This is awesome. Got completely lost reading this and was struggling to figure out where I got this link from. Amazing story.

I kinda love this. That sounds like an incredibly entertaining place to work for between 1 and 2 years in your late 20s and not a second longer.

If you enjoyed this, you'd probably enjoy thedailywtf.com, which is full of stories like that.

This is like the functional ugly tier of buildings from "how buildings learn". Excellent stuff

With AI "programmers", this will be the future: bugs galore and the things that do work, work by accident.

I think this company was ahead of the curve.

The blog post is an entertaining read, but I was left with the impression the author might have tried do embellish, particularly in it's disbelief angle.

Take this passage:

> The app relied on a SOAP service, not to do any servicey things. No, the service was a pure function. It was the client that did all the side effects. In that client, I discovered a massive class hierarchy. 120 classes each with various methods, inheritance going 10 levels deep. The only problem? ALL THE METHODS WERE EMPTY. I do not exaggerate here. Not mostly empty. Empty.

> That one stumped me for a while. Eventually, I learned this was in service of building a structure he could then use reflection on. That reflection would let him create a pipe-delimited string (whose structure was completely database-driven, but entirely static) that he would send over a socket.

Classes with empty methods? Used reflection to create a pipe-delimited string? The string was sent over the wire?

Why congratulations, you just rediscovered data transfer objects, specifically API models.