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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[–] jubilationtcornpone@sh.itjust.works 6 points 2 days ago (1 children)

One of my old bosses used to say, "the choice is often not between right and wrong, but good, better, and best."

I agree with that sentiment for the most part. Different styles is fine. But sometimes you run into someone who is trying to use a socket wrench to drive nails and all you can do is just kind of watch in amazement and wonder how they arrived at the conclusion that this was the way to go.

[–] olafurp@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago

I would go for "garbage, bad and ok" where bad is acceptable. Most styles are ok, a lot of anti-patterns are bad but still get the job done but sometimes people write pure garbage. I'm very happy that at my job we just have a lot of bad code that's workable but this one contractor wrote an absolute piece of shit. His code was a convoluted side-effect mess that was "reactive" and at around 3-5x more verbose than the "naive" solution. He made so many decisions that increased complexity and overhead that it become a rigid buggy mess.

Sometimes people just need to stick to the basics by using a database layer and a service layer on the backend and a API layer and component code on the front.