So... About a month ago 2 interns started a project from scratch at my company. My boss gave them a project to follow as an example (more for the api and database side).

Wednesday they ended the internship and I've began to help fix the rest of the kinks that were left to be fixed. Friday we were finishing up the app and api to send to the client for tests. The database was created with 4 tables that were equal in structure... Imagine that you need a table for orders and they have status like pending, cancelled, finished and accepted. What they've done was they created 4 tables, one for each status....

Why the hell would you do this???

I'm guessing if they are interns they possible didn't know any different? Or maybe they thought 4 small tables are quicker to access than one big one?

Did you not think to ask them before they left?

Well I guess it's what you should expect when letting two interns without supervision on a project.
They needed supervision and advices.

@Jonnyforgotten they left Wednesday and we saw the problem Friday. I would ask them why they did what they did, but the thing is that myself finished my internship when they arrived (colleagues from my university, and it's more of a traineeship than internship 😐) and I think 2 weeks before they left, one of my colleagues at the company asked why they did.that and they said because that's how they were thought.

I had the same classes that they have for databases and I did not learn that.

Although you pointed out some relevant, well, points xp but it's more simple to have a status field in the table and change that field rather than creating and deleting objects everytime you want to.change status

What do you expect when they lack any real experience as well as no guidance from someone knowledgeable? I’m sure they did whatever they thought was best.

@zshh The thing is that I have the same level of experience as they have. The difference is that I had 3 months of traineeship before them. We studied the same subjects for 3 years for our degree in IT Engineering, I still don't understand how they thought 4 tables was better than one :x