'He wanted to see every line of code in this project': Company CTO accuses freelancer of "faking" project results

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Remy Millisky • Writer and Editor
May 9, 2024 11:00 AM EDT

This boss just had to involve himself in a project that he didn't really understand. Instead of just letting the pros do their job, he had to double down. 

This freelancer, u/dodgeballwater, shared that they were working for a big company focused on cell phone networks. This was back when we still had 2G and 2.5G internet speeds, a far cry from what we have today with 4G and 5G. For lots of humanity's recent history, the internet has just been slow. It'd be eye-opening to show today's kids how people used to have to use dial-up internet or the internet of the early 2000s, which would load web pages from top to bottom, and could take a few minutes per page. It's a blessing to be able to zip from page to page on the internet these days, with many pages loading almost instantly. 

This person worked as a coder back in the day, and they were assigned to "build a reliable delivery platform" for one company's cell phone network. Their boss wanted to see all of the teams work, so that's exactly what he got. 

Next up, check out some oddly designed things that are going to be just about impossible for their owners to clean. 

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  • 01
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    via Markus Spiske on Unsplash
  • 02
    Malicious software code review Σ Way back in the early 2000's I found myself working freelance as a result of the dot com implosion.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 03
    I found a gig sub-contracting for a contract a large company in San Diego had acquired from another company. They wanted to build a reliable delivery platform for the cell network. In those days cell data was 2G & 2.5G at best, so this wasn't as easy as you might think.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 04
    The division of the large company ran a satellite message platform, and the CTO of that division had no interest in this project, which is how I ended up with it.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 05
    Interestingly enough in the dot com implosion I had been let go by a company building a VAN overlay on the internet, a very similar problem. Since the second version of a product is always better I just took the lessons I learned and applied them to this project.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 06
    That included heavily relying on this "new thing" called open source software. It took my small team about six months to build and deliver the platform and both the customer and the sales people were very happy with the result. But the CTO of this division was not.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 07
    He had turned down the project based on his assumption that it would be a long and arduous task. So he demanded a code review with me and my team. He was very explicit, he wanted to see every line of code in this project, and we were not to leave anything out. He was sure we were somehow faking our results and was going to "get to the bottom" of this, as there was no way we could have delivered in six months.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 08
    So we assembled our source into a zip for him. First the code we wrote. Then all the source for the open source libraries we used. Then the source for the libraries those libraries used, an so on recursively until we everything. We ran all that through a formatter (to make it easier to read) and ended up with about 800MB of source files. Which we sent off to the CTO.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 09
    The initial code review date got moved back, and rescheduled for a month later. We sat in the meeting waiting for him, and he arrived about 15 minutes late. He stood in the doorway and looked at us and finally asked his only question - what did we use to pretty print the source.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 10
    I started to say we used a script we wrote but he cut me off, said fine and left the room. We ended up doing work for that large company for 10 years and never again were we asked to a code review.
    via u/dodgeballwater
  • 11
    dreaminginteal To get to the real question-- Which license were the libraries written with? Some of them require any code that incorporates them to be made public on demand.
    via u/dreaminginteal
  • 12
    I know of a case where manglement in a fairly large company didn't understand that, and tried to stonewall someone who asked for the complete source for some commercial software. They went to their Legal team, and Legal said "cut them a CD with the source; you have no other choice". Said company became much more careful about how they used Open Source software after that.
    via u/dreaminginteal
  • 13
    Origonn Could be he wanted the source code to the script you used to pretty print the code.
    via u/Origonn
  • 14
    That must've felt really good haha
    via r/MaliciousCompliance
  • 15
    FoolishStone Like the story and putting the CTO in his place; but I hope you're doing regular code reviews as a matter of course. We use a Gerrit based system tied to git.
    via u/FoolishStone

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