181–190 of 264 posts
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Ah such classic outsourced third-world contractor output. They are told what to do (by some PM who has no idea) and they do it. If they ever say "uh this doesn't make sense" they are cheaply replaced. I've seen some of this nonsense (though not IBM related): strncpy(dst, src, strlen(src)); dst[strlen(dst)] = '\0';
> dst[strlen(dst)] = '\0'; That line alone is cancerous.
I've never interacted directly with IBM, but I remember about 2 years ago, they had a talk at the Akamai Edge conference about how they dealt with bloated cookies. The company I work for has the same problem so I sat in to see what their solution was. The problem they were having is that all the various IBM lines of business added so much garbage onto the client's cookie, that eventually their pages would stop loadin…
How did your company solve it?
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Ah such classic outsourced third-world contractor output. They are told what to do (by some PM who has no idea) and they do it. If they ever say "uh this doesn't make sense" they are cheaply replaced. I've seen some of this nonsense (though not IBM related): strncpy(dst, src, strlen(src)); dst[strlen(dst)] = '\0';
> dst[strlen(dst)] = '\0'; That line alone is cancerous.
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> dst[strlen(dst)] = '\0'; That line alone is cancerous.
Not a programmer. What’s so bad about it?
The way a string is terminated in C is by a null character. ‘\0’ is a mnemonic. strlen() returns the length of a strong. It does this by doing a linear scan down the array until it finds the null, and the returns that index as the length.
That line of code does nothing useful. It means, “scan through the array until you find a null, then write a null there.” Which is exactly what you had to start.
So why would someone write this? Well, they were told to make sure that you always terminate your C strings with a null, otherwise you’ll run off the end of the array and corrupt memory. This is true, but this isn’t how you need to find the end of the array. They should have used the number from strlen(src), not strlen(dest). Even worse, strncpy() will put the null terminator in dest in this case.
The line belies any sense that the programmer had any understanding of what the code was actually doing. It’s a amateur mistake.
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Not a programmer. What’s so bad about it?
It doesn’t make any sense. The way a string is terminated in C is by a null character. ‘\0’ is a mnemonic. strlen() returns the length of a strong. It does this by doing a linear scan down the array until it finds the null, and the returns that index as the length. That line of code does nothing useful. It means, “scan through the array until you find a null, then write a null there.” Which is exactly what you had to…
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As of 2018, after seeing how terrible “engineer-types” can be at engineering management, the MBAs are starting to look better to me.
As an MBA who browses HN, I'm torn between the two opinions
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I dunno ... seems to me an indication of a larger systemic problem: "we couldn't even provide a company-wide engineering solution for this simple problem, so here's how we used a hack..."
That's the problem you get with silo'd teams. If they had a core technology team they could handle things like this more gracefully. Or maybe not, this is IBM after all.
I mean, in the same company you have on one end of the scale lots of teams doing just outsourced IT support ("my corporate word install is broken, pls fix"). And on the other end for instance the IBM Zürich research lab, who have received multiple Nobel prizes in physics and who developed things like Token ring and Trellis code modulation.
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had to deal with ibm once. we were developing an application for a customer and ibm was working on some new service for them. of course the customer insisted we use the new ibm service, even though it solved a problem we didn't have at all. the ibm product was a website to be used by end users, while our application had to pass our end users data through. so, i asked the ibm guys (via the customer) to give me the doc…
Ah such classic outsourced third-world contractor output. They are told what to do (by some PM who has no idea) and they do it. If they ever say "uh this doesn't make sense" they are cheaply replaced. I've seen some of this nonsense (though not IBM related): strncpy(dst, src, strlen(src)); dst[strlen(dst)] = '\0';
Do we know that the developers were outsourced or which countries they were from?