Well, that's the thing. Most jobs are 80% stuff you don't want to do and 20% stuff you do. You're not being paid to do your hobby, you're paid to make money for the business and do what your bosses say.

There are many places though that understand writing good code, even if it's boring, is important, and any decent programmer can go fish until they find a workplace like that.

Having a solid older developer around is important even if most of the work is boring. You're there to help the younger folk from making costly mistakes.

I agree with you.

I recently started working on a project in which the company had outsourced it to a wordpress shop, despite it not being a wordpress site.

fast forward a few years and no one fully trusts the software so everything it does gets checked/verified by a human, and they're actually hiring people because the workload is too much.

So they brought it in-house, which is where I come in.

And let me tell you, this codebase is horrific. To give you an idea, they needed a progress bar and ended up writing a FSM with the transition between nodes being http redirects. Now, the developers who worked on this wouldn't know what a FSM is if it bit them in the ass, but that's what they built. And the data for detecting if the background processing was still running was duplicated in 3 or 4 places, which means you would get states in this FSM that disagreed with each other about whether or not processing was finished. These pages would literally "argue" with each other over it by redirecting back and forth until the browser threw a too many redirects error.

I came across some code yesterday in which the developers had created a string of multiple insert statements. They then split on the string "INSERT INTO". Said split removes the INSERT INTO from the string. They then looped over the resulting array, prepended "INSERT INTO" back onto the sql and called the DB 1 at a time. I don't think these guys realized you could separate MySQL statements by semicolon.

My point is that the codebase is horrific, written by someone who was used to the style of development you're referring to, and they made an absolute mess.

BUT

To your point. The company realizes how bad the software is and I get a surprising amount of respect when talking about what needs to happen. The result is that we're making great strides towards making improvements, and despite how horrific the code is I find myself enjoying the work because it allows me to have an aspect of my skill set respected that can sometimes get ignored by people because it's not forward facing. Good software dev is boring as shit, so when you're doing it well no one notices.

Also, this post got me to thinking. I should submit that SQL code snippet to the daily wtf.

Ah, speaking of code snippet of the day. Found someone’s code trying to check if a promo-code is already used, and if not to apply it:

    $codes = $db->exec(‘SELECT code from promocode’);
    if (!in_array($myCode, $codes)){
        // use it
    }

!!