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130 points

Best comment ever was “It used to work like this but person at client demanded it work like that on this date” when the client complained it shouldn’t work like that.

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1 point

I was porting our old code from PHP to Go at a previous company. I laughed as I copied my then-six-year-old comment “I’m promised by xxxxx that this is a temporary measure <link to slack convo>”.

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13 points

That’s actually the perfect comment, because if anyone ever comes back to fuck with you about it, it’s explained right there. Then you turn it right back around on management and watch them run around like chickens with their heads cut off.

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1 point

Out management used to tell us, that even if head of department had committed to doing something some way, there’s no way or need to hold them accountable. It’s just that situation has changed, and nobody should bat an eye.

To be fair, they also did not pressure us much for the missed deadlines or missing features, because it was indeed the result of the situation described in the first paragraph

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this seems like a great idea as it provides proof in writing just in case the stakeholder complains later on about the thing you implemented at their request

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135 points

That’s basically what comments are most useful for. When you’re doing something that’s not obvious, and want to make sure the “why” doesn’t get lost to time.

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14 points

I spent a year making my company’s iOS apps accessible (meaning usable for the blind and people with vision disabilities). I had to do a lot of weird shit either because of bugs in Apple’s VoiceOver technology or because of the strange way in which our code base was broken up into modules (some of which I did not have access to) and I would always put in comments explaining why I was doing what I was doing. The guy doing code review and merges would always just remove my comments (without any other changes) because he felt that not only were comments unnecessary but also they were a “code smell” indicating professional incompetence. I feel sorry for whoever had to deal with that stuff at a later point.

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2 points

Well, this is shitty

I hope the reviewer did not also squash commits, and the next programmer would be able to at least dig what was there.

Doing changes after some rockstar dev implemented some really complex service, but left no clues as to what does what is so frustrating, and I can never be sure that I don’t break anything in a different place completely

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96 points

// I'm not really that dumb, there is a reason.

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37 points
*
// I told them I'd do this but only if they gave me time next sprint to fix it  - 12-03-1997
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43 points

// narrator: the reason was management

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The best comments are “why” comments, the runner up is “how” comments if high-level enough, and maybe just don’t write “what” comments at all because everyone reading your code knows how to read code.

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