--- title: "Wasted Years" url: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/1/wasted-years.md" canonical: "https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/1/wasted-years.html" published: "2003-07-01T11:23:00" updated: "2003-07-01T11:23:00" tags: ["Off Topic"] author: "Roy Osherove" description: "Oh boy. This funny article brought back a lot of memories. I remember once receiving some legacy VB code, and trying to figure out what the hell was happening. It was a nightmare. 3 or four modules containing huge…" usage: "Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page)." license: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/" --- # Wasted Years By Roy Osherove July 1, 2003 In [Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) **Historical article** · Originally published July 1, 2003; technical details may be outdated. Oh boy. [This funny article](http://www.mindprod.com/unmain) brought back **a lot** of memories. I remember once receiving some legacy VB code, and trying to figure out what the hell was happening. It was a nightmare. 3 or four modules containing huge 200-300 line procedures which accessed the database using lots concatenated strings SQL text inside. The best part was that one of them was named **Doit()** . After about 200 lines or so, it called another method.  That one was called **Doit1()**. That was the longest week of my life. That application had to be rewritten from the ground up, that's how bad it was. Sometimes people waste entire man-years on this stuff. I think it all comes down to companies not willing to spend the extra buck on the more experienced programmer, and think they can get away with it. They only end up paying much much more, not in the distant future, mind you, but starting right from the day that person comes on board. You can actually hear the money going down the drain on these occasions. ## More in Off Topic [All posts in Off Topic](https://osherove.com/blog/category/off-topic) - Jul 1, 2003 ### [Yey!](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/1/yey.html) - Jul 1, 2003 ### [Chris Sells talks about Learning to Learn](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/1/chris-sells-talks-about-learning-to-learn.html) - Jul 1, 2003 ### [User Groups](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/7/1/user-groups.html) - Jun 27, 2003 ### [Still Alive](https://osherove.com/blog/2003/6/27/still-alive.html) --- ## About the author **Roy Osherove**: Senior Solutions Architect at AWS working on AI for production and AI-driven development; author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership, with about 20 years of consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery. ### Sites - [RobotPaper](https://robotpaper.ai/): This blog: AI patterns and anti-patterns, AI and coding agents, and engineering leadership. - [osherove.com](https://osherove.com): Roy's personal site. Author of The Art of Unit Testing and Elastic Leadership; consulting and training on unit testing, TDD, team leadership and continuous delivery, plus about 20 years of blog posts. - [The Art of Unit Testing](https://www.artofunittesting.com): The Art of Unit Testing, 3rd Edition (Manning): readable, maintainable, trustworthy unit tests, plus TDD workshops in C#, JavaScript, Java and Kotlin. - [5whys.com](https://www.5whys.com): Roy's writing on software team leadership: self-organizing teams, surviving chaos, learning mode and the Elastic Leadership model. - [Pipeline Driven](https://pipelinedriven.org): Continuous delivery and DevOps practices: build patterns, pipeline-friendly testing, DevOps metrics and enterprise DevOps. - [Elastic Leadership](https://www.elasticleadership.com): Elastic Leadership, Roy's framework for software team leaders (survival, learning and self-organizing modes). ### Social - X: https://x.com/royosherove - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/osherove/ ### Contact - Contact form: https://forms.gle/jQSx5KoXvrVA1JCK7 ### License Licensed under CC BY 4.0 — reuse, quote and adapt with attribution (Roy Osherove, link to the original page). License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/