this post was submitted on 04 Feb 2024
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This is just...Well, if you wrote a prison escape movie that involved accessing an Access DB to reroute a transport you would be laughed at.
I wish I was kidding. It was ran by a single lady in her 70s who couldn't retire because she was the only one who knew how everything worked. Part of my last project there was modernizing it on a .net stack instead
I believe you. I can even guess the story.
In the late 80s/early 90s a staff member (self taught in office/access) quickly threw together something at the request of a manager as a stop gap wile a new proper system was specked out.
The person learned as they went and the system grew in functionality and complexity until the term spaghetti code was a massive understatement. It became their job.
The new proper system never arrived and they have been making do for the past 30-40 years.
I ran into the same thing a decade or so ago and it was a nightmare, but it was just an ice cream franchise, not prison related
It is truly insane how much of this world relies on systems like these
I know, I have seen them.
I was sysadmin for a Bankruptcy and Insolvency Firm for more than a decade and walked into 100s of businesses on the point of failure. Many of them could not be saved simply because their systems were so bad it was better for a buyer to buy their equipment and start with a clean sheet.
The ice cream business was going under because the partner who had been the access self starter had an argument with the others and had walked out 18months ago.
The access system ran the entire business (accounting and wages were on other programs but the db feed them data) and he was the only one who had any idea.
Shit started to go wrong and they had no idea what to do.
I'm grateful that my company is actively improving processes and working on very necessary rewrites but damn some of these systems make me cringe having to work on them. I'm just a dev so I can't even imagine the rage you must've faced at those jobs lol
Even though I occasionally toy with the idea of learning eg. COBOL so I could rake in the $$$ from consulting jobs to add features to some 60 year old codebase for a bank or something like that, I'm not sure that amount of stress would ever be worth it