Ridiculous Coding Practices by companies you have worked for
jbm: I was working for an airline website - which was weird, because I had been promised I would be working on something else.  I bit my tongue and agreed to it, since it sounded like fun.Then the Chairman of the company, a fellow who supposedly had a law & math degree, told me that he would be doing the design with me (???).  I sat down as he started writing buzzwords on the whiteboard.  I jotted down a bunch of nonsensical words like "powersearch", "hypersearch", "megametasearch", and tried to write down what each meant.Once the buzzwords were out of the way, it was onto the real meat and bones - the design!... except, in his own words, "At XYZ, we design the database FIRST and then design the program on top of that".  Think about it.  No objects, no user story, no nothing - just "DESIGN THE DATABASE".  So I sat slackjawed as he started listing stuff like "Oh, we can use an enum for the airline companies... hmm, I wonder if int is too big for the id, maybe we should use smallint?".  I tried to steer him towards the more fundamental questions of "What exactly do we want?", but he was having none of it.I spent 4 months working on that software, and 2 more months wasted in other ridiculous projects he had before I tendered my resignation.