• Bruce W (unregistered) in reply to RevMike

    Huh. Which firm :-). The one I worked for had a very similar system but I don't remember us merging in the late 90's. I remember testing the first version of the time keeping software. I broke it immediately because I go by my middle name. Somehow a WINDOWS 3.1 application was able to a create a file name of <first initial><space (probably some invisible ASCII character)><middle name>. Yep. Windows 3.1 never was able to even delete the file.....

  • Simetrical (unregistered) in reply to despair
    despair:
    How do people like this stay in business? Somewhere in the market there must be some more efficient competitor who can totally undercut their shipping window and prices and drive them into well deserved bankruptcy.
    Unfortunately, perfect competition does not exist in businesses such as IT. There are not sufficiently many sellers, nor sufficient information about the market/sufficient homogeneity, to guarantee the downfall of such inefficiency in a reasonable timeframe. Still better than socialism, because there is some competition, but sadly it's not perfect.
  • Tin (unregistered)

    SO this is the system ModusLink are using to process the Microsoft "Express" Upgrades then... Now I understand why mine hasn't shipped yet. It's now exactly 6 weeks since I ordered mine, and still no signs of shipping. Express my arse.

    Capture = ninjas... If these places employed some, maybe they'd be able to lower it to 3 to 4 weeks instead.

  • Izzy (unregistered) in reply to jgreen
    jgreen:
    I prefer to hope that this is the picture of Yvonne we're all hoping for (not really the one from the article, just a GIS).

    http://www.itv.rwth-aachen.de/Deutsch/Mitarbeiter/Yvonne.Lichtenfeld/yvonne.lichtenfeld.jpg

    She should be photographed on a wooden table, like this.

    http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/what/specific_objects/740876_writing_a_letter.php?id=740876

  • Kid (unregistered)

    My wife worked for a company with a very similar MO. Their customer service department was overwhelmed entering orders from Yahoo, Amazon, and Google. On top of that, their own website had two versions, one of which was over 2 years old, and not maintained anymore. But people could still place orders on it (for items which haven't been available for 2 years).

    Then they took down that website, including the backend. Sooo... the only way my wife had to look at customer's orders was a series of XLS files (essentially a dump of the old site's relational customer database).

    To top it off? Once the company realized that they couldn't support it's current business model, they laid off the entire CS staff. Then they distributed their work (already enough to keep 5 people busy 50 hours a week) to the developers, accountants and the CEO/CFO.

    Including phone calls from angry customers. Needless to say, we're both happy she doesn't work there anymore.

  • AC (unregistered) in reply to Izzy
    Izzy:
    jgreen:
    I prefer to hope that this is the picture of Yvonne we're all hoping for (not really the one from the article, just a GIS).

    http://www.itv.rwth-aachen.de/Deutsch/Mitarbeiter/Yvonne.Lichtenfeld/yvonne.lichtenfeld.jpg

    She should be photographed on a wooden table, like this.

    http://www.istockphoto.com/file_closeup/what/specific_objects/740876_writing_a_letter.php?id=740876

    Damn, I wanted to make that joke!

    Captcha: atari. Maybe they should add an Atari somewhere in their process.

  • Lukasz (unregistered) in reply to Tarsius

    ET got there and is doing pretty well

  • (cs) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    Evo:
    Let's all order something and give fake credit card information. Then, when they call, give them fake info again. It'll get them in an infinite loop. With enough people, we can easily DDoS their services. Or just order a product not in local stores...

    Btw, I want that damned picture ;-).

    I'd do this not to DDoS their system, but rather to get Yvonne to call me on a regular basis, she's obviously legal enough to work.

    Legal enough ?

  • blah (unregistered)
    adding things here and there on a need basis only

    This is how I am forced to work. Everything I'm working on has already been sold to customers and I have to constantly change what I'm making to accommodate the features my bosses think they remember talking about.

    I don't understand where my wage is coming from. Somebody please save me from this madness.

  • dkf (unregistered) in reply to Bruce W
    Bruce W:
    Somehow a WINDOWS 3.1 application was able to a create a file name of <first initial><space (probably some invisible ASCII character)><middle name>. Yep. Windows 3.1 never was able to even delete the file...
    If memory serves, there were several different file management APIs, at least two of which were holdovers from the bad old DOS days. Often what one of them could not do, another would perform without complaint. It's quite possible that many/all of these are still supported even now; MS are good at maintaining backward compatibility long past the point of sanity...
  • That guy outside your window (unregistered)

    Maybe they sell one $3m item per month...

  • SplasPood (unregistered)

    When I was younger I used to have an after school job at a real estate appraisal shop.. The procedure was this... Joe and Sue homeowners go to GimmeMoney Banking Corp and ask for a loan... They fill out piles of paperwork which then gets entered, manually, into a computer. Later, the bank would print some of this data back out of their computer system, stick it in a plain paper fax, and fax it on over to the company I worked for. It was my job to take these faxes off their fax machine, input the data by hand (from about a bazillion different bank formats) into our system, and then later print all the orders BACK OUT to be FAXED manually to each appraiser.

    It gets better... Each appraiser would then manually write up the appraisal on another form (some of the more with-it ones would use a computer!) which would then be re-entered into our system (in some cases we were actually getting these electronically... thank god.), printed back out, and couriered to the bank. Where they'd likely enter some of that data back into their system, generating another printout to hand to Joe & Sue telling them their home wasn't worth crap.

    Good times..

  • (cs)

    I was doing some work for a fairly large snack food corporation. They wanted to run a promotion where they reward consumers with "snack points" for eating their snacks and then the consumer cashes in these points for a shirt or other stuff. My idea was simple enough, print unique codes on the under side of the wrapper and have the consumer set up an account on a website and enter their codes. But no... The company wanted the consumer to cut the UPC's off the package and mail them in, hire a temp to count the UPC's and update the account manually...

  • Never_worked_for_WP (unregistered)

    I used to work for a temp agency that assigned me to work for a large appliance company (they recently bought out another appliance company). One of my jobs was to monitor web based app that would present me with orders that customers had placed online. I would have to manually run their credit cards and if approved, key their order into an old ordering system that was only accessible by using an OS/2 console.

  • Nubsalot (unregistered) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    Bruce W:
    Somehow a WINDOWS 3.1 application was able to a create a file name of <first initial><space (probably some invisible ASCII character)><middle name>. Yep. Windows 3.1 never was able to even delete the file...
    If memory serves, there were several different file management APIs, at least two of which were holdovers from the bad old DOS days. Often what one of them could not do, another would perform without complaint. It's quite possible that many/all of these are still supported even now; MS are good at maintaining backward compatibility long past the point of sanity...

    True. If you go digging about in the various files that come with windows you find ancient 3.1 stuff in there. Like an easter egg planted in a DLL (An easter egg you can only see if you rip it open and look for graphics) quite fun. Also, you can still compile old 3.1 programs under XP. Kinda tells me that the old APIs are still maintained. This also tends to tell me that this is the reason that with each new iteration of windows, the OS grows by about as much disk space as an OS should take up total. ;) Thus, having all previos crap in tow. HEhe. They really need to just say "Screw it all" and start from the very bottom, with security, stability and speed in mind. Not backasswards compatability.

  • Jeff "Quake" Dickey (unregistered) in reply to bob the dingo

    @Bob the Dingo:

    No, no; that's the improved, high-efficiency version that they've got a team of 8 Very Highly Certified Indian H1Bs working on it right now. The delivery date has been promised for 6 or 8 weeks from now; you can start looking for it in late 2009. :P

  • (cs) in reply to James
    James:
    Hah! I work at a major gov't agency (three letters; guess which) where our timekeeping works like this:

    1.)User runs a timekeeping app over TedXtend, a UNIX-on-Windows remoting service 2.)User enters time in/out and leave data 3.)App validates data 4.)User prints barcoded timesheet, initials, gets management signoff 5.)Timekeeper totally ignores barcode and keys in all fields from every time sheet, from every user, every two weeks, by hand.

    I've asked why they don't just use the Unix program's data... it's not kept in a format they can use.

    Oh, and the step (6) I didn't mention is when the timekeeper yells at everybody to get their timesheet in before the covered period even ends because it takes so long to get everybody into the system ;-)

    Nope, neither this nor the OP is really a WTF. After all, information comes in at one end and an appropriate response comes out the other; data entry errors, etc, permitting. Not ideal, but not a WTF either.

    I worked for a large US financial institution in the 1990s where the time-tracking information was maintained in an Access database (natch) with a VB front-end (natch) designed by an ex-Navy petty officer now managing QA (who better?). Many happy hours were spent by managers yelling at underlings to enter each individual 15 minute period in one of up to around 20 categories. The front-end was covered from head to toe in a gumptillion buttons of different sizes, shapes and hues, all of which represented non-orthogonal functions. Why was it like this? Because the only VB widget that the author understood was "Button."

    It was clearly vitally important to get all timesheet information, from everyone, absolutely accurately, entered into this fine, upstanding system on time.

    Nobody could quite explain why, though, because once a month, middle management would ceremoniously decant the Access database into a CSV file, import that into a bare Excel spreadsheet, stare at the resulting totals, realise that these totals in no way reflected their projections, and then ...

    ... make up a completely different set of numbers, manually enter those into the entirely different (mainframe) system that had been used for the purpose for about ten years or so, and post off a bunch of total lies to upper management.

    Happy days indeed.

  • Chris Harmon (unregistered)

    That is great! Last place I worked at the web "developers" spent at least 60% of their time properly massaging the equivalent of sales information like that into their individual databases! It was an insurance firm - so when the business needed changes to policies (and all the odd little variations like how pricing changes based on various factors), apparently the developers were the only ones who could make these "highly complex" changes to the database.

    Before I left, I was involved in building a toolbox that would contain tools to automate some of these processes. One of the developers recognized that such a tool is a great idea - and I built him one to automate one of his processes that took too much time.

  • me (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    ...and that includes praying for a valid credit card number too. MENSA.

  • Deian (unregistered)

    I noticed that you may get in infinite loop if you search in the local store and the item is not in stock :) (That's the reason for the delayed shipments I guess)

  • (cs)

    I'm placing on my prognosticator's hat for a moment.

    When a business owner, creates/buys a business they are not buying/creating a product, they are buying a business system. If the business system is broke the company will, eventually go the way of the dinosour. My prediction: Unless drastic measures are taken to fix the business system this company will be out of business within 5 years.

    I'm taking the hat off now. If they don't go out of business, there is now corporate justice in the world.

  • Tek (unregistered)

    Long story short, the law says we have to keep images of every piece of paper we process, including the invoices that we send out. This isn't really a problem since we have a couple of industrial-strength scanners and a giant fileserver.

    Well, I was ambling through the scanning room at my office one day, and noticed a giant stack of papers that looked awfully familiar. Apparently, it was someone's job to:

    1. Go to the website I wrote,
    2. Manually print a few hundred invoices,
    3. Carry them to the scanning room,
    4. Scan them onto the fileserver, and
    5. View each image in our in-house imaging software to attach the image to its invoice's database entry.

    I replaced this with:

    1. Run a nightly cron job that generates the images, saves them to the fileserver, and updates the database.

    Yay automation.

  • (cs)

    Friends don't get friends a data entry job.

    Parents do, however.

  • Undisclosed (unregistered)

    I work for a very large corporation and I have seen this many times. Managers are too scared to authorise anything because any project that goes astray ruins their chances for promotion. They would rather keep the system the same because it works. After all, if the project they came up with has any minor glitches in it it will be seen as a failure even though the project with the glitches is still much better than the one it is replacing.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    This isn't surprising at all. I'm amazed at how most companies manage to stay in business. My wife works for a very large mortgage company which provides enough fresh WTFs every day to provide content for an entire site. I might have to start submitting some, though they're not necessarily tech related.

  • iToad (unregistered) in reply to swordfishBob
    swordfishBob:
    KattMan:
    RON:
    Because, businesses do not want smart people. They want subservient people who will do what they tell them to do. ..

    .. I got into the habit of intentionally getting a few things wrong just so the interviewers have something they can teach me and they get to see how well I "take criticism."

    You habitually take interviews? I agree though. If an underling was better and smarter, then they should be paid higher. That's just not on.

    Strangely, I find myself reporting directly to the CEO, though I'm in IT, and we have an IT manager, and it's not me. (IT manager is pretty good, too - he was recruited as my offsider, and has taken on most vendor accounts, plus supervising our junior techs.)

    Class A managers hire Class A underlings. Class B managers hire Class C underlings.

  • (cs)

    HEY HAS ANYONE MADE A WOODEN TABLE JOKE YET?! BECAUSE THAT WOULD BE REAL FUNNY!!

  • dkfal (unregistered)

    Why does the author automatically assume that we would like a picture of Yvonne and that even the fact of wanting to look at a picture of a females makes us perverts? That's the WTF.

    Grow up.

  • Island Usurper (unregistered) in reply to dkfal

    Because this is the Internet, and we all know what that is for.

  • mnature (unregistered) in reply to ZoFreX

    Guys, guys . . .

    THIS is the real picture of Yvonne . . .

    http://www.pbase.com/image/27542461

    . . . but she has this GREAT voice on the phone . . .

    CAPTCHA: pirates (Avast, mateys!)

  • Rob (unregistered)

    If someone already said this, sorry but I don't have time to wade through 80+ comments to see if I'm repeating anyone.

    Someone who manually changes a website to add/edit/remove items is not a developer. A webmaster maybe.

  • (cs)

    Uhm...

    What happens if the item is out of stock at the warehouse, but in stock at a local store, but costs more than it is being sold fer?

  • andy brons (unregistered) in reply to RevMike
    RevMike:
    I used to work for a big six accounting/professional services firm that merged with another big six accounting/professional services firm in the late '90s. The other firm's time/expense processing system went like this...

    Another member of my team was pretty good at integrating C and Lotus Notes servers, so she wrote a gateway to use the data in the email to drive calls to Oracle.

    Price WaterHouse Coopers?

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    It's much the same here where I work, except our shipping is technically owned and run by a different company. That means that their process for getting stuff shipped is almost completely opaque to all but a few Holy Ones who have positions in both the main, parent company and the warehouse company. What our Web site's shopping cart system (which is a mess and a half in and of itself) does is queue orders in a Web interface which someone at this other company then handles by manually entering orders into some ancient, crufted system that the inventory people use to deliver orders.

    Hey, I didn't just order a DVD player from you did I? Took a while to turn up, was DOA, when I shipped it back, they didn't even know if it arrived, could not ship a replacement, only give a refund and it took them forever to do that. Not the best way to run a business.

    Ritz Camera BTW.

  • (cs)

    oh, oh, I can't even read the comments now, after the last line in that article, my eyes are watering too much... I mean, gee, that does explain the long wait on shipping, OK, and Yvonne obviously has too many brain cells active still for this line of work, run!

    I am still stuck on "These developers are responsible for manually adding and removing products and applying price changes, all without a database."

    Now I know why I stopped biting my nails, I would claw my way out of the building if I ever found myself in this scenario. I cannot imagine any circle of hell worse than what they must go through. They must be lobotomized, it is the only way. Oh, and I didn't see any mention of QA, I am guessing this was not an oversight.

    oh, I can't stop laughing...help...

  • iw (unregistered)

    You know what "middle man" people are always talking about?

    This is why cutting them out saves you so much money.

  • hognoxious (unregistered) in reply to Douglas
    Douglas:
    wHat dOes post 9/11 have anything to do with sending knives in the post?
    Nothing. He's probably getting it confused with Sarbanes-Oxley.
  • Pope (unregistered)

    Pssht.. Who needs any fancy-schmany computers. As Thoreau said, "Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity." ... though, if it were so simple, he'd really only have to say it once... or just type it once, then copy and paste twice. Or, rather, get a voice recognition system hooked up to his PDA, say, "simplicity," then upload the document to his computer, copy and paste twice, then post it in his blog.

    You know Thoreau would have had a blog - you waste less paper that way, thereby saving the trees. Of course, to get the electricity to power his computer the coal plants would have had to get the coal from a mine that cleared all trees and wildlife from that area.

    Man, technology is going to save us... If it doesn't kill me from heart-disease, hyper-tension or heart attack first. 'Cause Lord knows I don't have time to exercise any more. "What? Do push-ups? Pssht... Intervention is on!"

  • Martin Wusse (unregistered) in reply to despair

    How do people like this stay in business? Because the vast majority of their competition is just as incompetent and backward. The wastage that goes on in supposedly efficient companies...

  • Frod (unregistered) in reply to hognoxious

    You mean HIPAA, right?

    Captcha: craaazy... craaazy... for reading... this website...

  • (cs)

    I can't believe a month goes by where one of those 5 developers goes on a shooting rampage in their building.

    Then again, maybe they are the developers who came up with that process.

  • Dick Darlington (unregistered) in reply to bob the dingo

    Hey, before you laugh at this, here's another real-world example from a couple of years ago. It involves another order fulfilment company that acts as a centralised clearinghouse for order processing. They decide they're going to take everything online and so they set up all of their clients with fax MODEMs (this was before widespread Internet access). The retailers fax in their order with the fax MODEM, and it's received at a central site by another fax MODEM. It then gets printed out and typed in by data entry clerks. Once it's been processed, the central site uses a fax MODEM to fax a confirmation back to the retailer's fax MODEM.

    I can just see the cretins that set this thing up sitting there saying "I wonder what this modem thing is that came with our neat shiny new fax card, and what it's used for?".

  • Ptorq (unregistered) in reply to jo42
    jo42:
    Uhm... What happens if the item is out of stock at the warehouse, but in stock at a local store, but costs more than it is being sold fer?

    I assume that "in stock at a local store" means "in stock at one of the company's retail outlets" as opposed to "Hey, we could go buy one at K-Mart."

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