Chops was a developer for Initrode. Early on a Monday, they were summoned to their manager Gary’s office before the caffeine had even hit their brain.
Gary glowered up from his office chair as Chops entered. This wasn’t looking good. “We need to talk about the latest commit for Taskmaster.”
Taskmaster was a large application that’d been around for decades, far longer than Chops had been an employee. Thousands of internal and external customers relied upon it. Refinements over time had led to remarkable stability, its typical uptime now measured in years. However, just last week, their local installation had unexpectedly suffered a significant crash. Chops had been assigned to troubleshooting and repair.
“What’s wrong?” Chops asked.
“Your latest commit decreased the number of unit tests!” Gary replied as if Chops had slashed the tires on his BMW.
Within Taskmaster, some objects that were periodically generated were given a unique ID from a pool. The pool was of limited size and required scanning to find a spare ID. Each time a value was needed, a search began where the last search ended. IDs returned to the pool as objects were destroyed would only be reused when the search wrapped back around to the start.
Chops had discovered a bug in the wrap-around logic that would inevitably produce a crash if Taskmaster ran long enough. They also found that if the number of objects created exceeded the size of the pool, this would trigger an infinite loop.
Rather than attempt to patch any of this, Chops had nuked the whole thing and replaced it with code that assigned each object a universally unique identifier (UUID) from a trusted library UUID generator within its constructor. Gone was the bad code, along with its associated unit tests.
Knowing they would probably only get in a handful of words, Chops wonderered how on earth to explain all this in a way that would appease their manager. “Well—”
“That number must NEVER go down!” Gary snapped.
“But—”
“This is non-negotiable! Roll it back and come up with something better!”
And so Chops had no choice but to remove their solution, put all the janky code back in place, and patch over it with kludge. Every comment left to future engineers contained a tone of apology.
Taskmaster became less stable. Time and expensive developer hours were wasted. Risk to internal and external customers increased. But Gary could rest assured, knowing that his favored metric never faltered on his watch.
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