Yeah, maybe the contractor thought he’d get more work fixing it but he was long gone by the time I got it so i never met him
One of bugs I got was performance because the search didn’t work, with about 600,000 assets in database it would timeout searching for one by exact match on ID. It took 45 minutes to return 1 result.
I got dumped with fixing some bugs in a project written by a contractor who had literally done this but with extra steps.
Backend was sql server and c#/asp.
There was an api endpoint that took json, used xslt to transform to xml. Then called the stored procedure specified in request passing the xml as a parameter.
The stored procedure then queried the xml for parameters, executed the query, and returned results as xml.
Another xslt transformed that to json and returned to the client.
It was impressive how little c# there was.
Despite holding all the business logic, the sql was not in source control.
Had a 3 year old one this week. A loop that builds a list of messages to send to a queue for another service to consume then it calls BatchPublish.
Only Batch Publish was inside the loop so instead of sending n messages, it sends 1+2+3… +n
We never noticed before because n was never more then 100 and the consuming service is idempotent so the duplicate messages don’t cause issues. I think it’s (n(n-1))/2. So n=100 is 4950. That’s only 4 minutes work. Also that code only runs at 1am.
Recently n has been hitting 1000 which produces 499500 messages and it takes a few hours to clear and triggers an alarm for delayed processing.
I like to think this whole thing will collapse and there’ll be a massive demand for real programmers to clean up/rewrite all the AI slop.
But your thing seems more likely.
I speed ran this. First job right out of uni, the team lead went on holiday 2 weeks later and never came back. Everyone else was gone within 3 months.