I agree with the general sentiment ("one instance of bad code might have been me") but not the specific sentiment ("I could easily decide to catch and ignore errors through every bit of code I worked on without knowing why that was bad, and commit other, similar crimes against good taste in the same way").
The difference for me is that this is pervasive. Yes, sometimes I might write code with a bug in error handling at 3am when I'm trying to bring a service back up, but I don't do it consistently across all the code that I touch.
I accept that the scope is hard to understand without having worked on a codebase which a genuine fucking moron has also touched. "Oh strken," you might say, "surely it can't be that bad." Yes, it can. I have never seen anything like this before. It's like the difference between a house that hasn't been cleaned in a week and a hoarder's house. If I tried to explain what hoarding is, well, maybe you'd reply that sometimes you don't do the dishes every day or mop the floor every week, and then I'd have to explain that the kitchen I'm talking about is filled from floor to roof with dirty dishes and discarded wrappers, including meat trays, and smells like a dead possum.
Hey, that possum's name was Roger and I'm really sad that it died. I've been feeding it for weeks! There are definitely bad programmers out there who's code is only suitable for public shaming via the daily wtf.
The difference for me is that this is pervasive. Yes, sometimes I might write code with a bug in error handling at 3am when I'm trying to bring a service back up, but I don't do it consistently across all the code that I touch.
I accept that the scope is hard to understand without having worked on a codebase which a genuine fucking moron has also touched. "Oh strken," you might say, "surely it can't be that bad." Yes, it can. I have never seen anything like this before. It's like the difference between a house that hasn't been cleaned in a week and a hoarder's house. If I tried to explain what hoarding is, well, maybe you'd reply that sometimes you don't do the dishes every day or mop the floor every week, and then I'd have to explain that the kitchen I'm talking about is filled from floor to roof with dirty dishes and discarded wrappers, including meat trays, and smells like a dead possum.