The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Analyze This

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2016-06-29

When asked to choose among several possible tools to do a job, qualified technical people look at the manual and test to see if the tool actually does what they need it to do. Is it reasonably configurable? Must it have root privilege to launch, or can it be installed as your application login id? Smarter folks will do a load test to see if it will scale beyond a handful of records and work with the expected volumes of data. And all of this will be combined to form an informed opinion as to whether the tool is appropriate for the task at hand.

High Level Managers have a different approach. They are too busy to deal with mere technical details.

34 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-07

Coming of Age

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2016-06-15

When you discover the truth about Santa and the Easter Bunny, you die a little inside as you leave some innocence behind and begin to grow up.

When you get your first pay check at your first real job and discover that the government gets the first bite, you get a little disenchanted as you grow up.

50 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-23

Patchwork

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2016-06-06

Most technical folks can recognize a developmestuction environment when they encounter one. The less fortunate among us have had one inflicted upon us. However, the one thing they all seem to have in common is that people simply make changes directly in production. I’ve encountered a place that takes the concept to a Whole New Level O’ WTF™.

The company is a huge international conglomerate with regional offices on 5 continents, spread fairly evenly around the globe. The team for this particular project has several folks (developers, testers, QA, UAT and prod support) in each of the locations. Each region is mostly a self-contained installation of servers, databases and end users, but just to make it interesting, some of the data and messaging is shared across regions. Each region runs the normal business hours in its own time zone. As such, at any given time, one region is always doing intra-day processing, one is always in night time quiet-mode, and the other three are in various stages of ramp up, ramp down, or light traffic.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-22