Ask HN: What's the largest amount of bad code you have ever seen work?

To give you some examples, I originally came on as a contractor because they had some refactoring they wanted done. The entire system was home built (including the programming language) and there was a file size limit of 32,767 lines. They had many functions that were approaching this limit and they didn't know what to do, so they hired me. Probably you can imagine what I did.

One time I went to a code review. They were writing a lot of data into some pointers. I asked, "Where do you allocate the memory"? The response was, "We don't have to allocate memory. We ran it in the lab and it didn't crash, proving that allocating memory is a waste of time". No matter how much I tried reasoning with them, I couldn't convince them. The code shipped like that.

One of my more amusing anecdotes is that when I worked there the release life cycle was five years long. The developers would work on features for 3 years. The developers were responsible for testing that their own code worked. There was no QA. After 3 years, we would ship the code to the telcos (telephone companies) and they would test it for acceptance for 2 years. We would fix the bugs that they found.

I started working there at the end of a release cycle, so people were only fixing bugs. I got an interesting bug in that I couldn't find any code that implemented the feature. The feature had apparently been implemented at the beginning of the cycle (so around 4 years before), by someone who was now my C level manager. I started looking at the other features that person had implemented. There was no code. It seems that this enterprising person had started work and realised that nobody would check his code for 3 whole years. He just checked off all his work as done without actually doing anything. Since he was an order of magnitude faster than everybody else, he was instantly promoted into management. When I reported my findings to my manager, he made it clear I wasn't to tell anybody else ;-)

Such a messed up place. But the switch worked! It had an audit process that went around in the background fixing up the state of all the processes that ended up in weird states. In fact, when I worked there, nobody I worked with knew how to programmatically hang up a call. If you were using a feature like 3 way call, etc, they would just leave one side up. Within 3 minutes, the audit process would come by and hang up the phone. Tones features "worked" that way -- by putting the call into weird states and waiting for the audit process to put it back again. You could often hang up after a 3 way call, pick up the phone and still be connected to the call.

Most people don't know it, but because of some strangeness with some of the protocols, telcos used to "ring" their main switches with Nortel DMS switches. This would essentially fix the protocols so that everything could talk to everything. So, if you ever made a long distance telephone call 20 or 30 years ago, it almost certainly went through a DMS switch. The damn thing worked. Somehow. I have no idea how, though ;-)

I had a similar experience with an offshore company. This was during the early-mid 2000s, at the height of the offshoring era when $10/hour programmers in India were aplenty and everyone felt their job was soon to be outsourced. Turns out, no joke, they were being paid per line of code.

Despite having to maintain the heap of crap, I was amazed at the brilliance of their maniacal dark-art ability to implement as little functionality with as many lines of code possible. It was like code golf in reverse.