The Daily WTF is a humorous yet insightful blog that highlights absurd, puzzling, and downright bizarre coding practices, software design decisions, and IT anecdotes encountered in the wild. Through anonymous submissions and reader-contributed stories, The Daily WTF exposes the pitfalls of poor software engineering, questionable coding practices, and humorous tales from the trenches of IT. Developers can learn  lessons from the mistakes and misadventures shared on The Daily WTF, reminding them of the importance of code quality, best practices, and maintaining sanity in the world of software development.

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Fresh out of university, Remco took a job abroad, ignoring his initial misgivings. Red flags about the company, Conglomcorp, started appearing early on, from concerning layoff practices to questionable software development practices like adding a misleading 'Garbage Collection' button that called System.gc(). Remco's experience worsened as he dealt with a poorly maintained codebase and unhelpful senior developers, leading him to eventually leave the company.

Too Many Red Flags

Ah, nostalgia…
We had a software component that used JNI to call native code from a C DLL. There was one person responsible for the java layer we called and a team of two people for the C code.
When a memory leak was observed, all three were given the high priority task of finding and fixing the memory leak. In n the end it was fixed and we had no OOME in production anymore.
But another problem surfaced: the application has become incredibly slow. So management decided to start a performance project. A budget of 100k€ was allocated for the first phase to identify the parts of the software component that had the worst performance and create a POC before including the changes into the production code base in a next step.
During the kickoff, they did a presentation and we could see the server logs. They people said: “we cannot reproduce the slowdown when only running the C code”. The java guy said &quot;that’s java. Java is slow. There’s nothing I can do to speed up the java code.
In preparation we had enabled verbose GC on the system, and there was GC all over the place. I asked to see the java code. Those were all System.gc() calls all. When I asked the java guy why, he said that was all he could do in the previous task to fix the memory problems. He had inserted System.gc() calls right before and after every JNI call. It took a single phone call to the system administrator to add the JVM flag -XX:+DisableExplicitGC and restart the server. All problems were gone. The project was finished right after the kickoff, except for the java guy who had to remove all the GC calls again from his code.

too many unrelated cover images to titles

I’ve been in a couple of jobs like this. Low key, I kind of loved fixing the low-hanging fruit. It’s easy to be a hero in that environment.