Incentives, COBOL, and the DMV

A funny story about a incentives. A COBOL programmer was paid by the line of code, not surprisingly he did some creative coding, and the kicker is he ended up in a govt. job.

How I started my IT career | InfoWorld - By Anonymous: "While testing the completed application, I noticed that certain routines were running extremely slowly. It dawned on me that all these routines had been written by Bryce, a contract programmer. When I started debugging his code, I discovered that he wasn’t dividing numbers using normal division operators. Instead he was repeatedly subtracting one number from the other and counting how many such subtractions he could perform until the result was negative. Yikes!

Rewriting Bryce’s routines was easy. Understanding why he had used such an unusual algorithm was not. Then I found out that Bryce’s pay was based on the number of lines of code he wrote. This was hardly an inducement for elegant programming, and I eased him out of the loop.
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When we finished the project on schedule, the company offered me a full-time job. Instead, I headed back to school. Over the next few years, thinking about how satisfying it had been to head a complex programming job and being responsible for everything from coding to project and personnel management, I was motivated to nail some of my tougher academic assignments. Eventually I got a master’s degree and a high-paying consulting position.

As for Bryce, someone told me that he had moved on to a government job. It makes me wonder, sometimes — especially when I find myself waiting endlessly for the online DMV site to accept my registration update — if deep down in the code, some of Bryce’s repeated subtractions might be looping. "

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