My brother's here in the US and I'm doing my best to convince him that he wants to live here in Portland. In the meantime, it sounds like his job is doing its best to convince him that he wants to work anywhere else. One of the anecdotes he shared with me was regarding a large, Java-based Internet banking system that his company contracted another company to build. They paid the company 3000£ per day to get this done and when they finally got the code base, it mostly worked, but it was a mess. Naturally, my brother has to help maintain this.
Aside from tightly coupled methods and comments embedded in programs that read "my first EJB", they wound up with one program that was 2000 lines long, broken, with all comments in Spanish. After exhaustive work, they finally narrowed the problem down to one section of code and decided that they really, really needed the comment for it translated. They called up a coworker, read the Spanish to him, and got very curious as to why he was pissing himself with laughter. The translation of the comment:
Further into the darkness we go.
