A Japanese company once made the decision that they needed "virtual" employees in a particular system, for example to support e.g. adding a job to the org chart before that position had been filled (and another dozen use cases), so they had the clever idea "Hey, if we need to do this, we'll just input their 'name in Japanese' as one of a dozen status flags, like XX_JOB_REQUEST or XX_INCOMING_TRANSFER."
One developer at this company, who was annoyed with having to tweak a particular system every time they added a new possible status flag, wrote code which was, essentially:
if (InternalStringUtils.isAllLatinCharacters(employee.getJapaneseName()) {
/* no need to pay this 'employee' so remove them from batch
before we retrieve bank details for salary transfers */
...
}
Do I have to explain why I'm aware of this curious implementation choice?
One developer at this company, who was annoyed with having to tweak a particular system every time they added a new possible status flag, wrote code which was, essentially:
Do I have to explain why I'm aware of this curious implementation choice?