The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Software Possession

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2019-05-28

Jon worked for a small company that specialized in automation of inspection systems: basically the industrial version of home automation, where you glue together a series of disparate automatable parts to create a specialized workflow. Jon was the only software person at his 15-man company. The client was in Russia, and the company was in the USA, so communication went through email and primarily via a client representative, Sam. Sam would gather the requirements verbatim from the client and hand them to Jon; Jon would augment the software to meet their automation needs, and send a new version over to Sam to deliver. It worked, after a fashion. The system was designed to control a robot that mostly opened boxes, picked things up, ran a series of quality checks on the things, and put them back.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2019-06-05

Powerful Trouble

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2019-05-23

Many years ago, Chris B. worked for a company that made CompactPCI circuit boards. When the spec for hot-swappable boards (i.e., boards that could be added and removed without powering down the system) came out, the company began to make some. Chris became the designated software hot-swap expert.

35 comments - Last comment @ 2019-07-06

A Problem in the Backend

by Bobby T. Johnson in Feature Articles on 2019-05-15

Gary works at a medium company. Big enough that workers are specialized in their duty, but small enough to know people in other departments and to make turf wars a little more close and personal: danger close. Most of the departments see themselves as part of a team, but a few individuals see themselves as McCarthy, who will themselves alone save the company and defeat the enemies (who are all spies inside the company sent to destroy it from the inside).

One of these individuals is named Eric. Eric is close to a Kevin. Eric is the front-end developer, and neither likes nor cares about what happens on the backend. Whenever Eric has an issue, he blames the backend. CSS rendering glitch? Backend problem. Browser crash? That’s the backend problem. Slow UI, even when all the data is cached clientside? Definitely a backend problem. Gary used to get mad, but now knows that Eric is so dumb that he doesn’t even know how dumb he is.

39 comments - Last comment @ 2020-01-23

Recent Feature Articles

Software Possession

Powerful Trouble

A Problem in the Backend