“Hey, Kim H, can you sit in on a tech-screen for a new hire?”

The Big Boss had a candidate they wanted hired, but before the hiring could actually happen, a token screening process needed to happen. Kim and a few other staffers were pulled in to screen the candidate, and the screen turned into a Blue Screen, because the candidate crashed hard. Everyone in the room gave them a thumbs down, and passed their report up the chain to the Big Boss.

Anneke’s organization is the sort of company where “working” takes precedence over “working well”. Under-staffed, under-budgeted, and under unrealistic deadlines, there simply isn’t any emphasis on code quality. The result is your pretty standard pile of badness: no tests, miles of spaghetti code, fragile features and difficult to modify implementations.

Recently, the powers that be discovered that they could hire half a dozen fresh-out-of-school developers on the cheap, and threw a bunch of fresh-faced kids into that mountain of garbage with no supervision. And that’s how this happened.

Art received a job offer that had some generous terms, and during the interview process, there was an ominous sense that the hiring team was absolutely desperate for someone who had done anything software related.

Upon joining the team, Art found out why. Two years ago, someone had decided they needed to create a web-based storefront, and in a fit of NIH syndrome, it needed to be built from scratch. Unfortunately, they didn't have anyone working at the company with a web development background or even a software development background, so they just threw a book on JavaScript at the network admin and hoped for the best.

No one writes HTML anymore. We haven’t for years. These days, your HTML is snippets and components, templates and widgets. Someplace in your application chain, whether server-side or client-side, or even as part of a deployment step, if you’re using a static site generator, some code mashes those templates together and you get some output.

This has some side effects, like div abuse. Each component needs its own container tag, but we often nest components inside each other. Maybe there’s a span in there. If the application is suitably HTML5-y, maybe it’s sections instead.

John works for a manufacturing company which has accrued a large portfolio of C++ code. Developed over the course of decades, by many people, there’s more than a little legacy cruft and coding horrors mixed in. Frustrated with the ongoing maintenance, and in the interests of “modernization”, John was tasked with converting the legacy C++ into C#.

Which meant he had to read through the legacy C++.