In the beginning of Bojan's time in Dodoni, he wasn't empowered by Zakro's management because he worked on the project that Zakro wasn't involved in. It was a project originally developed by Patrik, person who was about to leave Dodoni and whom Bojan was hired to replace.

I am Zakro, your boss, and you should obey me...

Patrik seemed like a nice guy who obviously knew pretty much about programming and who was at the same time very social. He usually organized team coffee breaks by simply shouting: "OK, people. It's twelve o'clock. Let's get out of here for a cup of coffee." Two things he and Bojan definitely have in common are that he likes Dilbert and that he usually takes his watch off his hand while he is working. After Patrik left Dodoni, he found a job in one equally horrible champ firm where he quit after few months. "Third time lucky" rule also applies to Patrik because the third job he found was the right one. Short time after coming there he got promoted to development manager and up to this time he has probably forgotten about his traumatic experience in Dodoni computing.

Bojan didn't need much time to find out that there was a permanent hostility between Zakro and Patrik. This was because Patrik used every opportunity to show to Zakro how much he despises him and his incompetence. Of course, that pissed Zakro a lot. He was waiting for the smallest opportunity to humiliate Patrik and to show him who was the real authority in Dodoni. Finally he stroke lucky one day when Patrik overslept and missed the train to Dembelia, where he had to maintain his application on client's site. When Patrik came to office, Zakro put him in the middle of the room and in the front of the whole team shouted: "I am your boss, not Erich. I am the one who you should listen. I am sick of you constantly ignoring me. From now on you listen to what I say or you get your ass out of here, do you understand?" That incident obviously speeded up Patrik's decision to leave, but it wouldn't be fair to say that Zakro was the only reason Patrik left. He was also worn out by stupid project he had to work on and with equally stupid client's demands that resulted in that he had to work in Dembelia for several months and be at home only on weekends. The name of the project was REAL.

REAL - Bojan meets champion's style of programming

Project REAL was a typical example of one-man project, where one person developed the whole application and where no one else in the team had a clue what the project was all about and what its current status was. Patrik communicated directly with Erich and with the client, and Zakro's pride wasn't hurt because he was appointed a fictious controlling person, although it was obvious he didn't control anything. REAL was developed for big Dembelian real-estate agency to help their agents to work more efficiently. From the technical viewpoint it was a desktop application written in Visual Basic that used data from Access database. The version Patrik worked on for almost a year should have replaced older version written entirely in Access 2.0.

When Bojan opened REAL source code for the first time, he was horrified. The application was written as typical spaghetti code monolit and it violated all known rules of good design, architecture and coding conventions that Bojan knew about. Most of the code was inside form's event handlers that were in some cases hundreds of lines long. Database queries were hardcoded directly in those same event handlers, there were no data or business classes, instead of constants author used magic numbers and strings, comments were sporadic, complicated algorithms weren't documented at all and so on. To make things worse, many different parts of code looked exactly the same and it was obvious they were created by "copy-paste" method. REAL also had nothing that looked like technical documentation, if you don't count few pathetic pieces of paper that would be more usable if put in the bathroom. So, all in all, it was classical example of what many books on software development call "Maintenance nightmare product".

First questions that came to Bojan's mind, after he recovered from the shock of seeing that horror were: "How was possible to produce such an awful code? What happened to quality assurance, code reviews, did anybody besides Patrik take a look at that mess? What should I think about the firm where it is possible to write such a bad product without consequences?"
The only person that Bojan thought was able to stop the bad practices and establish quality in REAL was Zakro. "Why Zakro failed to do that?", Bojan kept asking himself.

When Bojan asked Patrik why he produced such ugly code, he answered that he had had no time to think about the quality because the delivery dates were unrealistic.  He didn't miss the opportunity to blame Erich for that and he said that it is normal for Erich to try to please the client and get the contract by promising unrealistic dates. "Initial estimate for REAL was three man-months and as you can see, it took me about a year to develop it and there is still work to be done. So that's it about the estimation in this company", Patrik added.

On the other hand, some Dodoni employees looked on the Patrik's project from different perspective. They called it "dream assignment" because it was solo project where you as a developer were your own boss and you set all the standards and there was nobody to disturb you. Even better, nobody knew what you were doing, so if you finished something in two hours, you could spend the rest of the day doing nothing and nobody would notice. Later Bojan learned that some of them envied Patrik because REAL was the only project in Dodoni that Zakro didn't have anything to do with. On one occasion one of them told to Bojan: "Pray to God that you got some project in C++. Zakro is too stupid to understand anything beyond Visual Basic so he won't bother you while you work on such project. It is really a blessing not having him behind your back, believe me."

REAL was scheduled to be finally delivered two months after Bojan arrived to Dodoni. It was considered a finished product, except few cosmetic changes that Bojan was supposed to implement. One year after, when he was still implementing some minor changes in REAL, he remembered that optimistic estimation. However, he wasn't angry because he realized long time ago that he shouldn't trust Erich's optimism, especially when it was about the delivery dates. He even liked working on REAL, because it required occasional business trips to Dembelia, which Bojan enjoyed because he had never been there before. It also allowed him from time to time to avoid Zakro's management, and from what he learned, not working with Zakro was better than any stress relief program.

REAL - tip of the iceberg

When later joined the team that was working on main Dodoni product, DAMP, Bojan realized that Patrik's style of programming he saw in REAL was de facto coding standard in Dodoni. DAMP code also violated all known rules of good programming and to make things worse, the project manager was Zakro. So, not just REAL or DAMP, but nearly all Dodoni products were deadly combination of spaghetti code, bad management, missing documentation and ignorance and stupidity in all aspects of work. Such a combination was a fatal poison that soon wiped out any sign of enthusiasm and optimism in many people who came to Dodoni. Once ambitious and willing to learn, after few months in Dodoni, they gave up and started looking for the smallest opportunity to quit and pursue professional satisfaction somewhere else. One of them was the only woman in Dodoni, Senka Lukavic.