Fixing Bugs Placed by Careless Coders
I can see when code has been lazily copy-n-pasted and not really incorporated properly. I can see when coders leave in hard-coded values when they thought they were changing things out. It's not all that hard. This morning I've been doing quite a bit of this kind of bug fixing. It's not all that hard - it's pretty easy stuff to spot, but it makes me sad for the guy that wrote it, because I'm not going to see him in the same light as I had.
Also, comments would be nice when I'm digging in a new web framework (Sinatra), and I really need to get up to speed on these Ruby web systems sooner rather than later as it's going to become more important to me that I'm able to write these - as opposed to just bug fixing them.
I suspect they just don't care, and aren't motivated in the least to care. So I really have to try very hard not to think it's who they are - just how they are responding to the job.