Michael had a co-worker who was new to the team. As such, there was definitely an expected ramp-up time. But this new developer got that ramp up time, and still wasn't performing. Worse, they ended up dragging down the entire team, as they'd go off, write a bunch of code, end up in a situation that they couldn't understand why nothing was working, and then beg for help.

For example, this dev was tasked with adding timestamps to a set of logging messages. The logs had started as simple "print" debugging messages, but had grown in complexity and it was time to treat them like real logging.

Joseph sends us a tried and true classic: bad date handling code, in JavaScript. We've all seen so much bad date handling code that it takes something special to make me do the "confused dog" head tilt.

		var months=new Array(13);
		months[1]='January';
		months[2]='February';
		months[3]='March';
		months[4]='April';
		months[5]='May';
		months[6]='June';
		months[7]='July';
		months[8]='August';
		months[9]='September';
		months[10]='October';
		months[11]='November';
		months[12]='December';
		var time=new Date();
		var lmonth=months[time.getMonth() + 1];
		var date=time.getDate();
		var year=time.getFullYear();
		document.write(lmonth + ' ');
		document.write(date + ', ' + year);

Today's anonymous submitter supplies us with a classic antipattern: padding via switch:

string TransactionOrder = (string)dr["TransactionOrder"].ToString().Trim();

switch (TransactionOrder.Length)
{
        case 1:
                TransactionOrder = "000" + TransactionOrder;
                break;
        case 2:
                TransactionOrder = "00" + TransactionOrder;
                break;
        case 3:
                TransactionOrder = "0" + TransactionOrder;
                break;
        default:
                TransactionOrder = TransactionOrder;
                break;
}

Phil's company hired a contractor. It was the typical overseas arrangement: bundle up a pile of work, send it off to another timezone, receive back terrible code, push back during code review, then the whole thing blows up when the contracting company pushes back about how while the code review is in the contract if you're going to be such sticklers about it, they'll never deliver, and then management steps in and says, "Just keep the code review to style comments," and then it ends up not mattering anyway because the contractor assigned to the contract leaves for another contracting company, and management opts to use the remaining billable hours for a new feature instead of finishing the inflight work, so you inherit a half-finished pile of trash and somehow have to make it work.

Like I said, pretty standard stuff.

One of the long-tenured developers, Douglas at Patrick's company left, which meant Patrick was called upon to pick up that share of the work. The code left behind by Douglas the departing developer was, well… code.

For example, this block of Java: