Well, I don't work in computing(sadly) but I used to get frustrated in my current day-job.

The worst thing was going out of my way to apply professional standards to my work, but then finding out the hard way that I was wasting my time due to the nature of the system. On the one hand they put a company rule book in your hand and - in their own words - say disciplinary action will be taken if not adheared to, but on the other hand you are surrounded by cowboys who then frown upon you for doing things by their bloody rule book!

When you see the cowboys getting away with murder, getting promoted through a popularity game and the genuine professionals getting kicked in the nuts and told "not good enough" when overloaded with work...you know its time to accept that the job is bullshit and that you work to live and not the other way around.

Funny, since I've learned to "let go" at work, I've been a lot happier in my job and at home. Just do your contracted hours and your best. In the end thats all you can do.

Cries of "Argh! Fucking REDACTED engine!!" We're not uncommon at my last job...
I try to mutter my streams of profanities, rather than yell though :D

Cries of "Argh! Fucking REDACTED engine!!" We're not uncommon at my last job...

Maybe not the same engine, but anecdotally, every time I've been given a "Tell us what's broken about this real-world code example" question during a job interview its been Unreal Engine in one form or another. I does a lot right, I mean, it must, right? But there are apparently plenty of instances in the code-base where someone simply decided that their assumptions were every bit as good as real error detection -- and the specific instances I'm recalling weren't even in performance-critical paths...

What helps me at work is having a coworker that has a desk in the same office, and we encrypted chat back and forth. Seems like every day, one of the freelancers that our company uses to outsource menial coding, or the new guy that was hired above me but can't quite code for his life, will ask me to fix a bug in what they wrote, and often, I find that the whole thing is just completely and utterly nightmarish (as an aside, the last HTML document that the new guy wrote that I had to fix contained such oddities like a <textarea> tag with "width", "height", and "type" attributes set [to 20, 5, and "text", respectively]. Spoiler alert: that's not even close to valid or functional).

Just as bad as inheriting bad code is being ordered to write it, like my boss' infamous micromanaging of the UI design:

1. He doesn't like the word "disapprove", because he doesn't want to give bad feelings. Fine, now it's called "unapprove", to strip a record of its approval.
2. Okay, now he wants employees to request approval. Fine. So, if he likes it, he approves. If he doesn't, he... unapproves. They never had approval in the first place, though.
3. Now, he wants a state where instead of just removing the request for approval if he unapproves, it is unambiguously marked that it has his disapproval so that they know to fix it. He wants it to be called... "On hold". So records are held when he disapproves.
4. The point where I call it borked is when I find several records with "XXXX" in the field where the supervisor's initials go when they approve a record. I inquire, and it turns out that they put that there on approved records to mark that it is good, but not to use it yet, because the situation's unstable.

Hold on, hold on.

• When you undo an approval request, you "unapprove" the record that was never approved.
• When you disapprove, you put the record "on hold".
• When you want to put a record on hold, you "approve" it, then put "XXXX" in the initials.

Unfortunately, he ranks so high in the company that he can literally send me packing on a whim, and no one would question him. So, his insane notions go. And the codebase gets tainted more and more, as they request new features that are made practically impossible due to their decisions on how we'd do our jobs beforehand.

I'd slap a keyboard, too. What keeps me sane is having a laugh about it with a sympathetic co-worker, who frequently comes up with new ideas for the software (he's one of the foremost users), but they get labelled as stupid until a bastardized version of it is ordered for me to implement, without giving him any credit (back when it was still a good idea).

TL;DR: I hate my job, but co-workers caught in the same struggle are helpful.

Frustrated? No I quite often find myself in a complete rage at work.

Usually at poorly made management decisions or not being invited to a meeting to discuss a particular problem whilst other coders who are working on entirely different projects have been invited and make architechtural decisions about frameworks they know nothing about and will never touch.

I don't mind bad code because it is a fact that every coder sees their own code as being better than everybody elses. Coders often accuse other coders of writing spaghetti code or misusing patterns but the truth is that every coder when viewing another coders work can spot places where impoovments are made.

I still love my job though.

Hahaha, don't even get me started.

Thanks for all your answers, guys. I'm glad that I'm not the only one who sometimes feels like this. Definitely some intersting perspectives that I'll keep in mind for the future.

Yes, I can relate. But I just remind myself that my job at its absolute worst is still a million times better than what most people on the planet do to make a living.

That's indeed true. I've got to be thankful, but it's damn hard when my desires as a programmer are so unsatisfied. I don't want to spend my while live fullfilling peoples dreams while my own dreams fall by the wayside.

One nice side effect is as you learn to cope with this code base, you'll become a more effective coder because of it, and you'll become really good at refactoring

That's a good way to look at it. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger

Biggest question for the original poster: Are you in a position to change it?

Sorry for leaving out the details. Mainly wanted to see how everyone else copes with frustration. We have the source code of the app, but I can only extend it by writing plugins because the app is maintained by the company who wrote it. They are in the process of refactoring a lot of things, but they still got a long way to go. It's a huge codebase, written in PHP and Javascript. A lot of magic going on, kinda hard to debug. The lack of documentation on how to work with it is my biggest problem.

you know its time to accept that the job is bullshit and that you work to live and not the other way around.

This is actually how I'm feeling right now. I guess that's not uncommon, most people I know don't have their dream job. But I'll refuse to live my life like this in the long run.

Hahaha, don't even get me started.

I'd love to hear it

That ain't uncommon at all. Maintaining legacy codebases has been the bane of programming jobs. You question why things are they way they are, yet there is no one there to help you out. I am a big advocate of documentating your code, but surprisingly, programmers seem to get really angry when they are told to write documentation, but got irritated when get handed a codebase without documentation

As long as you are employed as a programmer, part of your job will always be maintaining existing codebase, unless you work on your apps and code.