Three Minutes

A cautionary tale about a developer (Barry) who, instead of fixing slow SQL queries through proper indexing and query planning, wrote a Python polling script that checks every 3 minutes whether database jobs completed. The script has multiple code quality issues: unnecessary array usage, string comparison against boolean literals, duplicated near-identical queries, and embedded retry logic that bypasses the team's existing job management system. The real fix would have been query optimization with indexes rather than a workaround that masks the underlying performance problem.