What is the most EVIL code you have ever seen in a production enterprise environment? [closed]

Answer 1

In the main project header file, from an old-hand COBOL programmer, who was inexplicably writing a compiler in C:

int i, j, k;

"So you won't get a compiler error if you forget to declare your loop variables."

Answer 2

We had an application that loaded all of it's global state in an xml file. No problem with that, except that the developer had created a new form of recursion.

<settings>
  <property>
      <name>...</name>
      <value>...</value>
      <property>
          <name>...</name>
          <value>...</value>
          <property>
              <name>...</name>
              <value>...</value>
              <property>
                   <name>...</name>
                   <value>...</value>
                   <property>
                        <name>...</name>
                        <value>...</value>
                       <property>
                             <name>...</name>
                             <value>...</value>
                            <property>

Then comes the fun part. When the application loads, it runs through the list of properties and adds them to a global (flat) list, along with incrementing a mystery counter. The mystery counter is named something totally irrelevant and is used in mystery calculations:

List properties = new List();
Node<-root
while node.hasNode("property")
    add to properties list
    my_global_variable++;
    if hasNode("property")
         node=getNode("property"), ... etc etc

And then you get functions like

calculateSumOfCombinations(int x, int y){
   return x+y+my_global_variable;
}

edit: clarification - Took me a long time to figure out that he was counting the depth of the recursion, because at level 6 or 7 the properties changed meaning, so he was using the counter to split his flat set into 2 sets of different types, kind of like having a list of STATE, STATE, STATE, CITY, CITY, CITY and checking if the index > counter to see if your name is a city or state)

Answer 3

I don't know if I'd call the code "evil", but we had a developer who would create Object[] arrays instead of writing classes. Everywhere.

Answer 4

A little evil...someone I know wrote into the main internal company web app, a daily check to see if he has logged into the system in the past 10 days. If there's no record of him logged in, it disables the app for everyone in the company.

He wrote the piece once he heard rumors of layoffs, and if he was going down, the company would have to suffer.

The only reason I knew about it, is that he took a 2 week vacation & I called him when the site crapped out. He told me to log on with his username/password...and all was fine again.

Of course..months later we all got laid off.

Answer 5

Instead of writing a Windows service for a server process that needed to run constantly one of our "architects" wrote a console app and used the task scheduler to run it every 60 seconds.

Keep in mind this is in .NET where services are very easy to create.

--

Also, at the same place a console app was used to host a .NET remoting service, so they had to start the console app and lock a session to keep it running every time the server was rebooted.

--

At the last place I worked one of the architects had a single C# source code file with over 100 classes that was something like 250K in size.

Answer 6

Similar to what someone else mentioned above:

I worked in a place that had a pseudo-scripting language in the application. It fed into a massive method that had some 30 parameters and a giant Select Case statement.

It was time to add more parameters, but the guy on the team who had to do it realized that there were too many already.

His solution?

He added a single object parameter on the end, so he could pass in anything he wanted and then cast it.

I couldn't get out of that place fast enough.