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

Logging, Retooled

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2016-06-27

In every company, there is a tendency to value code that was invented in-house over code that was, to put it bluntly, Not Invented Here. There is an eternal struggle to find balance between the convenience of pre-packaged code that is not fully vetted and the trustworthiness of code they themselves have written. As is typical in these tales, Jon's company got it wrong.

29 comments - Last comment @ 2016-07-01

Dumb's The Word

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2016-06-23

Brent's latest software project contained a story for adding a word-cloud to a PDF report that was already being generated on a production server using Java. Instead of being handled by Brent's in-house team, the requirement was assigned—against Brent's wishes—to overseas developers whom the company had recently contracted to "add more horsepower" to things.

53 comments - Last comment @ 2016-07-05

Putting the "No" in "Novell"

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2016-06-21

In the late 90's, Gregg was hired to administer a small Novell network at EduLoans, a student loan processing company. What it amounted to though was a toxic waste cleanup at a Superfund site. To say his predecessor, Loretta, was underqualified was a blunt understatement. The company wanted a network on the cheap, which included elevating a receptionist with slight technical skills to the ranks of Novell administrator. They figured the only training she would ever need was a two week hands-on Novell CNA course. Novell Netware login screen circa 1997

Loretta returned from training with tons of free swag in tow. This included a CD-ROM beta version of Netware 3.12, with bold text printed across its face reading NOT FOR USE IN A PRODUCTION ENVIRONMENT. Ignoring that, she convinced the President of EduLoans that they could get by with this great free version so there would be more money to spend on hardware - and her raise.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2016-09-29

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

The Shield

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2016-06-13

Russell M. knew better than to tempt fate. The last time someone asked him about Big Telco’s network downtime, he bragged about not having any since he began … only for the network to go down within minutes. That time, a construction worker plugged a power drill into a UPS and drained it.

This time, with no construction on-site, he couldn’t use that excuse.

46 comments - Last comment @ 2016-10-14

A Costly Slip

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2016-06-08

It was a lazy, drowsy Saturday afternoon. The sun was shining, birds were singing. The kind of day when children should be playing outside, perhaps running bases in a sandlot someplace, carefree and smiling. Even indoors, thanks to the cost-saving measures at Big Online Retail Store™ HQ, it was warm enough to send tantalizing daydreams of comfortable naps in soft places to the employees working the weekend shift.

56 comments - Last comment @ 2016-06-15

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

Recent Feature Articles