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ARGH. I wrote a long rant containing a bunch of gems from the codebase at @work, and lost it.

I'll summarize the few I remember.

First, the cliche:
if (x == true) { return true; } else { return false; };
Seriously written (more than once) by the "legendary" devs themselves.

Then, lots of typos in constants (and methods, and comments, and ...) like:
SMD_AGENT_SHCEDULE_XYZ = '5-year-old-typo'

and gems like:

def hot_garbage
magic = [nil, '']
magic = [0, nil] if something_something
success = other_method_that_returns_nothing(magic)
if success == true
return true # signal success
end
end

^ That one is from our glorious self-proclaimed leader / "engineering director" / the junior dev thundercunt on a power trip. Good stuff.

Next up are a few of my personal favorites:

Report.run_every 4.hours # Every 6 hours
Daemon.run_at_hour 6 # Daily at 8am

LANG_ENGLISH = :en
LANG_SPANISH = :sp # because fuck standards, right?

And for design decisions...

The code was supposed to support multiple currencies, but just disregards them and sets a hardcoded 'usd' instead -- and the system stores that string on literally hundreds of millions of records, often multiple times too (e.g. for payment, display fees, etc). and! AND! IT'S ALWAYS A FUCKING VARCHAR(255)! So a single payment record uses 768 bytes to store 'usd' 'usd' 'usd'

I'd mention the design decisions that led to the 35 second minimum pay API response time (often 55 sec), but i don't remember the details well enough.

Also:
The senior devs can get pretty much anything through code review. So can the dev accountants. and ... well, pretty much everyone else. Seriously, i have absolutely no idea how all of this shit managed to get published.

But speaking of code reviews: Some security holes are allowed through because (and i quote) "they already exist elsewhere in the codebase." You can't make this up.

Oh, and another!
In a feature that merges two user objects and all their data, there's a method to generate a unique ID. It concatenates 12 random numbers (one at a time, ofc) then checks the database to see if that id already exists. It tries this 20 times, and uses the first unique one... or falls through and uses its last attempt. This ofc leads to collisions, and those collisions are messy and require a db rollback to fix. gg. This was written by the "legendary" dev himself, replete with his signature single-letter variable names. I brought it up and he laughed it off, saying the collisions have been rare enough it doesn't really matter so he won't fix it.

Yep, it's garbage all the way down.