[staofbur]

About 50% of the companies I consulted for between 2004-2013 had no issue tracker. Most emailed and/or emailed spreadsheets around.

What's even more shocking is about 25% of them didn't even use a VCS, most relying on some poor guy to sit there with a diff tool and merge everyone's shit into something cohesive. One company used a wooden spoon as an ownership lock.

[Sir_Substance]

A few weeks ago, someone had a thread up asking what people did to help them get past impostor syndrome, and I had a stab at writing up an answer that revolved around "realise that if you read hacker news, you're probably inside a quality bubble. Look at how bad some people who are employed in software are at their jobs and get some perspective".

I ended up deleting the comment without posting it because I didn't have any good examples that I felt I could talk about in detail.

This is a great one though. To everyone on hacker news, if you ever feel inadequate about not writing as many unit tests as you know you should (or whatever is bugging you), remember that time Staofbur found a whole company of people so clueless they used a wooden spoon instead of version control.

Yeah you should probably write more unit tests, but overall, the fact that you even know enough to feel worried about that makes you the cream of the software industry. There's a whole pail of rather thin milk below you.

[staofbur]

Hey, the spoon worked well, until I bought another one and left it in the office :) They had SVN running for everyone a week after and a month later they were running feature branches.

[thanksgiving]

Just last week, I witnessed a meeting where a QA guy said he doesn't want to update any jira ticket as it should be the business analyst who updates tickets?

More strangely, not everyone can open a pull request. I can understand not everyone being able to merge but not being able to request a merge? Is say your team was better than what I witnessed even when they didn't have version control.

[another-dave]

> "until I bought another one and left it in the office"

Ooh! You mean 'whoever has the spoon has the lock', type thing? I genuinely presumed you meant, 'don't mess up this code with conflicts or you'll get a smack of the wooden spoon' :D

[staofbur]

Yes it was a "hardware lock" i.e. the holder of the spoon was allowed to diff their copy with the master on a file share and update that. The spoon was used as a casual weapon to beat idiots as well in jest ;)

[twobyfour]

That's just depressing. WHYYYYYY?

[staofbur]

A lot of the companies, software was a function of the business, not the business itself. There was no motivation for the staff to do anything other than minimal effort or even research what their job was about. There was no pride, no ingenuity or creativity. Inevitably this descended into chaos and then I got hired to unfuck the places. Some places you couldn't fix because they were too cheap, too lazy and didn't want to make a change because they were in denial that the poo was actually already over the fan blades.

It was depressing and if I'm honest it made me physically ill and I folded the company and got a permanent job with a company that wielded the clue stick.

Feel much better now :)

[twobyfour]

You would think they would set up version control just to make their own minimal effort jobs less painful.

[staofbur]

Indeed. Apparently some of the human race loves suffering!

To be honest, even though we were just pulling TortoiseSVN into most of the companies, some people just couldn't figure it out even after being bought books, reading the manual AND sitting in training sessions for hours where we hand-held them through every day use cases.