I'll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.

They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
Here's my favorite part. You obviously don't want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you're thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.

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[–] i_stole_ur_taco@lemmy.ca 57 points 2 days ago

I found code that calculated a single column in an HTML table. It was “last record created on”.

The algorithm was basically:

foreach account group
  foreach account in each account group
    foreach record in account.records
      if record.date > maxdate
        max = maxdate

It basically loaded every database record (the basic unit of record in this DATA COLLECTION SYSTEM) to find the newest one.

Customers couldn’t understand why the page took a minute to load.

It was easily replaced with a SQL query to get the max and it dropped down to a few ms.

The code was so hilariously stupid I left it commented out in the code so future developers could understand who built what they are maintaining.