crazyscot's recent LJ post about a factor-of-20 speedup of some code reminds me that I've never written down in here the story of my first summer job, despite it being a standard anecdote I use in real life when I get into those ‘the worst code I've ever encountered’ geek war-story conversations.

( some of the worst code I've ever encountered, and how I too sped it up by a factor of twenty )

The boss took one look at the speed test, and shook his head. ‘We can't ship that,’ he said, ‘it's far too embarrassing. We'll have to deliberately slow it back down again, and ship lots of incremental speed upgrades.’

I laughed.

He turned out not to be joking.