Ridiculous Coding Practices by companies you have worked for
gchpaco: I'm apparently too opinionated to survive long in insane environments,
but I did intern for a company that, in Java, did a couple of really
disturbing things:1. Every Java exception that can possibly be thrown from a method must
be caught, logged, appended to a new Java exception, and re-thrown.
Fully 2/3rds of the code base was this sort of make-work.2. They followed the traditional naïve model of distributing a system:
break it into functional units, and put those on different machines.
Win!  Well, except that now every single query needs to talk to six
machines, all of which need to be up.3. Their system, running RMI, was of course implicitly multithreaded,
because that's how RMI works.  I didn't see in the codebase any real
attention paid to this, so I asked about it and the project lead said
"the two guys who know threading aren't in at the moment, but we'll
schedule a meeting Tuesday when they make it in" on a team of thirty.
Needless to say, the resulting system was a complete mess...