Comment On 6 to 8 Weeks If You're Lucky

Why, why, why do people who are this stupid get to process 3 million dollars of orders a month while I sit around leeching off the state because no one will employ me?

yesssss

I work in fulfillment for Large Internet Retailer. Good to know things could be worse.

Because, businesses do not want smart people. They want subservient people who will do what they tell them to do.

If businesses hired smart people, the managers would be threatened by it (since THEIR managers would say "why is someone below you smarter than you?"), and the people who fill out excel sheets all day with their neat little projections would have their estimates thrown off.

/too bitter?
//nah.

Quite simply, because there are relatively few people that can evaluate the business need, write a proposal that shows the benefits of, well, automated processes, and follow through to develop it on budget.

It is tough for administrators to see that there is a better way to do what they are doing, because what they are doing is (barely) working.

Wow... we do more than $3 mil per month here, and everything's automated - the website is run from a database, orders are processed automatically, the only manual part is the guy putting the items in a box and slapping a label on it (preprinted!).

Of course, I built all that crap, so before I did, everything was a manual process on the order of this article. Thank God for automation!

Let's all order something and give fake credit card information. Then, when they call, give them fake info again.
It'll get them in an infinite loop. With enough people, we can easily DDoS their services.
Or just order a product not in local stores...

Btw, I want that damned picture ;-).

Let's all order something and give fake credit card information. Then, when they call, give them fake info again.
It'll get them in an infinite loop. With enough people, we can easily DDoS their services.
Or just order a product not in local stores...

Btw, I want that damned picture ;-).

3 mil a month + all manual data entry = how many f**k ups?

Infinite loops are great -- out of stock at the local store -- > check stock at local store

RON:

Because, businesses do not want smart people. They want subservient people who will do what they tell them to do.

If businesses hired smart people, the managers would be threatened by it (since THEIR managers would say "why is someone below you smarter than you?"), and the people who fill out excel sheets all day with their neat little projections would have their estimates thrown off.

/too bitter?
//nah.

Regretfully this sounds far to close to the truth. Ever been called "over-qualified"? I got into the habit of intentionally getting a few things wrong just so the interviewers have something they can teach me and they get to see how well I "take criticism."

<sarcasm>
It's brilliant. To defend the company, how else can the IT workers be kept busy? If it was all automatic, the company would have to fire everyone and that wouldn't look good in the community.
</sarcasm>

Are you sure you don't have a picture?

Evo:

Let's all order something and give fake credit card information. Then, when they call, give them fake info again.
It'll get them in an infinite loop. With enough people, we can easily DDoS their services.
Or just order a product not in local stores...

Btw, I want that damned picture ;-).

I'd do this not to DDoS their system, but rather to get Yvonne to call me on a regular basis, she's obviously legal enough to work.

That can't be real... I mean, I've seen some INSANE stuff on this site but this one, just wow. My brain hurts just thinking of this article....

Wow... I know there have been plenty of really, really bad stories on this website, and I'm quite partial to the CodeSODs, but for me, this one is one of the best. The sheer lunacy of a company that does this being so successful! If they're processing $3m per month of orders, how much do you think their profit margin would be increased by scrapping the small army of Yvonnes they have working for them? Not that I want her to lose her job. I second the poster who was wondering why he can't get employed yet this crap happens...

Hmm.

At least they have a working method for taking orders and making money. That's pretty important, even if it isn't optimised. Data entry person is cheap. Faxes and so on are a hassle, thus hopefully they're selling large-value items.

However not having the developers actually develop a database for products and orders in order to optimise the process is enough to send you to the (captcha) sanitarium. 5 people to maintain a website manually is not cheap. You can get off the shelf systems that do everything, and tweak it to work within your website... or anyone competant can design and write one in short order.

You're missing the part where she takes a picture of the fax of a picture of the screenshot that Yahoo sent, then scans it into her computer, prints it out, and then enters the customer information.

i guess something called "IT" never got here.... no wonder why the IT demand is so high... is this corp on the fourth world!?



captcha: tacos (mmm...would it be possible to add french fries and extra large coke with that?)

Say it with me- as-uh-nahyn, asinine.

This is so stupid it's almost unfathomable! At least at my job it's only difficult to get them to automate the running of multiple automated tasks (so some of my work is done, I just have to write an 'unofficial' script to automate the piping actions).

J:

Infinite loops are great -- out of stock at the local store -- > check stock at local store

I think that should be "check stock at a DIFFERENT local store" in the case of repeated searches, which Jake hinted at in the article.

Anyhow, this reminds me of a lot of online stores back in the mid-90's that did online price/availability updates "by hand" with no database. Order something that's marked "in stock," only to find out a week later that it's been out of stock for months and they probably won't ever get any more in.

Saladin:

J:

Infinite loops are great -- out of stock at the local store -- > check stock at local store

I think that should be "check stock at a DIFFERENT local store" in the case of repeated searches, which Jake hinted at in the article.

Actually, the flowchart says "Search local stores", which means that Yvonne searches ALL local stores every time through the loop. So there aren't any different local stores.

batasrki:

<sarcasm>
It's brilliant. To defend the company, how else can the IT workers be kept busy? If it was all automatic, the company would have to fire everyone and that wouldn't look good in the community.
</sarcasm>

I worked somewhere that used that actual excuse. The process was cutting and pasting from Word docs into XML files that were processed through Xerces to generate the final static HTML for the site.
They were terrified of switching to a CMS. All their XLST skills would be useless.

Bill Waite:

Saladin:

J:

Infinite loops are great -- out of stock at the local store -- > check stock at local store

I think that should be "check stock at a DIFFERENT local store" in the case of repeated searches, which Jake hinted at in the article.

Actually, the flowchart says "Search local stores", which means that Yvonne searches ALL local stores every time through the loop. So there aren't any different local stores.

Still not an infintite loop. You are are assuming a single-threaded system, where nothing could have updated local store's stock in the meantime

Addendum (2007-03-20 15:52):
Of course, this is still potentially an infinite loop if the local stores have ceased selling the product, but as this story is third-hand and the business still exists, I think it's safe to assume this possibility has been covered.

And just to get it out of the way, no, I don't have any pictures of her. Perverts.

Wait a minute--this is obviously an adult woman. So it's now perverted for an adult male to be interested in a picture of an adult female?

Jojosh_the_Pi:

And just to get it out of the way, no, I don't have any pictures of her. Perverts.

Wait a minute--this is obviously an adult woman. So it's now perverted for an adult male to be interested in a picture of an adult female?

You are only supposed to be interested in an adult of the opposite gender only after you are married, any time before that is a perversion of morality.

Of course I don't recall the requirement that says you have to be married to each other.

You had me in total understanding... until you said they have no database.

Which changed this from:
a semi-acceptable-SOP-WTF, to a no-you-got-yourself-a-real-how-do-you-even-make-a-profit-WTF

I got into programming to rid the world of this kind of thing.

Oh the manularity! It makes me itch.

It makes me really enjoy the commercials on TV that talk about how having one single database means that you can get to everything and solve everything rather than having 12 different systems that don't talk to each other.

Can you send me an email about what company this is? I do database work for a living! :)

This is actually my niche (order management software) and you'd be surprised how backwards some companies' processes are. We run into a fair number of new customers like the OP. I'm convinced some people keep their bosses in the dark about software like ours because, as teeth-gratingly obtuse as this process sounds - hey, job security.

Man, that post is just brilliant, and you wouldn't believe that I have just dealt with an online merchant that seems to use that same flowchart ;)

I live in Brazil and I have ordered an inkjet printer with this merchant two weeks ago. It arrived just yesterday. Reading that flowchart made me think "yeah, <this merchant> also has its e-commerce system set up just like that".

It is such a relief to know that I am not alone :D

I think we should collate a list of "WTF Patterns", because they all end up in one category or another.


This one, for example, would be the "Not enough resources to make it better" pattern. I'm sure we've all worked for a company that uses this before.

Formal Definition:
The company has more work to accomplish than there are workers to accomplish it, so it continues to build up on its existing infrastructure by adding things here and there on a need basis only, and never planning further than the current task at hand.

Whenever someone brings up the idea of fixing the problem, the higher-ups run some calculations and see that a full refactoring will end up costing an extraordinary amount of money, and possibly downtime as well. Since management historically thinks only as far as the next quarter, they cannot possibly see the point of spending all this money on a system that will gain them nothing, and reject it.

A subcase occurs when managers realise that in the restructuring, they may lose their departments due to automation, and reject the solution on that reason.

So, inevitably, the company grows until it reaches a point where something breaks and they have to fix it, a new competitor arrives and stomps them into oblivion for being so inefficient, or everything just grinds to a halt and the company simply cannot grow any larger, no matter how many people they add.



This is the same exact reason why my company's premier enterprise app now has over 700 columns in one table. Every time I try bringing up the topic of fixing it (and the 15 years of legacy code that is built on top of the table), I'm met with "It works now, doesn't it? Then why would we waste all this money and downtime trying to fix it?".

/lesigh.

How do people like this stay in business? Somewhere in the market there must be some more efficient competitor who can totally undercut their shipping window and prices and drive them into well deserved bankruptcy.

Off-topic:

U.S. computer scientist and FORTRAN developer John W. Backus dead at 82

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10631/1066/

Let's observe one minute of silence...

wHat dOes post 9/11 have anything to do with sending knives in the post?

Do these appliances run on kerosene? Have their customers discovered the wonders of electricity yet. Do they know that Lindberg made it?

Here are some possible solutions to the technical problem presented here...

http://images.google.com/images?hl=en&q=yvonne&gbv=2

It's much the same here where I work, except our shipping is technically owned and run by a different company. That means that their process for getting stuff shipped is almost completely opaque to all but a few Holy Ones who have positions in both the main, parent company and the warehouse company. What our Web site's shopping cart system (which is a mess and a half in and of itself) does is queue orders in a Web interface which someone at this other company then handles by manually entering orders into some ancient, crufted system that the inventory people use to deliver orders.

We, the parent company, are wholly dependent on those in this subsidiary company to get product moving out the doors all over the world. If we piss people off over there, stuff doesn't move and it ends up putting us in a bad spot. The inertia involved in improving something that touches on both companies is that of not one but two different management chains and organizational structures.

Credit card information? All handled manually. Order tracking? Never heard of it. And, yes, many times I have heard the excuse that we can't fix things up and improve them because we would have to fire some number of people whose jobs consist of manual data entry.

I prefer to hope that this is the picture of Yvonne we're all hoping for (not really the one from the article, just a GIS).

http://www.itv.rwth-aachen.de/Deutsch/Mitarbeiter/Yvonne.Lichtenfeld/yvonne.lichtenfeld.jpg

KattMan:

RON:

Because, businesses do not want smart people. They want subservient people who will do what they tell them to do.
..

.. I got into the habit of intentionally getting a few things wrong just so the interviewers have something they can teach me and they get to see how well I "take criticism."

You habitually take interviews? I agree though. If an underling was better and smarter, then they should be paid higher. That's just not on.

Strangely, I find myself reporting directly to the CEO, though I'm in IT, and we have an IT manager, and it's not me. (IT manager is pretty good, too - he was recruited as my offsider, and has taken on most vendor accounts, plus supervising our junior techs.)

I don't see what the WTF is; at no point is the order photographed on a wooden table.

I used to work for a big six accounting/professional services firm that merged with another big six accounting/professional services firm in the late '90s. The other firm's time/expense processing system went like this...

1) Employee enters time sheet or expense report into a desktop app.
2) The desktop app generates a data file which is automatically attached to an email message addresses to a special mailbox.

So far this is reasonable. Remember that the consultants and accountants were frequently on the road. At any given time over half the workforce might be traveling so this all had to work seamlessly in an occasionally connected environment.

3) At the main IT center, the time and expense reports were received.

4) They were *re-keyed* into another system.

5) Reports were generated that allowed billing to take place.

Yes, data driving 50 million dollars of revenue a month was being re-keyed.

My team finally got to fix this mess. Another member of my team was pretty good at integrating C and Lotus Notes servers, so she wrote a gateway to use the data in the email to drive calls to Oracle. I then wrote a bunch of PL/SQL to process the data directly into our financial systems. No more re-keying, plus the user got a receipt in their email box detailing any rejected charges within a few minutes of transmitting, or at worst the next time they replicated their email.

Romeo:

Off-topic:

U.S. computer scientist and FORTRAN developer John W. Backus dead at 82

http://www.itwire.com.au/content/view/10631/1066/

Let's observe one minute of silence...

Was he buried face down, nine edge first?

ZoFreX:

Why, why, why do people who are this stupid get to process 3 million dollars of orders a month while I sit around leeching off the state because no one will employ me?

This should be an inspiring story. There a lots of idiots out there, and institutional idiocy is on an entirely different level altogether.

Knowing this should give you confidence to find a weak market and engineer better business processes.

isn't there supposed to be a step where the order is placed on a wooden table, photographed, emailed, then manually retyped?

Hah! I work at a major gov't agency (three letters; guess which) where our timekeeping works like this:

1.)User runs a timekeeping app over TedXtend, a UNIX-on-Windows remoting service
2.)User enters time in/out and leave data
3.)App validates data
4.)User prints barcoded timesheet, initials, gets management signoff
5.)Timekeeper totally ignores barcode and keys in all fields from every time sheet, from every user, every two weeks, by hand.


I've asked why they don't just use the Unix program's data... it's not kept in a format they can use.

Oh, and the step (6) I didn't mention is when the timekeeper yells at everybody to get their timesheet in before the covered period even ends because it takes so long to get everybody into the system ;-)

The kTrue WTF here is the "Developers" are maintaining the without a database instead of coding the database then something that keeps Yvonne off suicide watch.

bob the dingo:

You're missing the part where she takes a picture of the fax of a picture of the screenshot that Yahoo sent, then scans it into her computer, prints it out, and then enters the customer information.

All on a wooden table.

Douglas:

wHat dOes post 9/11 have anything to do with sending knives in the post?

Nothing directly - just the general trend to prevent our kids from doing anything remotely dangerous (and thus, interesting). No company would *dream* of giving away knives - some kid would do something dumb, and the company would get blamed for enabling it.

It's scary how badly we're disabling our kids today.

How can Yahoo simply fax it?

They have to print it out, place it on a wooden table, take a photo with an analog camera, ship the film to an 1-hour photo shop, scan the image back in, wrap it in a PDF (or powerpoint), send it to another department, which prints it out and ships it to the company, each sheet of paper in a single XXL parcel.