'He was not a programmer': Micromanager tries to humiliate his senior programmer by demanding he make changes to a perfect batch of code, employee maliciously complies by creating a series of nonsensical loopholes that go unnoticed for years

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Jesse Kessenheimer • Writer and Editor
Apr 26, 2025 3:00 PM EDT

Coding in the 80s was a lot simpler than it is now, but the technologically challenged managers who manage the coding teams remain the same: Uninformed. Computer literacy, even in this day and age, is hard to come by, but it seems that nitpicky, know-it-all managers have persisted. Eager to prove themselves against their brainiac teams, they try their best to flaunt their power, but this clever programmer wasn't going to go down without a fight—or at least without including the best joke the coding community has ever seen in his listing. 

The software world has two types of people: The suits who go around flexing and trying to act important, and the dude in a t-shirt and jeans who works downstairs churning out all of the usable code they're selling. 

While both parties desperately need the other to survive (because we all know that coders aren't the salesman-y type), it's clear that the nerds in the dungeons of the company are the ones keeping the lights on by creating the product. This senior programmer knew that the only way he could convey this nuanced relationship to his hyper-egotistical manager was to outwit him. Keep reading for the silly story from the 80s about the nerd that finally got the best of the prom king, but dancing coder circles around him that would stand with the company for years.

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    Cheezburger Image 10497931008
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    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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    Bucking a software trend in 1980 M 45 years ago, I spent a few months as a software engineer for a Midwest company that built industrial control systems... writing assembler for an embedded micro.
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    Management had gone to a seminar on "structured design," the latest software trend, and got religion. My manager, Jerry, called me into his office and asked to see my work. He was not a programmer, but sure...
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    whatever... here you go. I handed him my listing, about a half inch thick, and forgot all about it. A few days later, he called me into his office (which always reeked of
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    ciga tte smoke). "You've got some work to do!" he snapped, furious. I looked down at his desk and my 8085 macro assembler listing was heavily annotated in red pencil... with every JUMP
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    instruction circled. "This is now a go-to-less shop. You've got to get these out of here." "Jerry, this is assembler code... that's different from a high-level language."
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    "I don't want a bunch of God- excuses! You have two weeks." Well, shoot. This is ridiculous. I stared at the code for a while, then got a flash of inspiration and set to work.
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    Every place there was a jump, conditional or unconditional, I put the target address into the HL register, did an SPHL to copy it to the stack pointer, then did a RETURN followed by a form feed
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    and a "title block" describing the new "module." The flow of control was absolutely unchanged, although with a few extra instructions it was marginally slower. The machine was controlling giant industrial batching equipment, so that wouldn't matter.
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    I dropped the listing, now almost two inches thick, onto Jerry's desk, and went home. He would either spot the joke and respond with anger, or (hopefully) be convinced that I had magically converted the
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    program into a proper structured design application. Some of those title blocks were pretty fanciful... He bought it! Suddenly I was an expert software engineer versed in
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    Yourdon and Constantine principles, and the application made it into distribution. Around the same time, I quit to work full-time on my engineering textbook and other fun projects, and forgot all about it...
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    ...until about 3 years later, when I was pedaling across the United States on a computerized recumbent bicycle. I got a message from a new employee of the company who was charged with
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    Listen on port 14 console.InServer ruming; Reading package lists... Done Building dependency tree Reading state information... Done The following extra packages will be installed Labdolibre-text liblibre21 binbased libmagickcore-extra Libopeners Libr.2-7 nete agick-doc autotrace cups-sd lar le steps Liet-in player pvray ratian Libuere,2-7-gth Suppested packages: to re graded, newly installed, Need to get 2649 of archives After this operation, 51 A of additiona Do you want to continue? (Y/n) scri
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    The image does not depict the actual subjects of the story. Subjects are models.

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    maintenance of the legacy system, and he was trying to make sense of my listing. I called him back from a pay phone in Texas. He sounded bewildered.
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    "Did you write this? What are you, I mean, you know, I don't understand... like, what are you actually DOING here?" "Ah! There's only one thing you have to know," I said, then went on to
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    relate the tale of Jerry and the structured design hack. By the end he was practically rolling on the floor, and told me they had long since fired that guy. He now shared my secret about virtual software modules, and promised not to tell... But it's been almost a half a century so I guess it's okay now.
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    PN_Guin A few words of explanation for the less tech inclined: The boss has heard a few new buzzwords and wants to implement a certain style of coding for his team. This style prohibits the use of some
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    commands that don't even exist anymore in modern high level programming languages (or are at the least frowned upon). This would have been fine and actually a good idea if op had done their programming in one of those high level programming languages.
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    High level languages like C, C++, Python or even Basic look and read a bit like highly formalized English (exceptions apply) and can be more or less read by most people after a bit of training.
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    These programs are then "compiled" ie translated into machine code. The programmer doesn't have to bother with the details of the processor and the program can be compiled for use on different machines.
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    Assembler (what op was actually using) is a completely different beast. Here you are talking directly to the computer and using something only slightly above the actual machine code. The results are usually highly specific and highly optimized.
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    The concepts of high level languages simply do not apply assembler. Boss man didn't know and didn't care if it wasn't feasible or even possible.
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    So OP complied by excessively stuffing and blowing up their code and turning it into a hard to maintain nightmare. But now it didn't use the commands the boss was so wind up about anymore.
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    Boss was happy and the next person with an actual clue looking at the code had several moments.
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    Tenzipper And I bet some of those machines are still running that same code. Well done MC.
    via Tenzipper

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