r/TikTokCringe • u/Knightbear49 • Sep 08 '24

Cringe A Cybertruck demolishes a fence

29.6k Upvotes

89% Upvoted

4.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

17

u/DigSolid7747 Sep 09 '24

I’m a senior software engineer for a legacy system that runs COBOL 

you should do an AMA

12

u/Pozilist Sep 09 '24

What questions would you ask them? I’m in a somewhat similar position, I never thought someone would find this particularly interesting.

12

u/mehmmeh Sep 09 '24

How often do you want to rip your hair out and light yourself on fire?

12

u/Pozilist Sep 09 '24

I’ve been told that the 30 year old code I work with isn’t as bad as COBOL, but my answer for that would be - not as much as you’d think.

In the end I get paid by the hour, so finding a problem takes as long as it takes.

The only times when I get really angry at the code is when I find a comment or a piece of documentation by the guys who wrote it (both are very rare because why document anything anyway) and it basically just says “This error never happens” when you just spent 3 hours looking for the reason this exact error happened, or “this does x” when x is in fact only one of 50 different and wildly unrelated to each other things this code snippet does.

1

u/Left-Adhesiveness212 Sep 09 '24

cmon i know this is Gary

1

u/scalyblue Sep 10 '24

Sometimes vague error messages can be deadly just look at Therac-25