This editorial was originally published on Mar 20, 2014. It is being re-published as Steve is out of town.

At times I am rather dismayed by the quality of code I see written today. I'm not sure it's worse than the poor code compiled early in my career, but there are so many more people writing code in our industry that it seems there is more and more poorly written code.

We suffer from the chef problem in techology. As more companies look to become software companies, they need to hire more software people. To meet the staffing demand, more and more marginally skilled people will be chosen, and software quality goes down.

Part of what we do here is to try and educate the SQL Server professionals on how to become better at their jobs. That's really the core mission that started SQLServerCentral and continues today thanks to the belief in that mission by Red Gate Software. As we look to do that, we want to bring to light the things that aren't good ideas and can cause problems.

What common mistakes do you see T-SQL developers making?

The question this week is based on a post by the talented Doug Lane, who wrote about the top three mistakes T-SQL developers make. Doug has a good list, and I'd urge you to read it, along with some sage advice from Brad McGeHee. However I'm sure many of you see different common issues in your own work.

What things need to be fixed later? What code regularly causes performance issues? The more specific problems that you can share, along with their solutions, the more you might help another developer build better code in the future.