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Gamasutra recently ran an article with a collection of anecdotes from game developers who had to employ some quick and dirty fixes to get their products to ship on time.
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tricks.php
"Back at [company X] — I think it was near the end of [the project] — we had an object in one of the levels that needed to be hidden. We didn't want to re-export the level and we did not use checksum names. So right smack in the middle of the engine code we had something like the following. The game shipped with this in: if( level == 10 && object == 56 ) {HideObject();} Maybe a year later, an artist using our engine came to us very frustrated about why an object in their level was not showing up after exporting to what resolved to level 10. I wonder why?"
So our question to you is how often are "non-standard" solutions deployed in your own work?
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The only time "hacks" are put into my code are when you have legacy systems that don't play friendly with newer systems. Hacks happen usually because of older hacks that as a developer I have to program around. Any original code or brand new development work is clean of hacks.
Don't miss the crazy workloads and deadlines of the game industry but I do have a soft spot for all the crazy hacks. These were things people used to joke and laugh about back when the industry were a little more laid back when PC was king etc. In this day and age of AAA, it just becomes incredibly stressful
The reverse; how often are standard solutions deployed in my work? Not very much; hack-a-licious code.
What? You mean people have projects with clean code without hacks due to time constraints? That's a fantasy world!
Ha! Great poll idea - I remember reading that article and thinking about all of the hacks I've had to do in the past, especially the first 5 years of my career when I worked in the advertising field where we had to work backwards from client due dates. Lately, fortunately, I haven't needed to do any hacks, in fact we have a team dedicated to just the opposite, cleaning up technical debt in our code bases.
i think a bit hacking for goodness is similar with 'white lies', what do you guys think?