Runaway abstraction
An erstwhile colleague insisted on using that half-assed entity framework the SQL Server team was pushing in competition with LINQ.
Now he’s gone and I’m left with interminable layer upon layer of code that doesn’t actually do anything. It’s worse than COBOL!
This is a situation not dissimilar to what happens when people read Design Patterns and get religion. Older, more seasoned programmers recognise DP as simply a formal language for what expert programmers did, or intend to do.
Greener programmers get carried away and treat the use of design patterns as an objective in its own right. This always ends in tears, with stilted code that’s unmaintainable because it doesn’t speak of purpose.
The thing that gets my goat is that the mere existence of the web service neatly splits things into layers. Further layering adds nothing and makes the code hard to read.