Hey folks! I think this request is right up this comm’s alley. I’m sure that we all know bogo sort but, what other terrible/terribly inefficient algorithms, software architecture, or design choices have you been horrified/amused by?

I, sadly, lost a great page of competing terrible sorting algorithms, but I’ll lead with JDSL as a terrible (and terribly inefficient) software architecture and design. The TL;DR is that a fresh CS guy got an internship at a company that based its software offering around a custom, DSL based on JSON that used a svn repo to store all functions in different commits. The poor intern had a bad time due to attempting to add comments to the code, resulting in customer data loss.

    • sirdorius
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      6 months ago

      I unironically had a screening interview with a recruiter that asked “If you were creating a startup, would you use microservices?”. She didn’t like that my answer was “It depends, I don’t have enough information to answer”.

      • Redkey
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        6 months ago

        “If you were making food, would you use onion powder?”