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First.

That is REALLY quite cool the PICTURE of the wooden TABLE being used to accompany THIS ARTICLE!

Comment added after 8:00 am.

Just a glitch.

Looks like job security of their clerical staff is something they WANT compromised...

"Now confident, Nick approached Darlene with the cause of the discrepency - while the rules forbade it, the room reservation system permitted new reservations to be made by users after 8:00 in the morning for that day and the problem was not the result of a system gone haywire with preumably phantom room reservations."

Do the WTFs ever get spell-checked before they are submitted, or are these just glitches in the system?

Fixed! Forthwith, all TDWTF spell-checking will be 'crowd sourced'. The Internet is my new F7 key (thanks everybody in advance!) -MB

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

So, Darlene had a fit about a trivial problem at work roughly once per month? I wonder if there could be some kind of pattern here...

p.s. wtf does "vulputate" mean?

anonymous:

wtf does "vulputate" mean?

Wild (ahem) guess: to become a fox, or foxy? (Added later: The first several Google hits seem to be in Latin. Not gonna bother reading 'em. You're welcome.)

"Glitch". Rhymes with "bitch".

Wisdom of the blindman:
Automate 20% of someone's job and you are their hero. Automate 80% of someone's job and you are their nemesis.

Apparently, nobody had actually taken the time to explain any kind of solution as each time the reply from the IT office was that the new entries during working hours are to be discarded as "glitches" …without reservation.

I don't understand this sentence. Can somebody explain, please?

Dump her under the bus and get rewarded for it, if the company has some sort of official 'process improvement' program.

Run it through them and she's got a heck of a lot more justifying to do since she'll be doing it to a panel of people who exist solely to implement process improvement.

Guess who's job security they'll be looking at?

About every other month, Darlene appeared, threw a fit and left

So it's PMS?

skztr:

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

So, basically, you're saying the best IT workers are people who value showing off their skills and stroking their ego more than they value money. That sounds like academia to me. Something tells me most profs would be terrible I.T. workers...

Bappi:

Apparently, nobody had actually taken the time to explain any kind of solution as each time the reply from the IT office was that the new entries during working hours are to be discarded as "glitches" …without reservation.

I don't understand this sentence. Can somebody explain, please?

Hear hear! Can somebody rewrite it? Perhaps this time you could try some punctuation...

In a hurry this afternoon Mark?

Downfall:

skztr:

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

So, basically, you're saying the best IT workers are people who value showing off their skills and stroking their ego more than they value money. That sounds like academia to me. Something tells me most profs would be terrible I.T. workers...

Not at all how I interpreted that...and I've been there. I have it on my resume, I left a company because the solution I provided essentially rendered the crux my position obsolete. It was the talking point of every interview obtained with that resume, and it turned out to be a pretty valuable one.

If you can program yourself out of a job, you likely will not have too much trouble finding a better one. Not only will you have the resume point, you will also have a glowing recommendation from the employer. Now, how many interviews have you gone to where you could take a letter of recommendation from your CURRENT employer?

Trust me, it's not about ego over money here. It is about perfecting your trade to the point at which you become valuable not only to an employer, but to an entire industry.

So TRWTF is that the other IT guys just told her it was a "glitch" and to disregard any entries after 8 instead of either a.) explaining it to her or b.) fixing it to match policy?

Voodoo Coder:

Downfall:

skztr:

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

So, basically, you're saying the best IT workers are people who value showing off their skills and stroking their ego more than they value money. That sounds like academia to me. Something tells me most profs would be terrible I.T. workers...

Not at all how I interpreted that...and I've been there. I have it on my resume, I left a company because the solution I provided essentially rendered the crux my position obsolete. It was the talking point of every interview obtained with that resume, and it turned out to be a pretty valuable one.

If you can program yourself out of a job, you likely will not have too much trouble finding a better one. Not only will you have the resume point, you will also have a glowing recommendation from the employer. Now, how many interviews have you gone to where you could take a letter of recommendation from your CURRENT employer?

Trust me, it's not about ego over money here. It is about perfecting your trade to the point at which you become valuable not only to an employer, but to an entire industry.

I agree. There's an old saying that if you make yourself indispensible in your position, you also make yourself unpromotable.

Bappi:

Apparently, nobody had actually taken the time to explain any kind of solution as each time the reply from the IT office was that the new entries during working hours are to be discarded as "glitches" ...without reservation.

I don't understand this sentence. Can somebody explain, please?

My take on it: Nick was the first person from IT to offer a solution to the problem (which she rejected). Always before, the IT department just told her to delete (discard) the new room request entries, justifying the deletion by calling them "glitches", and to not honor their request to reserve the room (i.e., "without reservation").

Automating processes makes the world more efficient and means more for everyone. It's the right thing to do. Use your skills for good, not evil.

MrsPost:

Dump her under the bus and get rewarded for it, if the company has some sort of official 'process improvement' program.

Run it through them and she's got a heck of a lot more justifying to do since she'll be doing it to a panel of people who exist solely to implement process improvement.

Guess who's job security they'll be looking at?

Love to, but the transit system is on strike. One more count against them.

Downfall:

So, basically, you're saying the best IT workers are people who value showing off their skills and stroking their ego more than they value money. That sounds like academia to me. Something tells me most profs would be terrible I.T. workers...

I sometimes think of one of my sophomore CS professors, an arrogant egomaniac who got irritated when anyone in the classroom offered up any bit of knowledge he had not personally dispensed. I'd love to compare salaries with him now.

skztr:

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

Or you could program yourself out of a job - not tell anyone - then collect a salary for playing solitaire.

How exactly do you program yourself out of a job? Do you write software that writes software better than you do? because that would be awesome.

Alan:

How exactly do you program yourself out of a job? Do you write software that writes software better than you do? because that would be awesome.

I once wrote an application that had no bugs. My workload was much lighter for a week or two afterward. I was afraid I had programmed myself out of a job and they were getting ready to can me.

Now all of my software has a healthy number of bugs and I'm always busy. Problem solved!

Alan:

skztr:

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

Or you could program yourself out of a job - not tell anyone - then collect a salary for playing solitaire.

How exactly do you program yourself out of a job? Do you write software that writes software better than you do? because that would be awesome.

That's exactly what you do in an environment where your software is used in a proprietary system with a small number of use cases whose behavior is modified entirely by customer provided and easily parsed functional logic specifications.

I hope to be out of a job sometime next year. Maybe come back as a contractor for huge sums of money to make small upgrades and fix glitches in maintenance mode.

Mmmm... Glitches! Bitches!

Alan:

Or you could program yourself out of a job - not tell anyone - then collect a salary for playing solitaire.

How exactly do you program yourself out of a job? Do you write software that writes software better than you do? because that would be awesome.

That certainly is one way.

Or...

As I was, you are employed in a small non-tech firm who needs you to develop, support, and continuously customize a solution while providing desktop support and maintaining their single server...and you develop a program that needs very little support and can be customized by the user.

It's nothing revolutionary by any means, but showing them how they can save money by outsourcing their support positions, and obsoleting a programmer position...well, it helped open the door to future, better opportunities.

Reminds me of an inventory program I wrote for a curtain manufacturer years ago. The owners never understood how the bi-yearly physical inventory counts differed from the database's calculated counts. It couldn't be that the employees were stealing curtains because that was against the rules -- it had to be a glitch in the software! Eventually, the floor manager found the best solution was to 'adjust' the discrepancy reports before the owners ever saw them.

Funny how the discrepancies were always the most expensive curtains...

I want to program myself out of a job. I get too bored to stick around for too long, so instead I plan everything on how to make them less dependant upon me within 2 or so years. Once that is done, I move on to the next challenge!

Marc B:

Reminds me of an inventory program I wrote for a curtain manufacturer years ago. The owners never understood how the bi-yearly physical inventory counts differed from the database's calculated counts. It couldn't be that the employees were stealing curtains because that was against the rules -- it had to be a glitch in the software! Eventually, the floor manager found the best solution was to 'adjust' the discrepancy reports before the owners ever saw them.

Funny how the discrepancies were always the most expensive curtains...

Where is this place that employees can steal curtains and are they hiring?

Oh, so the glitch is that the paper in the file doesn't automatically update itself when a change is made?

Darlene is hot.

Jeb Bush:

Marc B:

Reminds me of an inventory program I wrote for a curtain manufacturer years ago. The owners never understood how the bi-yearly physical inventory counts differed from the database's calculated counts. It couldn't be that the employees were stealing curtains because that was against the rules -- it had to be a glitch in the software! Eventually, the floor manager found the best solution was to 'adjust' the discrepancy reports before the owners ever saw them.

Funny how the discrepancies were always the most expensive curtains...

Where is this place that employees can steal curtains and are they hiring?

I know you'll be amazed by this, but they went out of business two years ago.

Jeb Bush:

Where is this place that employees can steal curtains and are they hiring?

Don't go. When they get caught, it's curtains for them.

Done that a couple of times, and you know what?

I'm fuckin' tired. I'm sick of not getting severance or unemployment, and at this point every job is like every other fuckin' job, same shit different assholes.

At this point, I do what needs doing, with a level of craftsmanship that won't embarrass me, and I'll chime in with suggestions and recommendations as appropriate. But fuck me if I'm going to care any more than the company cares about me.

captcha: sagaciter

As a systems and network admin, I tell people that my job is to keep everything running perfectly 99% of the time. The other 1% is job security....

Nothing is more annoying than a user who wants you to *guess* what the problem is. Just tell me, bitch.

Hear hear! The bane of the industry are those who obfuscate their code, never document, and hide their processes in the name of protecting their job security.

In fact, I'm willing to wager that a sizable percentage of the CodeSOD's we see on this site are a direct result of "professionals" who put their job security above their job duties.

First result on GIS for 'pinstripe'

Hmmm... She can storm into my office whenever she wants! :)

Downfall:

skztr:

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

So, basically, you're saying the best IT workers are people who value showing off their skills and stroking their ego more than they value money. That sounds like academia to me. Something tells me most profs would be terrible I.T. workers...

As someone that works in higher ed, I'd say most profs would be terrible workers. If they didn't have tenure to hide behind, and had to work someplace with more performance standards than journal page count, they'd be on employement.

Alan:

How exactly do you program yourself out of a job? Do you write software that writes software better than you do? because that would be awesome.

I once had a coffee with a guy I knew vaguely and he offered me a job. He ran a research bureau, and he wanted a software developer to write PocketPC apps so that his data collectors could type up the results of interviews as they went rather than write something illegible on a clipboard. Based on his previous experience with outsourcing this, he thought it would be more economical to have someone in-house who just wrote these programs.

I explained code-data separation to him, then went home and specced out an estimate. It took me less than 3 months to write a one-off program with an XML file format and customise an open source XML editor to automatically use its schema. 3 days training one of his guys in XML and they've been using it happily for almost three years.

It's not actually a case of programming myself out of a job, but if I hadn't probed a bit at the very start to find out what the real requirements were it could have been.

Son of a glitch!

The university has a policy that you can't reserve a room after 8am on the day you need it?

I'm having trouble understanding who this policy benefits, because even with my low opinion of university staff I can't see why it should make any difference. Do they also chase people out of unreserved conference rooms? Or just encourage fights when two groups of people both have a last-minute need for some room space?

Perhaps the 8am policy is in there to favor the manual usage counting procedures? That sounds like university staff: introduce a policy which makes the real job of the university (education and research) harder in order to make the support staff's job easier. Because heaven forbid they'd have to calculate usage on the day _after_.

Mark:

I'm having trouble understanding who this policy benefits, because even with my low opinion of university staff I can't

It's probably because it would be complete and utter chaos if you didn't discourage people from procrastinating till the last minute to reserve their room. More so given that the person confirming the room reservation may not know that the room all of the way across campus has just been poached.

Time to let the DBAs carry firearms. Again.

Jim:

Nothing is more annoying than a user who wants you to *guess* what the problem is. Just tell me, bitch.

Hell, at least she gave him a clue (something different in the reports).

I get people who visit/call/email with "Your data is wrong!", and who then wait for my response, as if I can magically ascertain what the problem might be in one of the thousands or millions of records I might have supplied to them at some point in the past. (Assuming, or course that it even came from me in the first place: occasionally I get people who complain about errors in other people's data).

I'm often inclined to say something flip like "Thanks for the update" and then ignore them, but you know that they're just spoiling for a fight.

bramster:

MrsPost:

Dump her under the bus and get rewarded for it, if the company has some sort of official 'process improvement' program.

Run it through them and she's got a heck of a lot more justifying to do since she'll be doing it to a panel of people who exist solely to implement process improvement.

Guess who's job security they'll be looking at?

Love to, but the transit system is on strike. One more count against them.

http://www.fireottawabusdrivers.com/

Me:

Downfall:

skztr:

The only good I.T. worker is one who doesn't care about anyone's job security, even his own.

Program yourself out of a job, or you're not doing it right.

So, basically, you're saying the best IT workers are people who value showing off their skills and stroking their ego more than they value money. That sounds like academia to me. Something tells me most profs would be terrible I.T. workers...

As someone that works in higher ed, I'd say most profs would be terrible workers. If they didn't have tenure to hide behind, and had to work someplace with more performance standards than journal page count, they'd be on employement.

He who can, does. He who can't, teaches.
Those who can, but teach nonetheless, eventually find that they no longer can.

I don't know about CS professors, but most engineering professors spend more time "doing" than teaching. And "doing" is often commercially- or military-funded research that can't be done by anyone else. People always seem to forget the research aspect of professorship when deriding academia.

Sokel:

He who can, does. He who can't, teaches.
Those who can, but teach nonetheless, eventually find that they no longer can.

I lectured for a while when I was finishing off my doctorate, I often heard a variation of the above:

Those who can, do.
Those who can't, teach.
Those who can't teach, lecture.

I had no idea how much fun life is without professors and bloody students. When I exited academia and entered the Real World of Commerce (TM) it was amazing to ask a question and get an answer back in less than a month! (And a correct answer to boot.)

I recently considered going back to do another degree in something else... Then realised it would only be a matter of time before the stress of not being able to get anything done would send me postal. Any further education will have to be self taught or commercial in nature.

CAPCHA: populus (With but a single additional 'o' - a game I almost played to the point of failing my first degree, man I loved building a bridge under one of those crusader knight chaps as he went to wade though the 'enemy' heretic peoples.)