Horror stories from 20 years of coding
Things I’ve seen and done over the years
In the spirit of Friday the 13th, I’d like to share some horror stories as a programmer. Whether nightmarish or entertaining, I hope it’s at least insightful.
Edit: Normally, I want to put something positive out there and try not to focus too much on the bad, but this is a horror story article. It wasn’t an easy decision to air out dirty laundry from my professional career, but some of these things should never happen, especially in a “professional” environment. I would have liked to counter each “worst” with a “best” story, but for brevity, I’ll save that for a future article.
Worst interview ever
..we were all interviewed to keep our jobs…
It wasn’t particularly a bad interview for me, as much as it was a completely messed up situation as a whole. I was working at a great company, which was pretty much everything I wanted in terms of a career and having colleagues I could call friends. After taking a few wrong turns, they needed to find a way to cut costs and hired a consulting firm to help them analyze what needs to go and what needs to stay.
The entire engineering staff was interviewed, so they can be assessed on what skills they had, and…