What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

I imagined some people would crop up with experience at RHIC/CERN. I never touched the SixTrack code directly but I've heard legend. The compile time features was a constant on all the projects I touched there and was such a hilarious relic. "The code is flexible! Just know these completely undocumented flags or spend months grokking the dense/obtuse/scattered source files and you can make the code do anything you want, all these hard coded constants will change".

As ugly as things like SixTrack were, I vaguely trust them just because there were usually a lot of eyes on them... even if they were hideous. The more obscure chunks of code that were somewhere in the analysis chain were the ones that really terrified me. I worked on a lot of the code for simulating detector upgrades (I won't get more specific than that) and that was a terrifying place. Designing entire multi-billion dollar detectors systems based on hundreds of different pieces of code and output data that were glued together with no over-arching design or integration. The code 'review' usually came down to "that output looks good"... or not...

Related to this, I now work in the atmospheric sciences, and a completely-unrelated-but-oddly-similar problem exists in the various modeling communities. So many fragmented pieces of code glued together and untouched or touched with no real computing oversight. So many wasted computing cycles. So many failure points.

Once upon a time, I worked on a small project that involved updating a chunk of Fortran code that did some sort of engineering calculation. The company hired some crusty old engineering professor somewhere who had no clue how to use any kind of source control to do the actual code update. My part of the project was to fix/update the part of this tool where the DLL built from this Fortran code was used by an Excel VBA script - you entered the input data in Excel, then some VBA fed it into the DLL, and stuck the output in some more cells. Getting all that to work right was an adventure.

* sharepoint * itunes * crystal reports * amazon alexa

In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They traced it back to the shared IBM mainframe, and then to an RPC service, and finally back to the AST PC that had been generating the unique license numbers on the HP Non-Stop and sending them to the IBM.

To prevent such an outage from occurring again, a yellow sticky saying "don't turn off" was attached to the AST.

I have many stories. Here's a fun one.

I worked for a company a long time ago that traded with companies all around the world. A lot of their customers were small businesses in rural Africa, South America, etc. and they in turn had local banks they used to facilitate payments to and from.

A large number of these banks did not have a reliable internet connection, or if they did, they most assuredly didn't use it for payment instructions. Instead, I had to jerry rig a system that used TELEX -- yes, TELEX -- connected to IBM's Lotus Domino/Notes suite of mail transport software. That way we could "email" domino and it'd connect to some fantastically expensive TELEX hardware which then went over the wire on whatever the hell network they'd use for that in the 2010s.

We had carefully crafted email addresses with the TELEX numbers embedded (ever wonder why email address specs are so complicated? So people like me can do dumb shit like this!)

We'd then send them very carefully formatted instructions in uppercase ascii, to conform with (I forget which, SWIFT perhaps?) payment instructions that were clearly invented in the typewriter era and then hoisted, kicking and screaming, into the digital age with nary a change.

Fun times. Worked really well and tied in with all the other stuff they'd hang off of Lotus Notes. If you ever wonder why a lot of businesses struggled to move away from it? There's your answer.