Sometimes I just feel like if I could get my hands on certain programmers I would slap them silly. Or perhaps kick the living crap out of them.
I’m working with this legacy application. In one table there is a column that is a string. Its an ID number stored with leading zeroes, like: 005, 016, 548. In another table, the same ID is stored as an integer, no leading zeroes. And they are key values in both tables. I am not allowed to correct the tables due to the effect it would have on existing applications.
Its so irritating to have to constantly convert back and forth due to some long ago idiot’s lack of planning. But what really irks me is that these tables were created about six years ago. The guy who did it hasn’t worked here for five years. In all that time, all the expansions and upgrades and applications, no one has been allowed to fix it. This mismatch of data, over five years, has probably resulted in hundreds, thousands of lines of additional code, to the point where fixing it will now cost the company a small fortune to fix. So they don’t fix it.
So, here I am, writing a couple extra lines of code per function, every page of code, probably three or four hours per week of my time, because one guy six years ago made a stupid error.
Ugh.