> If you really need some horrifying code to be happy...

Ha ha, it only makes me happy when I understand the root cause of how it happened in the first place. When I see truly horrifying code in production at work, I'm not interested in ridiculing the individual responsible, I feel profoundly curious as to how on Earth such code made it into production in the first place ... and feel an irresistible urge to uncover the root cause to make sure it doesn't happen again.

One common cause of ridiculously bad code making it into production I've seen is when the non-technical manager (who never looks at the code) rates an individual's performance based on KPIs, such as productivity. Team-based KPIs produce higher quality and more maintainable code in my experience. These topics are touched upon in:

In reply to Re^3: Is this OK? by eyepopslikeamosquito
in thread Is this OK? by jwkrahn

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