The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Best of 2015: The A(nti)-Team

by snoofle in Best of… on 2015-12-31

Building a good, healthy team environment is hard. In this story, they just don't bother. --Remy

In the 1980’s, there was a TV show called The A-Team. There was the scrounger, who could scam anyone out of anything. He would make promises that were sort of true to get what he wanted (sound like marketing?) There was the tough guy who could intimidate anyone into doing anything. He knew how to get things done, but underneath it all, was a nice guy. There was the leader, who could always come up with a plan to save the day. And there was the one guy who was a little crazy (the good kind of crazy), but who you could count on in a pinch. There was also the occasional outside helper who would run interference and recon. This was a group of folks who worked as a well-oiled machine to get the job done. Failure was not an option! They were a team!

The A-Team never filed a project methodology document. No wonder they were wanted criminals.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2016-01-08

Best of 2015: Tis' the Season

by Ellis Morning in Best of… on 2015-12-30

We just finished the holiday season, but it's not too long ago that we were wrapped up in a different kind of season: Hunting Season As commenter RFoxmich pointed out: this might be the first 0pt. "Buck". --Remy

12 comments - Last comment @ 2019-02-21

Best of 2015: Once You Eliminate the Impossible…

by Dan J. in Best of… on 2015-12-29

This article, from April had a problem, so they decided to use XML. Now they have An error occurred while parsing EntityName. Line 7, position 32. -- Remy

Once you eliminate the impossible…

20 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-03

Best of 2015: To Spite Your Face…

by Remy Porter in Best of… on 2015-12-28

This article, from February had me cringing even as I reread it- and I wrote it! I've had the misfortune of working on a number of projects that failed because of people like Brandon making sure they failed. --Remy

“I’ve got a gig for you,” said the recruiter.

Clive, like many freelancers, weighed the contents of his bank account versus the daily rate he was promised, and decided that any gig was for him under those conditions. This one sounded mostly okay; an insurance company needed a new software package that would help them leap through some regulatory hoops. As a bonus, they wanted someone who could teach their devs the latest tools and techniques… like source control.

1 comments - Last comment @ 2019-10-01

Classic WTF: Holiday Smorgasbord

by Alex Papadimoulis in Coded Smorgasbord on 2015-12-25

Your Christmas present this year is a pile of WTFs from back in 2005. A veritable holiday smorgasbord. This post wouldn't be here if it didn't exist. --Remy

It's been a while since I've done a smorgasbord post, so here goes ...

38 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-04

The PM Who Stole Christmas

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2015-12-24

It’s Christmas Eve, and that means we’re taking a little break from writing new articles. Starting next week, we’ll re-run all of the best articles of this year.

For today, though, while I was working on The Glitch Who Stole Christmas, I got a bit inspired, and maybe a bit carried away.
Instead of our usual fare, here’s something a little… different.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-25

The Glitch Who Stole Christmas

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2015-12-23

Every Who down in Whoville like Christmas a lot…
But the Bug, who lived just North of Whoville, did not!

Peter L sat on his recliner, wireless keyboard and mouse balanced on his lap, and watched Jebediah Kerman burn up on re-entry. It was “Cyber Monday”, also known as “look, the consumer didn’t buy enough stuff on ‘Black Friday’, so please buy more stuff!”

77 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-24

The Apple Genius

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-22

Apple refers to their in-store technicians as “geniuses”. Everyone on Earth knows that it’s nothing more than cute marketing and is a meaningless title.

Well, almost everyone. Derick worked for a company where the CIO worked at Apple’s HQ at some point. Said CIO was quite proud of this achievement, and made sure everyone knew it. He wasn’t happy that his new startup had decided to use C#, but it was okay: he was ready to reinvent core pieces of the .NET framework to avoid having to deal with whatever bombs Microsoft had snuck in.

58 comments - Last comment @ 2016-01-07

The Machine

by Maciej Stachowski in Feature Articles on 2015-12-21

I shouldn't have taken that call, I thought, looking down the dark, endless staircase.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2022-03-17

Exactly What I was Looking For

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2015-12-18

Adrian K. wrote, "Why yes, Apple Developer Forum, that is EXACTLY what I meant!"

17 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-19

The Returned Value

by Remy Porter in Representative Line on 2015-12-17

Wilson Silva was looking through some production code, and found this representative line. This particular block of Ruby code was written by someone who claimed to have “lots of programming experience”. One must wonder what that experience was.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2017-07-23

The Excel Expert

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2015-12-16

Ishai bore the unenviable, oft-cursed title of Microsoft Support Engineer. Just about every user who ended up in his call queue was peeved from the start, having navigated half a dozen phone menu options and being stuck on hold for interminable wait times. It didn’t make for a productive support experience.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2023-01-04

Leaving an Honest Comment

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-15

Apo’s workplace just recently migrated their code into source control. They have eight years of code that’s been written and maintained by developers using a network share as their central repository.

// Special treatment for Attribute "weight unit"
// Needs to be mapped to more readable values for display because SAP is using some ISO codes that are not understandable
// by normal users. Hence, if we encounter this attribute, we map it to resemble an easier understandable unit
// Yes, this is all hardcoded, yes "one" should not do that
// Please redirect any complaints to the peeps who do budgeting and the customer who is not paying to do this properly
if (idAttribute_ == 18500) {
        if (textblock_ == "KGM") {
                textblock_ = "KG";
        }
        if (textblock_ == "MGM") {
                textblock_ = "MG";
        }
        if (textblock_ == "GRM") {
                textblock_ = "G";
        }
}

97 comments - Last comment @ 2016-01-06

Secure Portfolio

by Jane Bailey in Tales from the Interview on 2015-12-14

"Heeey, Sean ..." Aisha's tone was cloying as she poked her head around the divider of Sean's cube, still seated on her desk chair.

96 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-28

Flipping Burgers at Google

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2015-12-11

"For some, Google interview questions are getting more obscure," writes Ernie, "but for those of us who worked for years in fast food, all that toiling might pay off."

16 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-11

Awk-ward Error Checking

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2015-12-10

Emma W. was hired on by BerkTech’s QA department in preparation for a major code rewrite. A Russian company had purchased a thousand copies of BerkTech’s emponymous software package, but as it only supported English, it would require a substantial localization project to support Russian.

After Emma started, it didn’t take long for her to notice some common patterns in her unit tests.

74 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-14

Collated Performance

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-09

Eliza had a co-worker who had a problem. There were users with names like “René”. Other users, using standard keyboards, wanted to search for “René”, but couldn’t be bothered to figure out how to type that accent, so they just searched for “Rene”.

The co-worker came up with this solution:

16 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-10

Puppet Labs Sponsors 2016 and Launches a New Tool!

by Remy Porter in Announcements on 2015-12-08

Here at TDWTF, we’re happy to announce that Puppet Labs have renewed their sponsorship of TDWTF.

DevOps and infrastructure automation are at that critical cusp, where everyone’s talking about the buzzword, and everyone knows that it’s important, but most people don’t know exactly what it means to “do DevOps”. The tools we use to build infrastructure and deploy applications are changing fast, and the complexity is increasing: and complexity means more opportunities for WTFs.

10 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-12

Safe-ty First

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2015-12-08

Connor was a Highly-Paid Consultant who dealt with data security and audits, making sure companies’ secrets were irretrievable by enemies, competitors, and unauthorized employees alike.

He got an assignment to work with GrocerSoft, a mid-sized company which developed software mostly used by small, independent grocery stores across the nation. They’d just picked up a new client, a chain of medium-sized grocery stores with a paranoid board of directors who imagined all sorts of competitors trying to steal their Top Secret grocery inventory suppliers. As part of the new agreement, GrocerSoft’s sales team had promised annual security audits of GrocerSoft’s data.

77 comments - Last comment @ 2016-01-15

Elliptical Curveball

by Phil Pennock in CodeSOD on 2015-12-07

Why is it that you hear people saying, “don’t roll your own crypto”? It can’t be that bad, right? I mean, if the code gives the correct outputs when given the correct inputs?

Everything in cryptography depends upon “high quality” random numbers, and lots of them. People get into semi-informed flamewars about what “entropy” means, government agencies sneak backdoors into algorithms, performance matters, secrecy matters, and unpredictability matters. The standard which defines four randomness generators is NIST Special Publication 800–90. One of the four raised suspicions because it (Dual_EC_DRBG) was three times slower than any of the others.

38 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-28

Online Shopping Magic

by Mark Bowytz in Error'd on 2015-12-04

"Wow! Every time I tapped 'See more products', the number more than doubled," writes Stephanie F.

17 comments - Last comment @ 2018-03-03

Hang On…

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2015-12-02

Once upon a time, there was a small logistics company that did most of their software development in house. In the early 2000s, they decided to get ahead of the curve, and started building software to work on mobile devices. At the time, it was risky and uncertain, but over the next few decades, the idea of using commodity mobile phones to run their warehouse management software saved the company piles of money.

They grew so big that they cut the company into two parts- Inilogic, the big giant logistics company, and Initech, which made their mobile phone software. In the split, some developers went to Initech, while a few- like Mr. A- stayed with Inilogic.

37 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-04

A Cable Outage

by Maciej Stachowski in Feature Articles on 2015-12-01

New Year's Eve is a wonderful day. Not only a time of rejoicing—meeting and partying with friends and strangers alike to celebrate making it through yet another year—but also a time of change. Between new resolutions and yesteryear's memoirs, it's the best moment to move our lives in a different, exciting, and surprising direction.

15 comments - Last comment @ 2015-12-04

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