Jacob S. apparently wandered away from the line and wasn't even in the right city anymore.
"Welcome aboard, Colin!" Colin M. gave his boss a firm handshake, excited about his first day on the job. He'd be a member of the team that worked on an application that ran on a managed information appliance. "I'll set you up with Mike, who can show you the ropes."
Colin's boss turned him over to Mike, who started describing the system architecture immediately. "So here's what we've got," he began. "The core is the email processing module. It takes in an email, logs a little information, and stores attachments in the file system. Easy, right?" Mike gave him a little more background, but reasoned that Colin should be able to figure it out.
"I'm as much a fan of Java Generics as the next guy," writes Jim Bethancourt, "why bother with writing all that type-specific code for common collections (or - gasp - losing type safety) when one can simply go HashMap<String, SomeObject>."
"However, after working on several of my predecessor's projects, I think it's pretty clear that liked generics, too. But I'm gonna go ahead and say that he liked them juuuuuust a bit too much. This was one of way-too-many lines in the variable definition section of some (you guessed it) generic class...
Let's All Reinvent the Wheel... Again (from K.D.)
I was interviewing candidates for a junior web application development position. The candidate had, so far, seemed very knowledgeable and more than met the requirements of the position. I had, in fact, almost made my decision that I would make Joe an offer, but I had to ask just one more question.
"I have this feeling most of the day while I'm on support," writes M, "but I've never thought to try telling people."
Where are my keys? Cam S. had checked under every couch cushion, in every jacket pocket, under every bed, everywhere for his keys. While checking the kitchen counter for the third time, he glanced at the oven clock. 8:35. Even if the skies had opened up right that minute and his keys descended on a golden platter, he'd still be at least ten minutes late for work.
It was then that he peeked in the garage and beheld a beautiful sight — his keys sitting on the drivers' seat of his truck. If he drove unreasonably, dangerously fast, he might still be able to get to work on time! Cam breathed a sigh of relief when he saw the keys in his truck. His locked truck. Damn it! The only other key was with his wife, who had left for work a while ago. It was clear that it just wasn't in the stars for Cam to go to work that day.
"Not too long ago," Jess writes, "I adopted an application that needed 'a rather minor change' to its functionality. Naturally, when I started, the project owner had no idea what file or directory the functionality was in, so he gave me access to the server and sent me off. After wading through a number of oddly named directories trying to find where the site was even located, I finally found the index file I had hoped would set me in the right direction."
"Of course, it didn't. After twenty minutes of jumping from page to page to page, I realized that I'd simply have to grep the entire application: a gig or so of content with tens of thousands of files within hundreds of directories. After nothing turned up, I quickly realized that most of the files had completely meaningless extensions: .html files had lots of PHP, .php4 files had PHP5, and .php files rarely had any PHP.
Tsk, tsk. After all the requests to plz email me teh codez, and the Daily WTF community's failure to recognize student initiative, "MonkeyCode" posted a similar story in the sidebar...
We're looking for some new developers on our team here at our online travel reservation startup. London being London at the moment, it's proving hard to get good quality candidates to actually show up for an interview. Little did we know how bad the quality can be at times.
Originally posted by "DrillSgtK"...
In the late 90’s, I worked for a small, “start-up/spin-off” dot com company. We were originally The University’s distant learning department, but had been re-constituted as a for-profit company, owned by The University to service The University. A year and a half old, the company had grown from six people working out of a trailer on campus to a seventy-five person operation with three offices and large co-location site in a data center. The IT staff, however, remained the same size: three of us.
