First programming job – a 4 month reflection

Kids these days. I once worked on a system where the size of the switch statement broke the compiler. I believe the limit was 64k lines in a switch, although my memory is a little hazy. Of course you couldn't actually reasonably edit a single file with that much code, so it was split into several files, each of which was still thousands of lines long, but at least you could load the smaller files without crashing emacs with out-of-memory errors.

  switch (action)
  {
  #include 
  #include 
  #include 
  // etc
  default: printf("unhandled action")
  }

Another thing that I've noticed, and that has happened > 1 time is that I'll write something, spend like all day on it, then come to work the next day to have found out that the manager re-wrote it claiming "simplification" of the code, which is in fact not true, or claiming my code had a "bug" These bugs aren't security bugs, or anything for that matter. Their small user permission things that I was never told about and is not documented. I don't care if I can't work on something, but if you want to do it, then do it, don't ask me to do it, then re-write it because I could have been working on something else in that time.

One of the reasons why open source is good is because you associate your code with your name. You take personal responsibilith for it. At a company where developers have come and gone over time, that doesn't happen.

Now, how you approach this matters. You can either become one of those who don't care, you can start to roll the stone uphill or you can seek greener pastures. It's all up to you. The people you work with sound like they don't care for things as long as it works. Do you want to become like that?