How does such bad work go undetected for so long? What fraction of coders are like this? How many years can someone peddle such lousy code to one employer or another? Do they eventually learn better, or find another career, or become management?
This reminds me a lot of the PHP e-commerce site a family friend asked me to fix after his offshore programmer ghosted. It had a lot of this sort of stuff plus a lot of variables/functions/comments/etc written in Russian or Ukranian. No source control, just lots of duplicate files with .1, .old, etc tacked on them. No non-production environment of course. I thought maybe I could help, but then I saw all the plain text credit card numbers in the database and figured it wasn't worth the headache.
How does such bad work go undetected for so long? What fraction of coders are like this? How many years can someone peddle such lousy code to one employer or another? Do they eventually learn better, or find another career, or become management?