters - without informing Bryan or anyone else on the team. After all, it's not like developers need to plan for code and resource scalability issues beyond the original design requirements or anything.We've read countless stories about how difficult it is to work with things like dates and even booleans, but buttons are pretty much solidly understood. Some combination of text, text+image or just image, and an onAction callback pretty much covers it. Oh sure, you can set fg/bg colors and the font, but that's usually to just give visual clues. Unfortunately, buttons would be the beginning of a downward spiral so steep, that sheer inertia would derail the project.The project manager decided that images were incredibly confusing, so all buttons should have text instead of icons. Bryan had created several toolbars (because ribbons were shot down already) which, according to management, made the application unusable. In particular, there was a fairly standard user icon with a pencil bullet that was meant to (as you might have guessed it) edit users...

"Apparently, I viewed the page during one of those special 31 seconds of the year," wrote Richard W.

Working for a contractor within the defense industry can be an interesting experience. Sometimes you find yourself trying to debug an application from a stack trace which was handwritten and faxed out of a secured facility with all the relevant information redacted by overzealous security contractors who believe that you need a Secret clearance just to know that it was a System.NullReferenceException. After weeks of frustration when you are unable to solve anything from a sheet of thick black Sharpie stripes, they may bring you there for on-site debugging.Beforehand, they will lock up your cell phone, cut out the WiFi antennas from your development laptop, and background check you so thoroughly that they’ll demand explanations for the sins of your great-great-great-great grandfather’s neighbor’s cousin’s second wife’s stillborn son before letting you in the door. Once inside, they will set up temporary curtains around your environment to block off any Secret-rated workstation screens to keep you from peeking and accidentally learning what the Top Secret thread pitch is for the lug nuts of the latest black-project recon jet. Then they will set up an array of very annoying red flashing lights and constant alarm whistles to declare to all the regular staff that they need to watch their mouths because an uncleared individual is present.Then you’ll spend several long days trying to fix code. But you’ll have no Internet connection, no documentation other than whatever three-ring binders full of possibly-relevant StackOverflow questions you had forseen to prepare, and the critical component which reliably triggers the fault has been unplugged because it occasionally sends Secret-rated UDP packets, and, alas, you’re still uncleared.When you finish the work, if you’re lucky they’ll even let you keep your laptop. Minus the hard drive, of course. That gets pulled, secure-erased ten times over, and used for target practice at the local Marine battalion’s next SpendEx.Despite all the inherent difficulties though, defense work can be very financially-rewarding. If you play your cards right, your company may find itself milking a 30-year-long fighter jet development project for all it’s worth with no questions asked. That’s good for salaries, good for employee morale, and very good for job security.That’s not what happened to Nikko, of course. No. His company didn’t play its cards right at all. In fact, they didn’t even have cards. They were the player who walked up to the poker table after the River and went all-in despite not even being dealed into the game. “Hey,” the company’s leaders said to themselves, “Yeah we’ll lose some money, but at least we get to play with the big boys. That’s worth a lot, and someday we’ll be the lead contractor for the software on the next big Fire Control Radar!”So Nikko found himself working on a project his company was the subcontractor (a.k.a. the lowest bidder) for. But in their excited rush to take on the work, nobody read the contract and signed it as-is. The customer’s requirements for this component were vague, contradictory, at times absurd, and of course the contract offered no protection for Nikko’s company.In fact, months later when Nikko–not yet aware of the mess he was in–met with engineers from the lead contractor–whom we’ll call Acme–for guidance on the project, one of them plainly told him in an informal context “Yeah, it’s a terrible component. We just wanted to get out from under it. It’s a shame you guys bid on it…”The project began, using a small team of a project manager, Nikko as the experienced lead, and two junior engineers. Acme did not make things easy on them. They were expected to write all code at Acme’s facilities, on a network with no Internet access. They were asked to bring their own laptops in to develop on, but the information security guys refused and instead offered them one 15-year-old Pentium 4 that the three engineers were expected to share. Of course, using such an ancient system meant that a clean compile took 20 minutes, and the hidden background process that the security guys used to audit file access constantly brought disk I/O to a halt.But development started anyway, depsite all the red flags. They were required to use an API from another subcontractor. However, that subcontractor would only give them obfuscated JAR files with no documentation. Fortunately it was a fairly simple API and the team had some success decompiling it and figuring out how it works.But their next hurdle was even worse. All the JAR did was communicate with a REST interface from a server. But due to the way the Acme security guys had things set up, there was no test server on the development network. It wasn’t allowed. Period.The actual server lived in an integration lab located several miles away, but coding was not allowed there. Access to it was tightly-controlled and scheduled. Nikko found himself writing code, checking it in, and scheduling a time slot at the lab (which often took days) to try out his changes.The integration lab was secured. He could not bring anything in and Acme information security specialists had to sign off on strict paperwork every time he wanted to transfer the latest build there. Debuggers were forbidden due to the fears of giving an uncleared individual access to the system’s memory, and Nikko had to hand-copy any error logs using pen and paper to bring any error messages out of the facility and back to the development lab.Three months into the project, Nikko was alone. The project manager threw some kind of temper tantrum and either quit or was fired. One of the junior engineers gave birth and quit the company during maternity leave. And the other junior engineer accepted an offer from another company and also left.Nikko, feeling burned out and unable to sleep one night, then remembered his father’s story of punchcard programming in computing’s early days. Back then, your program was a stack of punchcards, with each card performing a single machine instruction. You had to schedule a 15-minute timeslot with the computer to run through your program which was actually a stack of punchcards. And sometimes the operator accidentally dropped your box of punchcards on the way to the machine but made no effort to ensure they were executed in the correct order, ruining the job.The day after that revelation, Nikko met with his bosses. He was upset, and flatly told them that the project could not succeed, they were following 1970’s punchcard programming methodologies in the year 2016, and that he would have no part in it anymore.He then took on a job at a different defense contractor. And then found himself working again as a subcontractor on an Acme component. He decided to stick with it for a while since his new company actually read contracts before signing, so maybe it would be better this time? Still, in the back of his mind he started to wonder if he had died and Acme was his purgatory.[Advertisement] Manage IT infrastructure as code across all environments with Puppet. Puppet Enterprise now offers more control and insight, with role-based access control, activity logging and all-new Puppet Apps. Start your free trial today!

"As an Australian, I demand that they replace one of the two Belgiums with something to represent the quarter of the Earth they missed!" writes John A.