I’ll give an example. At my previous company there was a program where you basically select a start date, select an end date, select the system and press a button and it reaches out to a database and pulls all the data following that matches those parameters. The horrors of this were 1. The queries were hard coded.
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They were stored in a configuration file, in xml format.
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The queries were not 1 entry. It was 4, a start, the part between start date and end date, the part between end date and system and then the end part. All of these were then concatenated in the program intermixed with variables.
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This was then sent to the server as pure sql, no orm.
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Here’s my favorite part. You obviously don’t want anyone modifying the configuration file so they encrypted it. Now I know what you’re thinking at some point you probably will need to modify or add to the configuration so you store an unencrypted version in a secure location. Nope! The program had the ability to encrypt and decrypt but there were no visible buttons to access those functions. The program was written in winforms. You had to open the program in visual studio, manually expand the size of the window(locked size in regular use) and that shows the buttons. Now run the program in debug. Press the decrypt button. DO NOT EXIT THE PROGRAM! Edit the file in a text editor. Save file. Press the encrypt button. Copy the encrypted file to any other location on your computer. Close the program. Manually email the encrypted file to anybody using the file.
It was a single PHP file containing upper tens of thousands of lines of code (i.e. probably 60k+ but I no longer recall the exact amount). And the horrors didn’t stop there. Function names and code formatting were haphazard, some functions were descriptive enough to be helpful(ish) like check_if_first_friday_of_month() but most were literally along the lines of function12() with no comments to indicate the purpose. A̸n̶d̷ ̴t̵h̵e̵ ̸h̷o̵r̶r̸o̷r̵s̸ ̸d̷i̸d̵n̷’̷t̶ ̵s̶t̴o̸p̸ ̷t̵h̶e̶r̵e̶.̴ This application was storing sensitive personal information in the database in plain text. And the horrors didn’t stop there.
Congrats to the developer, though. This project was the one that finally got him fired and he immediately pivoted into a management position at a big tech company (don’t recall which but it might’ve been Microsoft or IBM) making an order of magnitude more money.