When 'Final' Means Nothing: How One Team Outsmarted a Rigid API With Malicious Compliance
If you’ve survived long enough in the world of software development, you know “final” is rarely, if ever, final. But what happens when one dev team’s blind adherence to “final” creates a roadblock so absurd that the only way through is, well… through the side door? Welcome to the wild world of malicious compliance, where bureaucracy meets creative coding, and neither leaves unscathed.
Today’s story comes courtesy of u/logan96, a seasoned programmer who faced the immovable object of backend stubbornness and responded with a little irresistible force of their own. The result? A lesson in software, office politics, and the universal truth that labeling anything “final” is basically daring the universe to make you update it.
The API From Bureaucratic Hell
Let’s set the stage. Picture a team of front-end developers eager to build a sleek UI, only to be handed a backend API that contains, as the OP describes, “nearly 0% of the data that Design said we needed to display.” Our heroes, filled with hope (or perhaps desperation), approach the backend keepers with a humble scroll of missing features—only to be told, “The comments period ended six months ago. What you have is the final version.”
As u/CoderJoe1 wryly observes, “Marking anything as ‘Final’ automatically dooms it to immediate updates.” Even OP admits, “That seems to be universally true, yeah.” And it’s not just this one project—another commenter, u/blind_ninja_guy, shares, “Anything that you actually needed to use for production was deprecated, anything management wanted you to use for production was not yet complete. As soon as something became production ready it was deprecated.” The finality of “final” is, as it turns out, a myth.
The Notes Field: Where Malicious Compliance Thrives
So what’s a resourceful team to do? Enter the “notes” field—a freeform text box meant, perhaps, for the occasional annotation but never for the critical data backbone of an entire application. In a move that would make any seasoned dev both cringe and cheer, the team decides to JSON-encode all their necessary data and stuff it into the notes field. As u/pborenstein quips, “Freeform, you say? User-definable? But who would ever design an API like that /s.”
It’s a workaround only a developer (or a mad scientist) could love, and it’s not without precedent. u/throwaway_0x90 admits, “I too, from time to time, have abused a freeform field to store Base64 encoded binary data and JSON. Sometimes this is much easier to do than fighting corporate bureaucracy.” Another commenter, u/rdrunner_74, reminisces about a similar XML-based hack, only to watch it buckle under the weight of full-table scans and rising row counts. If you’ve ever wondered how legacy systems become such eldritch horrors, here’s your answer.
Of course, this kind of “solution” is both ingenious and horrifying. As retired DBA u/Cottabus puts it: “I admire your coping skills, but eww.” Even OP concedes, “No, I absolutely agree.”
When Malicious Compliance Forces a Rethink
It didn’t take long for word of this creative compliance to reach the higher-ups. Suddenly, the stonewalling backend team found religion and reopened their “final” API for review, now eagerly seeking input from the front-end crew. Apparently, the thought of cramming all future data into a single, unstructured field was the one thing more terrifying than, you know, collaborating.
The community was quick to joke about the likely fallout. “The new update will just limit the number of characters on the notes field,” u/AgreeableReturn7 snarked, to which OP replied, “I’m very surprised that’s not what happened, honestly.” Others, like u/talex000, were ready with a Plan B: “Then you just zip json and base64 it.”
Yet, as u/technos’s war story reveals, these “solutions” often work… until they don’t. Performance tanks, search becomes a nightmare, and suddenly everyone is begging for the architectural redo that should have happened in the first place. As one commenter analogized, it’s like being forced to use a form for a completely different department—so you print your own mini-form and paste it inside the “notes” box.
Why Do Developers Guard Their Kingdoms?
One of the most intriguing threads running through the comments is the psychology of code ownership. u/IAmTheFirehawk wonders, “I really don’t get why developers are so protective about code they wrote. I mean, if this was some sort of personal project I’d understand… but for work projects? Nah, makes no sense.”
OP’s answer is telling: “This team, and the manager in particular, were really kind of stuck-up in relation to their importance… They just would not compromise or collaborate unless really forced to.” It’s a familiar dynamic in tech, where teams become territorial, not necessarily out of malice, but perhaps out of pride, inertia, or a misplaced sense of control.
Final Thoughts: The True Meaning of “Final”
In the end, this story is a microcosm of software development everywhere. Mark something as “final,” and it’s destined for change. Build something “temporary,” and it’ll live on for years. As u/booch observed, “Marking it as temporary/proof-of-concept automatically dooms it to be a final/production version.”
So what’s the moral? Maybe it’s that flexibility beats rigidity, or that collaboration trumps territoriality. Or maybe, just maybe, it’s that the “notes” field is the true MVP of legacy systems everywhere.
Have you ever had to hack your way around inflexible systems? Or witnessed “malicious compliance” in the wild? Share your stories in the comments below—because if there’s one thing every dev knows, it’s that the weirdest solutions make for the best tales.
Original Reddit Post: Use the API as provided? Ok.