The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Upgrade

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2015-03-31

James stood on the precipice of a significant upgrade to his company’s reporting capabilities. Purchasing had cut a deal with the vendor ÜberWarehouse to upgrade their warehouse inventory tracking system from a basic .NET application with limited functionality to a full-blown data warehousing system. He jokingly called it the “Warehousing the Warehouse Project”. He was the only one who found it funny.

ÜberWarehouse wasn’t about to give that upgrade away for free, though. They sent James an invoice that could have easily filled his Yoda piggy bank with all the change from the nickel-and-diming contained within. The total of the invoice was significantly over the budget of the project, and that was a problem. Of particular interest was something ÜberWarehouse called “Memory Database”. The line item listed it as a “required” component, and it came with a price tag of $5,500USD.

James wanted answers from ÛberWarehouse in person, with hopes that he could negotiate the price down to something more palatable. They agreed to send Spencer, their head architect and chief excitement-generator to give James a demo that would knock his socks off.

68 comments - Last comment @ 2021-12-02

A Petite Change Request

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2015-03-26

Robert ran a web service used to store legal file data for a number of clients. One day, he received an email from his biggest client, Excédent, asking to meet about a new requirement.

"We've purchased new accounting software that requires us to track an additional piece of data," Philippe, Robert's contact from Excédent, explained over the conference call a few days later. "Each of our cases must now have a ‘cost center' associated with it. There are a lot of these cost centers, so when our employees enter case data, we'd like for them to be able to pick the one they need from a list."

39 comments - Last comment @ 2015-03-26

The A(nti)-Team

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2015-03-24

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.

Alex had taken a job on a new greenfield development effort to replace an aging and unsupportable birds-nest-o-wtf™. Naturally, the position was advertised as “we intend to do things right!” The project is fully funded. We will have the proper equipment and team personnel to get this job done. We have the full support of six layers of management plus all of the users. Alex was optimistic.

79 comments - Last comment @ 2015-03-26

The Record Setting Score

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2015-03-19

A few years ago, Joel Spolsky wrote his simple, 12-point test to measure how “good” a software team is. Stan was thinking about this test quite a bit, when he started a new job at a company which set a new record for failure.

62 comments - Last comment @ 2020-08-26

Dynamic Tables

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2015-03-17

We've all learned to write programs a bit more generically than the immediate problem requires. We use interfaces in our code and include concrete implementation classes via some language-appropriate mechanism. We use factories to produce the object we want, rather than hard code them. We use code generators to spew forth mountains of code from configurable templates. Sometimes, we even generate SQL on-the-fly. It provides more flexibility that way; instead of having to write a separate query for every permutation of question, we can write something that can dynamically create the query, execute it and return the results.

At Initech, Ian was assigned an interesting JIRA ticket: Investigate errors regarding column length. Since that was all the information written in the ticket, Ian hunted down the author of the ticket to pry out a tad more information. Apparently, the part of Initech's intranet website that was used by the sales agents was suddenly throwing errors about some kind of maximum-size error, and he needed to find out what it was, why it was happening and how to fix it.

60 comments - Last comment @ 2018-09-27

The Awesome Optimization

by Xander R. in Feature Articles on 2015-03-12

Dave liked to think that he was a responsible, thorough application developer. He always tried to understand a problem before tackling it, to think through all ways a change could affect things, and to gather information before making decisions. So when he received complaints about the speed of the custom web application used by his work’s health department, he decided to do a little research to gather all the facts before reporting the issue to his boss.

Do not throw in trash

39 comments - Last comment @ 2015-03-18

The Lockdown

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2015-03-10

2014 was waning, and Stacy’s team was struggling to deliver all the projects the director wanted before year-end. Insuracorp was a small, and that meant IT had a minuscule head-count. This meant they needed to bring on a Highly Paid Consultant for the last project, Codename: Lockport.

19 comments - Last comment @ 2015-03-10

Spared No Expense

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2015-03-05

Renee’s company was a Silicon Valley managed services company. They needed the best data-center they could find to house their infrastructure, and cost was not an object. They loaded up a dump truck full of money and went shopping for the most expensive hosting they could find.

60 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-21

Codename: Cloudy Viper

by TJ Mott in Feature Articles on 2015-03-03

In the interview, Initech seemed nice enough. The managers seemed like nice, normal people, and the company’s vibe seemed quite good. When Terrence was extended an offer, he accepted and joined.

by Jeremy Thompson

41 comments - Last comment @ 2018-02-21

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