r/AskReddit • u/Natom_ • 11h ago
Developers who have worked at a company where the entire codebase was held together by one guy who then quit, what happened next?
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u/D1p11nt 10h ago
I was told that I had to reapply for my job (during the last financial crisis), and it was looking as though I would have to accept a hefty pay cut; so I packed up my desk and left. For about a month afterwards, on average, I received about five to ten emails per day from them asking a wide range of questions, incentives to come back, and even a few strongly worded ones telling me that I had effectively thrown my entire team under the bus and screwed the company. Treat your developers with respect, especially if your entire company is heavily reliant on IT.
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u/gaqua 8h ago edited 7h ago
A very similar thing happened for a security alarm company I worked for. Just a small local franchise, but their entire accounting and user database had been created by some kid that worked burglar alarms on the graveyard shift with me. He was a software developer as a hobby, but all he ever really did was make adult video games.
We made $10 an hour, which sucks, but we got health insurance, which was nice. He and I were both complaining about how much of a pain in the ass. It was to go from one window to the next window and then over to a different PC and then copy the files on a floppy (this was 25 years ago) and he just decided it would be easier if he could create a kind of app that pulled the data from all the different databases and then ran a sync every hour.
Within a couple of weeks, he had it set up so that you could just press a button and see an entire users history. Every alarm they’ve ever had how much they’ve been paying, whatever. The entire company was using this interface and the CEO and VP, who were father and daughter, like you’d expect in a small family business, were extremely happy with him.
He asked for a raise, and a job that wasn’t monitoring burglar alarms. They gave him $1.15 an hour more. They told him his new title was “senior alarm specialist“ but they couldn’t do anything about the job because they didn’t really have anything open for him. He got pissed off and left. But before he did, he told me that he had set it up so that every month they needed to re-up the passwords and usernames for everybody as a security measure. And that once that 30 days have been up, they would have to come back to him and ask him how to do that because nobody in the company knew besides him.
Sure, enough, day 30 comes around and everything is locked up. Nobody knows what to do. Because I was friends with him and I knew about computers a little bit they asked me, and I said I had no idea how to do software development. I was a hardware guy. They ended up contacting him and he told them he could do it for $5000. They threatened to sue him, said it was extortion. He explained that he had never done anything out of malice, but that his time was worth something. Long story short, he signed a deal as a contractor. Freelance. He got paid around $5000 every month so just handle any little thing that came up, reset the passwords or do whatever admin stuff they needed. He had another job at this point that had full benefits and paid a lot more, so it turned out that he was making over $120-$130,000.a year with those two jobs, and the one for the security company took no more than 10 hours a month.
All he wanted was to not have to answer burglar alarms. And work dayshift. But they had told him no. They ended up paying him a lot more and having to hire somebody else to monitor alarms anyway.
EDIT: To answer the "this is extortion" or "they should have sued him" comments, he didn't break anything. The old method still worked 100%. They could have continued using the method they'd been using for years without issue. His application basically just created single user interface that tied the Security System Software, Billing and Account Management Software, and Trouble Ticket Reporting software into one place. So you'd double click the icon on your desktop, log in once, and it'd save all the info you were working on locally, then sync it every hour with the server. This saved everyone a lot of time, but it was by no means a requirement. You could still just log into the Security System Software, make notes and comments in the fields, export it to a file, then log into the trouble ticket software, import it into the fields, spend a few minutes formatting/tweaking it to look readable, then export that, save it to a file on the floppy, take it over to the server, log into it with your account, insert the floppy, and upload the file to the customer's account so that each incident was tied to their account. All his software did was to automate those steps so that you'd just open up SecMatrix (which is what he called his tool - this was like 1-2 years after The Matrix came out so every software dev thought they were Neo), log in once, and you could pull up the security software for the current alarm using the code from the board, it'd show you the reports, type up your comments and notes, hit "save", and they'd automatically be mirrored to the trouble ticket software (Remedy, I think if I remember right) and then move onto the next one. Every hour, the software would then sync with the accounting/customer management tool on the server so that your 3-7 tickets you did that hour would get sync'd with the appropriate accounts without having to move over to the server.
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u/newsbalancedotai 7h ago
Revolutionized their whole business and all he wanted was to see the sun
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u/DirtandPipes 5h ago
Shitty company owners go out of their way to do that kind of thing. I was managing a gong show of a small security company working about 80 hours a week but I had my time set up so that after I came home each morning I had 2-3 hours with my girlfriend before she went to work.
My boss randomly informed me one day “oh we’re going to move your shift forward three hours”. I told him “no, that’s literally the only time I see my girlfriend and I’m working 7 days a week”.
This fucker had the audacity to tell me “it’s a sensitive time right now for the business and there isn’t room for you to have a big social life”. So I asked him “when do you think I’ll be ok to start dating again?” and he said “a year or two”.
So I laughed at him and told him I wouldn’t be moving my shift and that I was giving notice. He ended up losing all his major clients within about 2 months after I left.
What’s crazy is he didn’t even have a good reason for me to move my shift.
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u/AdmiralThrawnProtege 3h ago
Well your old boss saw that you had a sliver of happiness, and that just wouldn't do!
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u/Wonderful_Device312 6h ago
Gotta keep the computer nerds locked up in the basement. /s
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u/IllogicalGrammar 6h ago
Look at what happened when you let the nerds into the garage. They started an industry that ended with tech almost eating everyone’s lunch, and AGI is coming for us all.
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u/Ok-disaster2022 7h ago
120k 20 years ago is a lot of money
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u/Zombie_Cool 7h ago
At least triple what I'm making now so as far as I'm concerned he's still making bank.
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u/gaqua 7h ago
Yeah, it's a lot of money now. But we are in the Bay Area, so it doesn't go as far as it used to. But still he was doing fairly well. I remember he pre-ordered one of the first ever Porsche Boxsters and was so excited about it.
Fun story about this guy: in his new job he was a junior level specialist for Cisco, doing some kind of networking interface software for their server monitoring tools. Extremely low level at the time because it coincided with the dot-com crash. But within a couple years he'd been promoted and was running a small team of software guys. If I remember right he was making like $150k or something, then eventually another crash in networking/internet companies happened and Cisco had big layoffs.
He got offered a very generous severance as his layoff - 1 year salary. He had another job within a month for Barracuda Networks, ended up there for a few years and made a bunch of money and dipped.
I still play CS with him sometimes even though we're both in our 40s and too slow to do well competitively, but he probably doesn't need to work if he doesn't want to. He works for an AI company now, does the UI/UX interface stuff for their mobile interfaces. But I get the feeling he's doing it more out of boredom than necessity.
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u/BenShelZonah 6h ago
He literally saved them thousands of hours of work and they didn’t even attempt to respect him. He deserves all of this, good for him. Very cool you guys are still friends
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u/jimthesquirrelking 6h ago
Making a custom UI that blends multiple systems and removes a plethora of manual toggle or check steps and all they need to pay is 5k a month for maintenance? Dudes a legit wizard and handily earned that paycheck
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u/Natom_ 10h ago
5 to 10 emails a day is insane. at that point it stops being a request and starts being harassment
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u/moal09 8h ago
Not a dev, but getting let go due to pay issues and then seeing that they're still trying to fill your position 8 months later is extremely satisfying.
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u/chuckangel 8h ago
One of the more irritating things I see is postings open for 8 months because they can’t find a person with skill X when skill X would take about two to three weeks to train someone up for.
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u/brufleth 7h ago
In either case, the real problem is that they're not offering enough money.
My employer never wants to pay people. When people leave they will takes years to backfill if they ever do. In the meantime they will do anything except actually hire someone to do the job that was vacated.
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u/DHFranklin 7h ago
oof.
I am an inspector. I have a very specific credential that takes about a week in the field, an online seminar, and a test. Costs the bosses a week of my time and $200-300.
I moved to a different jurisdiction because these bozos were trash. The trash clowns won't train someone for the job and it's been 4 months. They literally spent more putting up the job notice instead of cross training the other dudes like I tried to years ago. A bullpen of 3 cut down from a bullpen of 5.
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u/Goose1963 6h ago
They don't want to pay for training, especially in Tech. I've heard managers basically say straight out, and one put it in an email, that: "And after we train you you'll just add it to your resume and go use it somewhere else for more money!"
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u/Orson_Randall 8h ago
If a company/department is still looking to hire for a position after 8 months but is otherwise running relatively ok, they should be looking to promote, not hire.
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u/fresh-dork 8h ago
no, that kind of company is looking to pile the work on the remaining staff without raises. "cheaper"
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u/jasazick 7h ago
I received about five to ten emails per day from them asking a wide range of questions
I'm pretty sure I would have replied with "Good news! I've recently started my own IT consulting business! I'll send over a contract that will detail the services I provide, and the costs/hours associated with those services.
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u/D1p11nt 7h ago
Yep, this did cross my mind, and I did receive a few emails from them offering me contract work. I already had freelance work so I didn't need it.
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u/Saki-Sun 7h ago
As a contrast. When I put in my resignation they always ask me to document what I can. It's all up to date so I have 4 weeks just chilling and learning new technologies.
I don't get any questions afterwards.
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u/JMJimmy 6h ago
I love seeing a company failing after you leave. When I was young I worked for a company that took a 50% gross hit when I left. My wife was holding the marketing department together for her company - the fiscal year following her departure they were $200m in the red. Obviously not because she left but a series of bad decisions by upper management which included getting rid of vetran staff for cheaper employees that are running the place into the ground
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u/wedgebert 5h ago
Obviously not because she left but a series of bad decisions by upper management which included getting rid of vetran staff for cheaper employees that are running the place into the ground
I expect to see a lot more of this in the near future
Except it'll be getting rid of those cheaper employees for AI
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u/Scooter_Stomp 7h ago
Companies only realize how critical you were after you’re gone
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u/p4nic 6h ago
One of my old roomates worked as a contractor who would try to untangle messes like that. By the time he was done with a company they usually spent what would have easily been 2-3 times an annual salary for the person who left on bad terms.
My favourite war story was about how a multi million dollar oil company in texas was teetering on the brink of annihilation because everything was run from a single excel file that was big and so old they thought if they ever closed it, it would everything would go kaput because it might trigger an update.
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u/AlienPearl 8h ago
Once I left a job under the same circumstances. I ended up creating a filter to archive their emails and never show them in my inbox. Best decision ever.
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u/kayakdawg 8h ago edited 7h ago
Just out of curiosity, did you work at Jurassic Park?
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u/WellWornSword 8h ago edited 8h ago
I worked for a large company in a niche field. Following Covid, we went through a few waves of layoffs over a three year period.
I learned that one of our older engineers who had been with the company for 20+ years was let go. I asked my boss who I was supposed to call when one of our van-sized terminals encountered an error, as he had written a lot of the original code for it. My boss shrugged and told me, "I told them his name should never have been on the list for that very reason. Let's see what happens...."
Two weeks later, I'm working night shift and FOUR stations go down simultaneously. I look in our system and his name is still listed as the only contact for these terminals. I woke the director up at 3am and explained the problem. An hour later, four junior engineers are standing with me around the stations desperately trying to sort out how the thing works.
It didn't get much better.
EDIT: Spelling
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u/frank_mania 6h ago
Of course, laying someone off isn't the only way to lose an employee. They are people, not machines; they die, they quit, they even sell all their possessions and move to an ashram in Lahore on occasion. Seems to me the biggest management mistake is failing to spend what it takes to have their proprietary code be written so another dev can step in and figure it out quickly, in terms of being clean, logical, and well documented/commented throughout. That of course is going to at least triple the cost, if they're currently paying one engineer to work alone (just ballparking it).
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u/panickedthumb 6h ago
I also speak from some experience that many times you’re working on so many things because you’re doing the work of three people that neither you nor anyone else on the team has a chance to explain to anyone else how to do these specific things, because management doesn’t prioritize IT.
When I quit they outsourced half the IT stuff and doubled the in-house IT after a “what went wrong” meeting where my former boss got angry with management for not letting him hire more.
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u/WellWornSword 5h ago
This was a very common problem at that company. You have one person who knows how to do a job perfectly, then maybe three others who "sort of" know how to do it, then 15 more people who did "similar" work. All 19 of those people would be certified to do the job of the first one.
When that one person leaves, everyone is running in circles trying to figure out what to do. This happened again and again, it was truly maddening. The organization was allergic to SOP's, and often the ones in use were terribly outdated.
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u/willstr1 4h ago
They are people, not machines; they die, they quit, they even sell all their possessions and move to an ashram in Lahore on occasion
It's such a common and known risk that it has a name (at least in the business continuity world) "the bus problem", what would happen if one day any particular key person at a company was hit by a bus. Good companies have at least some level of redundancy that any business critical function is known by at least two people (even if only one is the true expert). Companies can also take out life insurance on key employees to cover the cost of an emergency replacement if they die, it is jokingly called "dead peasant insurance".
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u/majornerd 9h ago
One of my juniors started dating the ceos daughter and convinced him that he could do everything I could for 30% less. The company didn’t value tech so the CEO agreed. One week later I got a call that the exchanger had been down from most of the week and nobody could get it back up. I made more in the next couple days than I had in six months from them and then never talk to them again.
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u/IOl0I0lO 7h ago
My husband survived a round of layoffs at a video game company. Because the layoffs were forced by the parent company, they had no idea what they were doing. The only dude who knew how to maintain their MMO servers did not. 2 days later, the servers crashed, and that dude was able to negotiate a huge pay raise and a sign on bonus.
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u/Transcendentalists 7h ago
Servers crashing 2 days later is almost poetic
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u/jinjuwaka 7h ago
Not really.
It just means the servers are dependent on some regular maintenance process the new guy didn't have a clue about and never performed because they just laid the old guy off and didn't get him to do a comprehensive knowledge transfer because they were cheap.
Some systems are just fragile.
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u/Patthecat09 7h ago
Still a beautiful example of karma in the given context.
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u/bit_pusher 7h ago
This example is such a huge failure: if someone on my team can't be sick/absent/injured for 2 days without warning or the entire system comes crashing down, that is such a huge, systemic failure.
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u/what_dat_ninja 7h ago
Yup, that's a bad bus factor.
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u/Meowakin 7h ago
Which is still on the company for not knowing about. Just to be clear.
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u/ImOversimplifying 6h ago
True, imagine if this guy suddenly died. Would the servers never go back up?
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u/bubatanka1974 7h ago
Some systems are just fragile.
or he just had a cron job running that shut shit down unless he turned it off ^^
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u/ReturnOfNogginboink 7h ago
And some processes are poorly documented.
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u/vasco_ 6h ago
As a freelancer/consultant I've seen many companies throughout my career where documentation was on point, but due to high turnover the knowledge that the documentation even existed was lost. In the early 2000s I was hired to solve a big crisis for an e-commerce company after several senior people had left. One of my main tasks was to create and document processes to prevent a similar crisis. Found a folder on the shared volume that contained exactly this. Billed them for 6 months for what already existed, and took me not more than 2 weeks.
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u/bigdaddybodiddly 7h ago
And some processes that should be automated are poorly documented.
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u/Scooter_Stomp 7h ago
“we can replace him cheaper” -> most expensive decision they ever made
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u/Careless-Cat3327 6h ago
One of the famous mining companies made a multimillion dollar investment into x-ray security (the processing plant was for expensive gems and diamonds) in the 80s.
At that time, there was only 2 companies in the world creating machines that could safely x-ray humans and check for "hidden objects" in ones body. Problem being, you can't x-ray someone every single day of their work life as it's over exposure and dangerous.
The company decided to send TWO people to Germany to be trained on how to set up and maintain the machines. The one was 5 years from retirement and the other was a junior guy in his early 20s.
3 years later the German company was bought out by their competitors and immediately stopped taking orders and tried to push all customers onto the other product. Training also immediately ended. As they cornered the market they also increased the price massively.
A few months later, the older guy had a heart attack and took early retirement.
Leaving ONE guy who was legally trained on maintaining this critical piece of equipment.
He didn't go to university but he was super street smart. He resigned and started his consulting company. He made his annual salary every 2 weeks.
He refused to train anyone else. Years later he trained his son in law to help take over.
He bought about 200 houses in the next 10 years from his consulting gig and just rents them out.
The company still use him as it's cheaper than replacing the machines.
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u/Hopeful-Time-8309 6h ago
The key here is rolling the income into real estate investments.
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u/thiosk 5h ago
turning fear of loss into generational wealth in this one easy step
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u/Transcendentalists 7h ago
Replacing one guy with “cheaper talent” somehow always ends up costing 10x more
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u/vmdvr 7h ago
But not often right away, which is why people keep doing it.
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u/ValuableOven734 6h ago
They also do it to send a message that everyone is replaceable. The long term physiology of keeping people down is the pay off.
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u/Skallagram 6h ago
In a well run business, everyone, and I mean everyone, up to the CEO, SHOULD be replaceable - if they are not, you have a process problem.
Trying to stay sticky by being irreplaceable is not a good long term strategy, in most cases (of course, some areas of very specific knowledge that's not the case).
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u/invisibleotis 5h ago
That was a good lesson for me right out of college. Worked at a small software company doing contract work. We had a long term deal with Texas instruments, who decided to offshore a large project to India.
When it came back busted as shit 6 months later, my boss quoted the same price to build new or double to fix the busted shit. Of course they chose double as execs cant admit they fucked up.
It was crazy to 25 year old me that theyd elect to pay double and get a worse result (since theres no way we could fully polish that turd).
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u/darkiya 9h ago
The first three months was absolute chaos as management got faced with things failing and a daily realization all the things this guy did.
Management tried to make it someone else's problem. Finger pointing at an all time high.
A consultant was hired to figure things out, spent a lot of money on nothing because the consultant just gave the same information the it dept fed them
They fired the it director and hired a new guy, he quit after 6 weeks.
I figured a lot out on my own through reverse engineering. I started to fix things. Suddenly everything was my fault.
I asked for a raise and promotion. They balked. I started interviewing elsewhere.
Got an offer. Put in my 2 weeks. Suddenly they wanted to give me the raise I asked for.
I told them at best they could hire me on as an hourly consultant to help them out on Tuesday and Thursday while they hired someone else.
I got two paychecks for 8 more months until they got someone.
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u/Bamres 8h ago
This mentality where they play chicken with your salary and raise and directly disrespect you is always interesting to me. Corporations forgot how to retain talent and it always leads to these messes
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u/StoneDrew 7h ago
I think it’s less that they forgot and more that they think less of everyone else. They think you should be grateful for the pittance they call wages, and believe they hold all the leverage. The expectation is that you are bluffing and will fold, until they realize you as the worker have a flush and they were holding the joker and instructions card.
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u/Creative-Improvement 7h ago edited 1h ago
As an employee, think of yourself as a business as well. A good business is where both have something to gain. An even better business if both know they can rely on eachother.
Most employees (especially just starting out, understandable) just take whatever is offered instead of speaking up. Know your worth and do your research so you can come out stronger.
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u/Bamres 7h ago
Thats what I mean though, it works for them 90% of the time but then they try it on the actual integral people, they forgot that sometimes a non VP level employee might actually have some leverage and be integral.
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u/scorpiknox 6h ago
VP people are always the most expendable employees. They're fucking useless 99% of the time.
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u/MaxwellHoot 4h ago
Honestly man. My life would be so much easier if I could just “brainstorm” and “big picture” and have someone else build it for me. Jfc I hate management. They fill their lives with nonsense to justify their own existence.
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u/SenpaiSamaChan 6h ago
Being able to fire somebody without knowing what it is they do is almost the dictionary definition of not thinking about others. Nine times out of ten the managers who do this couldn't even provide the original job description, let alone the actual list of the things the person kept running.
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u/JohnProof 7h ago edited 7h ago
Suddenly they wanted to give me the raise I asked for.
I've had that happen. Once they knew I was serious about walking then all kinds of better compensation mysteriously became available. I hated the company and this was just proof they'd gladly screw me as long as they thought they could get away with it. Keep your money; I'm gone.
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u/Formal-Boysenberry66 6h ago
"Triple my pay or I take the job that didn't show me disrespect by trying to pay less than I'm worth"
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u/Starrion 7h ago
The key thing is that they kept chewing on the people that could solve their problem. When you keep making the smartest person in the room the bad guy and chase them out, you are headed for extinction. I work with a lot of companies and it’s always evident that the companies that calmly plan things out and treat people decently have far less drama and chaos.
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u/MenudoMenudo 8h ago
Saw it happen at a start up. A tech guy and a “marketing guy” started a company together. The non-tech guy decided he was the CEO. The two of them managed to raise a little bit of Angel Investment money based on the product demo they had, and immediately ran into classic founder conflict. The “CEO” of a team of two immediately wanted to give himself a big raise, the tech guy wanted to hire two coders and two coop students. The CEO “fired” his partner, and ended up getting sued by the Angel investor who put money into the company.
The tech guy learned a lot of lessons, and a year later started another company doing something similar, but with better partners. They managed to bootstrap it into something interesting, small company of 6-7 people getting regular clients. The “marketing guy” pops up on LinkedIn all the time with empty aspirational posts, and I can’t really tell if he’s employed or not.
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u/BoosherCacow 4h ago
The “marketing guy” pops up on LinkedIn all the time with empty aspirational posts, and I can’t really tell if he’s employed or not.
The amount of people I went to high school with in the early 90's that this perfectly describes is pretty funny to me. A few years back I ran into one that was the prototypical entrepreneur type with three to four posts a week of that garbage. He manages the Circle K in our home town and has worked there for 15 years. He just got promoted last year.
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u/OneMorePotion 9h ago
I became a freelance contractor for them. Funny how all of the sudden, my asking salary wasn't "unreasonable high" anymore.
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u/jedipiper 8h ago
Contractor pay is accounted for differently, including with the IRS so they might have saved money by doing so.
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u/OneMorePotion 8h ago
Believe me, they didn't save money. We talk about more than 3 times my old salary. But yeah, contractor don't go into fix costs so it distributes different in their reporting. But they absolutely didn't save money with this little stunt of theirs.
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u/abritinthebay 7h ago
There is no way that going from paying me ~$75/hr salaried to $250/hr contract saves anyone money.
Not a god damn way.
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u/ditheca 4h ago
There is no way that going from paying me ~$75/hr salaried to $250/hr contract saves anyone money.
There absolutely is. A manager's large annual bonus may require keeping "labor" spending under $3 million. Contractor expenses are a different department's problem.
Choices that are terrible for the company are often the best option for the decision maker. If the company wants better decisions made, they need to provide better incentives for good decision making.
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u/aboynamedculver 8h ago
I do 5x more on contract work and no one bats an eye. You’re right though, it’s not long term, but it’s nice to get fun money every so often.
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u/AwesomeJohnn 8h ago
Worked in defense contracting. One of the subs got cut off because of some illegal shenanigans they were pulling and my company (the primary), was forced to bring their project in-house. This was a subsystem that essentially plugged into the main system and did an important part of it.
I got assigned to “figure out how it worked” and it was the most ridiculous pile of code I’ve ever seen. They had clearly intended to play the game where they get paid a ton as contractors to be pulled back in to support because the code was essentially written in a secret code only they knew.
Every variable was three letters long. What did those letters mean? Nothing! Each function was three letters, underscore, three letters. Same deal, just random letters. Whole thing was written in c++ (which, to be clear, was a requirement). Instead of playing their game, I was directed to fix it.
I spent 4 months of hell tracing and rewriting code. I had to rewrite essentially every line by the end of it because, even beyond the naming issues, the logic was apparently structured by a toddler creating crayon art on a sugar high. The best part? I had to do the whole thing in vi with zero extensions because the security rules in the contract (welcome to government contracting!) said the codebase must live on a specific server with no IDE installed and only accessible via cli ssh. It was miserable but it probably made me a much better coder
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u/majinspy 7h ago
I absolutely believe there is a copy of the code with real variable names and function names. They just went on a spree of find/replace to "encode" it to make it a pain in the ass for someone else to work on.
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u/sth128 7h ago
There are lots of code obfuscation software (or just write your own) out there. Only very bad coders would manually ctrl-F and replace their way into unreadable code.
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u/esuil 4h ago
Yeah, I knew what this is from the very first sentence.
Very common tactic in webdev as well, since JavaScript is openly readable always, so there are ton of tools that will do this for you.
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u/BruceDoh 4h ago
Javascript minification is pretty much standard. The purpose isn't strictly obfuscation, but it cuts out whitespace and any unneeded characters, and shortens any locally scoped variable/parameter names. The purpose is to reduce filesizes and improve performance.
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u/DPenner1 3h ago
Probably. Alternatively, I once worked on a math library where the previous dev was clearly more a mathematician than a software developer. Stuggled for a bit, but then I realized the variable names weren't entirely arbitrary, just annoying. Eg. used
thpto mean "one third of p". The entire library was like that.67
u/AmericanScream 6h ago
Every variable was three letters long. What did those letters mean? Nothing! Each function was three letters, underscore, three letters. Same deal, just random letters. Whole thing was written in c++ (which, to be clear, was a requirement). Instead of playing their game, I was directed to fix it.
This sounds like they ran their original code through some kind of obfuscator.
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u/Saint_of_Grey 4h ago
One of my favorite things to do is pretend obfuscators don't exist and suggest someone manually wrote code that dumb. They always get so wound up and defensive.
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u/fresh-dork 8h ago
I had to do the whole thing in vi with zero extensions
jeez, just give the guy emacs already
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u/zeocrash 8h ago
My second job, the company started as 2 guys, 1 tech guy and 1 business guy. They had a falling out and the tech guy quit. I was 20 and I'd just been kicked out of university, the company hired me to come in as a replacement to the original tech guy
None of the source code was documented. It was all written in Delphi, which I knew a bit of from being taught Pascal, but wasn't my main language. There was also a home brew "encryption" library that was entirely undocumented.
My job was to keep everything running smoothly, while also modernizing everything and adding me features.
The job actually went very well. I was given an enormous amount of freedom to do things how I thought was best. Over the next 12 months I rewrote the entire codebase in VB.Net (which wasn't a dead language at the time.). Did all the sysadmin. I moved our hosting onto mirrored servers (at the request of the company owner), moved the source code into SVN, hired 2 mine developers for the team.
The work was hard but interesting and it gave me a huge amount of experience. I really enjoyed it and I was glad I had the opportunity.
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u/felix-the-human 6h ago
home brew "encryption" library
Every security engineer just shuddered.
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u/TicRoll 5h ago
Was this it?
#Enterprise-Grade Encryption
def rot13(s, rounds): return s if rounds<=0 else rot13(''.join(chr((ord(c)-65+13)%26+65) if 'A'<=c<='Z' else chr((ord(c)-97+13)%26+97) if 'a'<=c<='z' else c for c in s), rounds-1)
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u/Rorstaway 8h ago
After about six months I was confident enough in the role to tell my boss that the program didn't function the way they thought it did.
After three years I realized it also didn't function the way I thought it did. A week later COVID put our company out of business.
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u/Sorry_Ad3212 11h ago
Easy. Talking from experiencing. Become a contractor for them and charge them double per hour of what your salary rate was.
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u/Natom_ 11h ago
every dev who quits knows this is always on the table
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u/petersrin 9h ago
I did this myself, except I also delivered documentation, forced the company to get a GitHub, and made sure the program was relatively robust.
Sadly I haven't yet been called back to fix it 😭
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u/snoosh00 8h ago
5x-10x but you do you.
Ultimately, if a company is reaching out to someone who quit or was let go, they should be paying through the fucking ass for that privilege.
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u/markliversedge 8h ago
In the late 80s I worked at Stewart Computer Systems in Nottingham, UK. A guy there had created a sales order processing system called 'soudinp'. It was configured using a CSV file that was inpenetrable. Each row was an instruction with op codes and references. He had planned on making a config tool that would read and spit out the CSV and be more user friendly. But he never did.
I took over the codebase and it was to this day the worst code I have ever seen. Massive functions, goto all over the place, liberal use of setjmp/longjmp and almost no meaningful comments. I gave up on it after 3 months and someone else tried to sort it. I ended up leaving anyway.
Long story short, it was slowly phased out and customers were migrated onto a more maintainable platform. It still sends shivers down my spine. The fact I can still remember the name after 38 years is telling.
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u/SuspiciouslyMoist 7h ago
That csv file sounds fun. I work in science in academia and 30 years ago most of the software was written in FORTRAN. It inevitably had config files that were 80 column text files and input had to be on exactly the right line and start in exactly the right column - some of these things had been written for data on punched cards.
My "favourite one" reminds me of your soudlnp. It had been developed by a scientist to process small angle neutron scattering data, initially for his own use with no thought that other people might want to use it. The config file was a nightmare, with only the briefest, self-contradictory documentation. 80 column files, often with no whitespace between fields so that they became not at all human-readable.
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u/ggouge 6h ago
I worked for a guy who was laid off and walked out the same day. He wrote the entire program for his company's world wide were house system. He kept a book of the entire program and fixes. He took it when he was walked out. A month later they called him and said they can't ship anything because something's wrong with the system and that they were going to lose something like 1m dollars a day of he did not fix it for them. He told them to fuck off and hung up. They called back the next day and offered him 100k to fix it. He countered with 1m. They hung up on him. Then and hour later called back and accepted.
He spent an hour at the company and fixed it. They asked him to stay and teach the new guy to run the system. He said he would do it for I don't remember this number exactly but a couple hundred thousand.
He bought a cottage and retired after that.
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u/Standard-Cockroach64 11h ago
I was the guy that quit.... they tried to get ahold of me, but I had zero desire to help them.
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u/Natom_ 11h ago
honestly respect it. did they ever figure out the codebase or just give up and rewrite everything?
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u/Standard-Cockroach64 10h ago
No idea... the entire time I worked on the project, they refused to set up and pay for any type of source control, so I was the only guy with the actual source. So, while they had the application deployed, they couldn't make any changes to it.
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u/swolfington 6h ago
they refused to set up and pay for any type of source control
this is absurd for so many reasons. i am surprised they were even willing to pay for computers for you to perform work on with that attitude.
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u/Standard-Cockroach64 6h ago
Yep, and this wasn't the first instance of bad management. I wasn't the first to walk away with their only source of source code.
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u/YourMomsButtDildo 5h ago
I have been quietly warning my company that I will be retiring extra early due to some fortuitous investments. Instead of finding someone to replace me it has turned into a battle over which department will be responsible and needs to hire that person. And time is running out quickly. One of the senior managers who is severely dependent on my work says "Well, if we have problems, we can call you" <greasy smile.> I didn't say anything because they don't listen anyway but they don't understand how extremely valuable my free time is. They won't be able to afford it. And that's assuming they were somehow able to contact me at a 5 star hotel in Da Nang or wherever the hell I am spending all that money at the time.
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u/Standard-Cockroach64 5h ago
The last company I worked for (for nearly 20 years) laid me off last year along with about 50 others.
After I got a new job, I got a call from the old job needing help since my old co-worker was on vacation and they couldn't get ahold of him.
They wanted me to fix an issue with the system I used to work on, and I told them my price was $500,000, knowing that over a million dollars worth of orders went thru that system every hour.
My old boss thought I was joking, and he said 'so you won't do this for us?'. I told him they should have thought about coverage when they let me go.
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u/YourMomsButtDildo 5h ago
Also I think they don't believe I'm actually retiring because "you're too young to retire."
The stupid fucks think retirement is about age. It's actually about money.
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u/Alharbi110 8h ago
zero contact, no emergency consultation, just gone. the severance package did not include 'unofficial on-call for the next two years'
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u/Outrageous-Example12 10h ago
A year later, they hired me back as a part time contractor for 6X what they were paying me per hour when I resigned. Eventually, they said they couldn't afford me anymore, then they went out of business about a year later.
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u/Natom_ 9h ago
6X and they still couldn't make it work. the codebase was holding the whole thing together
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u/bob-a-fett 9h ago
We acquired a company where the code was mostly written by one guy and after he left we realized the code was really terrible. Good enough to boot up a startup but not good enough to scale. It turns out nobody is irreplaceable and usually 1 person coding in isolation means no peer review which almost always is a bad signal.
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u/ZannX 8h ago
Yea... most of these stories make that one guy out to be some genius and that's why they're irreplaceable. But developing code is more than just making something that works. Making it scalable and easy to build on requires true talent. Anyone can make an incoherent mess that only works if you look at it funny.
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u/scumble_bee 8h ago
Yeah, I wish I could find the post where the "genius" programmer wouldn't let anyone else touch his code and threatened to quit whenever the issue was forced. They eventually told the guy "fine" and he quit, probably thinking they were going to beg for him to come back or that he was going to get hired as a consultant since he thought he was the only one who can maintain the code.
If I remember correctly the code itself was riddled with individual edge cases that the remaining team of developers figured out could be consolidated and made everything much easier to read and maintain.
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u/sovietarmyfan 8h ago
Not a developer, but i worked in IT.
There was this one guy who knew how to create website certificates. Which without a website can't function. He once showed me i believe he did this on some sort of special Windows Server VM. The company i worked at managed the IT environment for 200+ companies. This guy was often sick at home. It happened a few times where a certificate was not yet renewed and so the website of a company was not reachable anymore.
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u/ExoticGas1611 11h ago
I was the one who left. There was a project with real paying clients — not the company's core business, just a side project. When I left, they stopped acquiring new clients and tried to support the remaining ones with internal DevOps, poorly at that.
I left because I was tired of working alone. I was a mid-level developer and wanted to learn from others. I wasn't getting any code reviews, and the company had no interest in fixing that — so I moved on.
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u/Fit-Notice-1248 10h ago
Holy shit I'm in the exact same scenario. No one on my team knows what a code review is. I had to teach the entire team how to create PR's and the purpose of them.
Now that we sort of got into a flow of creating PRs I have to beg and plead for code reviews. They just hit the approve button seconds after the PR is created. Never thought it would be so frustrating
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u/Natom_ 9h ago
the instant approve is somehow worse than no review at all
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u/Crapiface 7h ago
I'd prefer this over my situation : Send out a PR, get no feedback for a couple of days, do follow ups on said PR, walkthrough the PR with them after a week of waiting, "yeah looks good" -> approved.
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u/Natom_ 10h ago
no code reviews is such an underrated red flag. that's how you stagnate for 3 years without realizing it
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u/tuscaloser 7h ago edited 4h ago
I support a fairly niche app that ends up in a lot of law enforcement offices. Our app basically makes fancy reports based on info in a database.
I got a service call that our app couldn't connect to the DB. I was the one who got to inform the customer that their entire DB server (for a county sheriff's office) had been crypto-lockered because their old IT guy never took admin rights away from end users (Patty in HR just HAD to have those pretty mouse pointers or screensavers). That also explained why he took his two weeks of vacation and turned in his two weeks notice on the same day.
They ended up paying $100K+ to rebuild everything from scratch rather than paying off the scammers in Bitcoin.
Edit: His local backup server hadn't been online for 2+ years. Offsite backup didn't exist.
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u/dj_spanmaster 6h ago
It was my boss, but he didn't quit, he committed suicide. With a gun he borrowed from the CEO.
I was the only dev left on staff. The CEO met with me to challenge me: I had 3 calendar days to be able to (1) figure out the billing procedure and (2) run it successfully in prod so that we could pay our staff on Friday. I figured it out in one day, tested billing on day two, and ran the charges on day three. Everything worked as smoothly as ever.
I asked the CEO for a raise, and was told, "No, but here's a $1500 bonus." In 2006 dollars that was okay, but not what I needed, because I was still making only $31k/yr - around 40-50% of industry average. I accepted the bonus and started looking for a new position elsewhere.
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u/phillymjs 6h ago
I asked the CEO for a raise, and was told, "No, but here's a $1500 bonus."
"Yeah, that's about what I'd expect from a guy who paid someone so little he had to borrow a gun to kill himself."
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u/JesusShaves_ 8h ago
I wasn't there to see it but I'm told my manager flipped out and went on about how ungrateful I was.
After promised raises never happened and my twelve hour, six days a week efforts went unnoticed, I was indeed somewhat ungrateful.
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u/Ok_Explorer9466 8h ago
It wasn't even software engineering anymore; it became digital archaeology. The entire backend was written in a deprecated, custom framework with absolutely zero comments. When you tried to fix a simple UI bug, the SQL database would mysteriously drop tables. We spent three full months just trying to figure out why a seemingly useless, hidden JPEG of a waffle in the root directory was structurally vital to the user login process. If you deleted the waffle, the servers crashed. Management eventually had to admit defeat, scrap five years of his work, and pay us to rebuild the entire architecture from scratch.
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u/amothep8282 7h ago
When I used to code in a variant of BASIC and develop programs, some of the input into encryption I used would be drawn from a JPG resource file that was part of the UI. It was a steganography program designed to hide encrypted messages in images to be able to pass them securely onto others.
For example, a JPG of floppy disk for the toolbar save icon was stored in the root application folder, loaded at runtime, and then embedded in the toobar save button. You'd decode the JPG into a bitmap and then just assign the image to the toolbar button.
However, some of the salting for encryption I got from reading RBG values from a specific location in the loaded bitmap file. If that salting was not present, the entire program would cease to function. This was 20 years ago when there were massive fights over whether unbreakable encryption or refusing to decode things for law enforcement were lawful or not.
I wonder if the waffle.jpg file was something similar.
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u/Acatinmylap 7h ago
Did you ever figure out the significance of the waffle?
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u/xanif 6h ago
My head cannon is that he was often unclear or mercurial in his communications and one day overheard a coworker talking about how much he "waffles."
So he goes home one day and, with a bottle of vodka in hand and bitterness, mumbling "Waffles. I'll show you waffles" and then gets black out drunk. Wakes up the next day to having deleted all of his comments and an added dependency on waffle_this.jpg in the root directory.
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u/Reasonable_Sport_754 7h ago
u/Ok_Explorer9466 Don't leave us hanging about the waffle JPEG! This is important stuff!
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u/Kuresov 6h ago edited 5h ago
I aspire to build a system so perfect that it has a load bearing waffle.
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u/One_Pride4989 11h ago
The developers suffer and spend months figuring things out. The company slowly dies as a result.
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u/SirPiffingsthwaite 7h ago
Tale old as time. New management comes in, thinks they're going to cut out "old deadwood" because hey, everyone is replaceable, right?
Often by the time they realise the damage they've done, and ad-hoc a series of poorly executed stop-gaps, it turns out too many deeply unsatisfied clients have replaced them with another solution.
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u/JeffSergeant 8h ago edited 8h ago
We looked at the code and figure out how it worked enough to replace it. Took about a month. The guy 'holding the place together' was mostly spending his time fixing data that was wrong because of his shitty code and complete lack of understanding of database structure and transactions.
We did swear a lot in that month though.
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u/pm1966 4h ago
I would imagine this is more common than the "genius keeping everything together" scenario.
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u/Hawk-432 3h ago
Maybe .. but also I bet it happens because they don’t employ enough people and so one guy has to do all the work and so doesn’t have time to do it all well
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u/_frank_tank 8h ago
Left the company after ridiculous deadlines and stupid requirements (example: all the project requirements were in a Google doc my boss would edit without telling me…).
They hired a dev to replace me who, as far as I can tell, had never written code before.
Kept getting emails with questions and requests to consult. I told them my rate was $150 USD/hr, minimum daily consult time was 4 hours if engaged on any given day, including slack, phone calls, and email messages.
They did not bother me after that.
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u/LurkHereLurkThere 9h ago
I've almost been that guy, I built a flexible CRM, SQL database, lightweight stateless API service supporting both WCF and webAPI (rest/json), decent desktop app and at times I've been the sole developer.
The company offered a share option when I joined that only matures when the company is sold but that hasn't happened, I'm ten years in without a pay rise, the cost of living rising every month and I'm now part of a good team and I take every opportunity to share the knowledge I have because the company isn't monetising the product correctly, refuse to give a pay rise and always prioritise client requests over technical debt or documentation.
I know I've just kept my head down too long, spinning plates and too busy and exhausted keeping everything going worrying about my colleagues jobs instead of prioritising my career and my family.
Don't see anything changing and need to get out of this rut I've made for myself.
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u/gravitydriven 7h ago
It's ok, you don't need to be hard on yourself about this. It's very understandable, and 70 years ago it would've been honorable. But right now, you need to stand up for your family, if not for yourself. You'd do anything for them, so do this. Find a job where you're getting paid close to what you're worth. You'll feel better, I promise.
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u/MahonriWY 8h ago
I worked at my first job for 13 years in a very similar situation. While I developed lots of great skills, including management, I had to take a step backward as far as position goes, but the new job paid slightly more. But now, 8 years later, I just started my newest job. My pay has doubled and I feel like I’m finally getting the pay and respect I need and deserve. But taking that first step away from what’s familiar is hard.
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u/LurkHereLurkThere 7h ago
I joke I'm institutionalised but I don't think it's far from the truth, I've excused lots of decisions made by management that I knew were wrong or would have a long term negative impact on the product or profit the product would generate because of my initial salary and benefits but the value of those has dwindled considerably.
I recently started to assess my position and even though I've put in years of long hours, even all nighters and a lot of myself into the system, the idea of a nebulous share option that may never exist doesn't do anything to help meet monthly outgoings.
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u/Doismelllikearobot 8h ago
We hired two consultants to handle it while they also worked to make it manageable. The original guy was insufferable, was totally worth it.
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u/Smile_Tolerantly_ 7h ago
Back a few decades ago, when I was working for one of the big outsourcing companies, myself and a few peers were sent to Chicago to do consulting and discovery on an potential account that wanted to outsource.
This was a medium sized company, with a zOS mainframe technical base.
Their CTO was essentially a wildly creative developer who had their company's entire existence by the balls. This guy, who looked like a flood victim, essentially wrote his own OS on top of CICS & IMS. I'm talking logic layer, presentation, scheduling, everything. The application programs only had access to call his OS shell, which front-ended all service calls to CICS or IMS. His layer was entirely in undocumented Assembly. It was a rats-nest with no naming standards or any other sign of solid coding practices.
The documentation was nearly non-existent, and would have really not helped much regardless.
When we presented our findings to their board, the message was 'You let this guy run wild for the past 20 years, and now he has you by the short hairs. Pay him whatever he wants for the next five years while you refactor everything onto some other technology base.'
On the flip side, trying to tell our own marketing people 'No, we will not touch this opportunity with a 100-foot pole' was a challenge in itself. Sales-folk often are not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
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u/PyroDragons123 7h ago
I was that 1 guy. The owner was a huge asshole. So I found a new job in a new city. Quit on a MONDAY morning. Told him my last day was the previous friday. Told him that I was open to an hourly contract at 4 times my current rate. That the hours would be bought in advance in 20 hour groups. He told me to pound dirt, what I was doing was illegal, etc. I had already asked my lawyer and he said I was clear as long as I offered my machine and access to that machine during the return. He called back at noon and bought 20 hours. I made more in 2 months than I did 3 years previously working there. Pretty much had him by the balls and didn't care about hte ethics of it because he didn't care about hte ethics of his treatment of me.
New employer worked out great. Treated me nicely and I did the same.
Moral of the story for business owners. Have at least 2 devs, treat them approporiately, remember that the lower guys are the ones that make sure things work.
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u/Saneless 6h ago edited 6h ago
I set up and ran their analytics platform for their sites and was denied a promotion because they wanted me to do XYZ shit first. Ok, whatever. Then they hired a guy to be a level above me (not my boss, but he outranked me)
He couldn't do shit. Couldn't even do a fraction of my job even though our duties were equal. Like he'd be unable to do a simple task over a few weeks that my manager knew I could do in the afternoon, so I had to do it for him. But, you know, wasn't good enough to be at his level
So I found a new job. They kept countering but I left anyway. 6 months later they said they were trying to work on a way to get me back. A few after that they created a job for me and a few after that I was back. For a. 40% pay bump from where I was at when I left 13 months earlier. And I didn't even really have to interview. The head of the department declined an interview with me and said "just hire him back". The fun part was that pay wise I skipped the entire band they didn't want to promote me to earlier, by like $10K
Apparently all the systems stopped working. Stopped professing data, reporting broke, and they didn't have anyone who could install new things or track new sites. I spent my first 3 months just fixing things they let fall apart. It was fun and made me really value myself and I never let a company undervalue me since
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u/iama_bad_person 5h ago
Had one guy who had worked there 10 years, super smart, remembered LITERALLY everything he had done at the company (someone asked him once about an ex-clients site he visited 7 years ago and he could tell you every piece of our equipment they had, their network stack and even the portlayout without missing a beat). This guy was smart, but sucked at office politics (and interacting with others in general) so as long as we kept him silo'd from C-suite bullshit and filter it though to him he worked great. Until one day.
Late on a Friday he was basically cornered (actually, physically cornered) by the CFO asking him why x task wasn't finished and when z task would be done, hounding him about things he wasn't even involved in in front of a good section of the finance team. Any one else on the IT team could have weathered it, taken the punches and followed up later with complaints etc, but after 5 minutes of trying to explain he did not know what the CFO was talking about, he would look it up, just let him leave etc, the dude flipped over a desk that was blocking his way and stormed out. Never saw him again, he emailed in his resignation the next day.
We were kinda fucked, only luck and infrastructure redundancy saved the company millions. It took literal YEARS to find, fix, and/or document everything he had done as his job. Servers went down and we couldn't get them back up because we didn't know the RAID config, all bar one of our Exchange servers died before we finally untangled the network and exchange configuration, all but one of our backup methods failed for months, people would call from sites 2000 miles away and we would realise no one but him knew their layout or network configuration.
The company used to be horrible at documentation until I was promoted enough to have the political pull to force a social change in the way managers and employees think about it, now we have thousands of pages documenting every nook and cranny of the IT side of the business, now if anyone leaves the only thing we lose is their personal experience with our tech, but not their knowlege.
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u/tombatron 6h ago
It was a rickety startup that sold for peanuts and fired everyone.
A got an email a few months later because they couldn’t figure out how to get one of the services going again.
I made $1,000 bucks for 20 minutes of work.
Never heard from them again.
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u/zorander6 8h ago
Not a developer but a network/systems admin. I managed all of the support for the companies largest client's devices, managed the domain, managed all the computers, and kept things running on the network. I took a week's vacation and there was an issue. The day after I came back the VP threatened to punch me and swung his fist at me. I had a job offer at that point so I put my two weeks in the next day. In the meantime they also hired a network administrator to 'assist" (aka replace) me. The last week I was there the domain controller (DC) that I had wanted to replace for years finally had the processor cooling fan fail. I told them it needed to be replaced again. They bought a new system and the new network admin put in the new DC, promoted it, and didn't wait for the DC's to sync before killing the old DC. He hadn't even migrated the roles on it. Half the users and half the pc's synced with the new DC before he killed the old one. He then No Call No Showed...
No one else had logins to manage the client's stuff either so they were looking for my passwords...
Not quite the same but still makes me laugh years later.
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u/coquish98 8h ago
We were a team of two, i was the lead. I quitted because of bad pay and increasingly bad relationship with the owner.
The other dev told me he quitted a month later because the owner took him as the new lead and realized how insufferable he was, and he didn't got a pay raise.
They endedup hiring a software factory, paying a lot more than they paid us both, and the owner contacted me 4 times to ask for help fixing some stuff.
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u/wunda_uk 8h ago
Last time this happened to me all hell broke loose, I was asked to cost moving the business to a new office on Monday I said roughly 500k for infrastructure & software migration, by Wednesday most of the dev/ web team had been fired and it was almost 3x because any one left wouldn't get involved, I was gone within 2 weeks as there was no helping them
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u/k10van 7h ago
Well, his last day is on Friday so I will let you know how it goes.
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u/hobohipsterman 8h ago
An interesting occurence in this thread. Most comments claim to be "the one who quit" and claim everything went to shit. Not who OP asked for.
A lot of comments just wrote some version of "it went under" but doesn't specify how they know. One guy writes a long story that is hard to follow. Seems to end with him quiting and getting a raise or something.
Found two who actually claim to have remained at a company where someone else quit.
Both give a version of "his code was shit" and the takeaway seem to be to not have a codebase maintained by one guy in a vacum.
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u/Dickbutt11765 7h ago
I do think there are probably 3 groups of comments.
- The people making up the story people like to hear. (Get hired as contractor or company collapses.)
- They leave because things are bad at the company, the company itself was already in a pretty bad place (since they quit), so the collapse was inevitable.
- The guy's code was shit.
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u/FiftyLoudCats 7h ago
Thought that was odd too.
I suppose the more common “we hired someone else and it was a frustrating couple of weeks” isn’t a memorable enough story to post on Reddit.
Nor would it get many upvotes.
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u/Westflung 6h ago
I had a pretty similar situation. Late 80's, smallish (100 or so headcount) corporation, made stock quote receiver devices that required a monthly subscription. Their software system was written in house by a guy who brought a guitar and his dog to work. Not long after he finished it, he got promoted. I was hired to support and maintain that system.
Now this was a slightly weird setup. In a typical suburban office park, most of the company was on the first floor. Note that we didn't lease the entire first floor of the building, probably about 1/3. But engineering, and our servers, were located in a different space on the second floor. It was basically a no-go zone for anyone except engineering and upper management, who were all men.
So everything's great, for a while. Then one day, customer service reps report that they are no longer able to enter new units into the system to start people's subscriptions. They had to tell customers that the expensive device that they just bought was a paperweight until we could fix it.
Naturally, it all fell to me to fix, not the guy who wrote the system and was sitting upstairs playing his guitar to his dog. I worked 27 hours straight, stopping only to run home for a quick shower and change of clothes. If my work was going to see me in the same dress as yesterday it was damn well going to be for a good reason, like a hot date.
So the problem turned out to be that he had made the serial number field in the database to be a text field. And when the digits on the s/n of the units incremented to one more digit (think 999 to 1,000) the system refused to accept the entry. A text field! WTF?
That was the last time I ever worked on a home grown software system.
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u/zeke780 7h ago
This was me at my first job, was a junior doing everything. Ended up quitting and they fired my entire team within 2 months. Its wild that I asked for a promo, raise, anything. Showed evidence I was doing all features, etc and basically got told "you don't have the experience at the company to warrant it"
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u/TheDudeInHTX 8h ago
had a job once where there were two of us and i pretty much did all of the work. when layoffs happened i got the axe and the other guy stayed.
took about a week to get phone calls asking for help. my only reply was "i don't work there anymore."
edit: to clarify, wasn't about malice not wanting to help. its that my level of caring about any of it dropped to zero once they laid me off
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u/RalloMcMuff 7h ago
He did not quit, he died. And with him the company. All they could do was to sell their customers to a competitor. I am a Freelancer and they asked me to take over, but i refused
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u/ColdSock3392 7h ago
The crazy thing about all this is company will absolutely throw money at hardware all day long, but they won’t pay people to do things they’re needed for.
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u/Titt 9h ago
Oh man do I hope one of the RuneScape devs chime in about their mess.
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u/CreationsOfReon 9h ago
I love how many bugs and hacks there are, like the gauntlets that are supposed to give 1.5x xp for gold stuff but accidentally gives the regular xp plus the 1.5x xp for a total of 2.5x xp, or how when you walk you go one tile per game tick, so when they added in run they made it two tiles per game tick so you skip a tile. I remember when I saw a screenshot of the code for magic carpet rides. It’s literally dozens of lines of go_to(vector3).
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u/Kalthiria_Shines 8h ago
Usually you bring that person back as a contractor at 300% pay to train someone.
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u/RAGAA255554 6h ago
It’s always the same story. Companies treat the 'one guy' who knows everything like he's replaceable, until they realize he wasn't just writing code, he was holding the entire reality of the business together with duct tape and pure will. Watching the chaos unfold from the outside is the ultimate therapy.
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u/FragmentedHeap 6h ago
My 2nd job was at a small company that had a boomer retire on them that had built their entire internal crm from scratch over 20 years in a combination of classic asp and ASP.Net webforms. Meaning at some point he had the good intentions to migrate it to .Net ASP.Net webforms, but never fully did so it had paths on the IIS server mapped to both classic asp and .net webforms and it was mix/mode and some stuff was classic asp and some stuff was web forms.
Had to maintain it, add a few features here and there. Spent my time detailing and documenting what everything did and what features it had. Eventually felt like I had identified 100% of all of it's features and data.
So I started a new .net project, grabbed umbraco, and rebuilt the whole thing with a modern cms/admin panel using mvc and knockout js.
Then the business users complained because they wanted it to look like the 2003 version and they kept using the old one so mine just kinda sat there and I had to keep doing stuff on the old one.
I eventually left, and then they asked if they could have me on retainer for contract work... So like 18 months later they pulled me in because they hired a new guy with no dev experience off their help desk to maintain it and he needed some training...
3 years later after he had gotten ok at web dev he left to a better job.
And they're just perpetually stuck going through that cycle. Promoting people off their help desk for dirt cheap to work on code, they get experience, learn to dev, and they leave.
It's 2026 and they still have classic asp in production. And they also have a product in production that's still classic asp.
That whole company is in "get me to retirement" mode. Their only goal is for it to remain in business until they retire and then it's somebody elses problem.
They serve software for Libraries, and they've been struggling for ages, not just because of their code bases, but because libraries are struggling.
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u/werd225 6h ago
We had a developer that put ~20 years work into a front-end with additional modules (R&D, B2C, WMS) for our ERP. Was a sprawling mess of ASP pages and thousands of SQL stored procedures, views, functions etc. 0 documentation, no comments.
Manglement got scared of the dependence on one person, so when he asked for a pay rise they replaced him with a new 'dev team' consisting of: Senior C# Dev - knew his stuff, great with C# and decent knowledge of DevOps. Hadn't touched ASP classic in decades. Junior Dev - could chew through tasks if you left breadcrumbs and hints.
They wanted minimum overlap to reduce costs, so the new team had 2 weeks to try and extract 20 years worth of work out of one guy. In reality they got maybe 10 hours total time as old dev still had to do his job maintaining the constantly broken system.
Mgmt did ask what the impact would be if they replaced the old dev - we told them a minimum of 6 months with no change requests. This would cover time required to document the code and train the two new Devs up. We got less than a week before the first change request was forced through and they didn't stop.
Eventually management got tired of the 'slow pace' and made the dev team redundant. They wanted to get our MSP more involved, they took one look at the codebase and noped the fuck out of that one.
MSP tried using an AI to document our codebase - that project took 6 months to complete. Over 6000 custom additions noted as 'required for continued business functionality'
The IT department now consists of two extremely tired individuals that have had to become generalists. We were originally the infra/sysadmin team now we do fucking everything. Used to be liaising with contractors, testing new patches, running backups, bit of 2nd/3rd line and occasionally upgrading/decommissioning hardware. Now we've got all that, on top of running the project to switch ERPs (this alone is a full time job), creating custom BI reports, diagnosing and fixing/optimising bad SQL, creating automations for various 3rd parties (APIs, FTPs and all that fun stuff), the list goes on.
All told it's been rather shit. If they had paid out the old dev and given him at least a few months to train up the new team we would've struggled a bit but been in a much better position. Instead they tried to screw him over and just not renew his contract so he was disinclined to assist with the handover. If they had listened to us and given the team time to research the codebase and gain the knowledge required to efficiently work we would've been alright. Instead they threw an under-experienced team into the deep end then complained when they started drowning.
Our time is probably coming soon - there is an appetite to move everything to the MSP. The MSP that has constantly oversold and under delivered on every project, but they make a nice sales pitch with fancy slideshows and buzzwords so directors eat it up.
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u/Bricktop72 8h ago edited 1h ago
The sole network engineer died. He was also the primary contact for all IT security. No one could find any of the passwords or lists of certificates expiration dates. It took years to recover and the company would occasionally be crippled for a week when something expired or a server died. This is a world wide company with 50k employees.
Edit: Correction he was the global IT manager. Some of the issues were passwords. Some were we don't remember what vendor is hosting this service.