Haven't seen much of other people's code...
...but what I have seen makes me feel (a lot) less embarrassed about my own.
Worst was some consultant who'd taken what should've been a simple string padding operation in VBA to get a valid 8-character payroll number and turned it into a multi-line conditional...
If Len(strPayNo) = 1 Then
strPayNo = "E000000" & strPayNo
ElseIf Len(strPayNo) = 2 Then
strPayNo = "E00000" & strPayNo
ElseIf Len(strPayNo) = 3 Then
strPayNo = "E0000" & strPayNo
ElseIf Len(strPayNo) = 4 Then
strPayNo = "E000" & strPayNo
ElseIf Len(strPayNo) = 5 Then
strPayNo = "E00" & strPayNo
ElseIf Len(strPayNo) = 6 Then
strPayNo = "E0" & strPayNo
ElseIf Len(strPayNo) = 7 Then
strPayNo = "E" & strPayNo
End If
Not only had he done this, but he had replicated it EVERYWHERE. That code block appeared something like 140 times. At first I thought he'd cut and pasted it, but then one of the users told me the guy had been charging £1k+ per day for his services (working on site) and I got the sinking certainty that he had just sat there for days on end and typed every single line out by hand.
This was a public sector (NHS) organisation he'd fleeced, and it was just a one-man project for a few weeks. I shudder to think what else is out there in public sector land.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
