My friend was an intern at a telecommunications company in Bratislava. It was his job to so some minor software development in Java. In retrospect, this turned out to be one his most challenging jobs but not because of the work but because of the equipment.
The computer that assigned to him was slow and quite literally wasn’t quite up for the task. There was enough space for Java, and there was enough space for the development environment Eclipse, but there was not space enough for the source code he needed to change. He was a very clever and industrious developer and copied some code locally a built the rest over the network. The poor hardware was probably due to a very tight budget, which was reflected in other aspects of the company.
That doesn’t mean that his time was completely uninteresting. During his development he did find one super funny piece of login code. The code looked somewhat similar to this.
Authenticated = false
try {
Status = checkpassword (user, password)
if (status == password_accepted)
{
Authenticated = true;
}
}
catch (Exception ex)
{
Authenticated = true;
}
This pseudo code basically means that if some unexpected action took place while the user was logging onto the program then an exception would be thrown but the exception handler was setting the authenticated flag to true – thus upon serious error during login you wouldn’t need to know the password. To test this theory, my friend disconnected the computer from the network and logged into the software with false credentials. Once the login process was over, he plugged the computer into the network and it turned out he was logged in.
A lot of the actual staff were not employed but were temp workers and in the IT department most of the technical people had a contract that was only for a year. This did provide maximum flexibility for the company but it didn’t inspire much firm loyalty. At the end of his one year internship, my friend was not only one of the most senior people in the group but one of the few who remained from the group he started with beyond the first year.