• bob the dingo (unregistered)

    "combined experience" is a great term... so basically they had one guy with 25 years, and 4 guys with none! that or they were all janitors there...

  • (cs)

    25 years combined experience?  And they still don't RTFM? 

  • Hit (unregistered)

    I imagine the warning sirens were already blaring when "Could you send us your [entire!!] production database to us?" came in.  

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:
    Hi Dustin,

    Can you have one of your DBA's give us a call? I 
    need to know what command to run to import this 
    database file into our database.

    Thanks,
    Edward

    Err... try  Ctrl+Alt+Del or Ctrl+Alt+F6

    Should put you out of misery. 

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    . . .The start-up touts itself as a "small, agile consultancy" lead by "five gurus" with "over twenty-five years combined experience working at Oracle Corporation." . . .

    So . . . was Edward one of the gurus?  It sounds like he was the intern.
     

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered)

    Wow - how can you spend 5 years at Oracle and not know how to import a database? Even I can do that, and I'm a dev.     

  • foo (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka

    When some people work at a place for ten years they get ten years of experience, other people work at a place for ten years and get one year of experience ten times.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka

    They probably worked as janitors at the Oracle offices in Hyderabad, most "gurus" are from India.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous

    Anonymous:
    They probably worked as janitors at the Oracle offices in Hyderabad, most "gurus" are from India.

    I nominate this as the funniest line of the day, or possibly the most unintentionally ironic line of the day.

    But, to stay on topic, I'll bet by now that Dustin wishes he had FedExed that server out to them. 

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous

    haha yeah I was thinking along those lines... probably not janitors (I'd hope), but I doubt they held any overly technical positions.

     

    Now, I haven't worked with Oracle since Uni (sql server and pg here), but I'm pretty certain I'd have no trouble importing a database, even if it cost me a massive 5 minutes on google. Heck, wikipedia probably has a walkthrough for it...

     

    Every Joe and his dog thinks they're an IT expert. 

     

    EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

  • FooLman (unregistered) in reply to bob the dingo
    Anonymous:
    "combined experience" is a great term... so basically they had one guy with 25 years, and 4 guys with none! that or they were all janitors there...

    I used to work for a company advertised itself as "more than 100 years of cumulated telecom experience". It turned out some guy was in the marketing team for 10 years or so and there were 2 or 3 sales guys with 5-6 years each, but for sure they even added the years since they first called their moms, and it was still short... So this one sounds painfully real to me...

    and another great WTF without a line of code...
  • wyz (unregistered) in reply to foo

    Anonymous:
    When some people work at a place for ten years they get ten years of experience, other people work at a place for ten years and get one year of experience ten times.

    In this case, one month of experience 120 times.

    captcha: truthiness

  • Jesse (unregistered) in reply to Howi
    Howi:

    EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

     

    ...and the professor said it would never work.

  • Jay (unregistered)

    I'll spare you Dustin's reply, but suffice it to say that he was "transitioned off the liaison role" shortly thereafter.

     
    No! I want to see it! :-D

  • (cs) in reply to bob the dingo

    Anonymous:
    "combined experience" is a great term... so basically they had one guy with 25 years, and 4 guys with none! that or they were all janitors there...

    It had to be the latter. The former surely would have resulted in the aforementioned stupidity being resolved by the one guy.

  • (cs)

    Advertising youself as a guru is a warning itself.

    Hiring feng shui experts would've yielded a nice user interface at least.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Jesse
    Anonymous:
    Howi:

    EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

     

    ...and the professor said it would never work.

     

    The punchline is that the founder later Fedexed a copy of the paper to that professor.     

  • Cody (unregistered) in reply to Franz Kafka

    Not quite true.  The founder indicated in a later article that he doesn't remember the grade but that it was probably pretty bad since it wasn't a very well thought-out idea.  That's the extent of legitimacy that wikipedia ascribes to the article at least.

  • (cs)

    Small and agile? Apparently they're just small and agile enough to slip under the BS detector of the suits who'd want to hire them. Although, in some companies, they wouldn't have to be all that small...

  • Vince Frisina (unregistered) in reply to Jesse

    This is an urban legend.  The original idea for FedEx, which was presented in that business school paper, was for express check clearing between federal reserve banks by actually processing the checks in the air as they traveled between banks. (Federal reserve, Express processing) Even the founder of fedex has said the professor was right that it would never work.  That is why FedEx ships packages instead of clearing checks.  When the check idea, and several others, turned out to be untenable, they stepped back and realized that the transportation system they devised would be perfect for overnight delivery.
     

  • (cs) in reply to Cody

    Anonymous:
    Not quite true.  The founder indicated in a later article that he doesn't remember the grade but that it was probably pretty bad since it wasn't a very well thought-out idea.  That's the extent of legitimacy that wikipedia ascribes to the article at least.

     

    And here is the article itself.

     

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Hit

    what's worse than the fact that they asked for the production DB.... after they asked for the QA, I get the impression that they actually wanted the product box, not just the data in the DB ;-)

  • (cs)

    OMG.

     

    The start-up touts itself as a "small, agile consultancy" lead by "five gurus" with "over twenty-five years combined experience working at Oracle Corporation."

    In what department... Janitorial?

    Jebus...
     

     

     

    W00h00! i got the edit in time!!! Looks like half the other ppl posted like the same comment lol. 

  • (cs) in reply to bob the dingo

    bob the dingo:
    "...or they were all janitors there...

    Janitors? I'm guessing with copy like "small, agile consultancy lead by five gurus with over twenty-five years combined experience," they're from Oracle's marketing department. Even a janitor knows enough math to figure out that 5 years average a piece is not enough to make someone a guru of anything, even janitoring.

    "Guru" 1: Dang, Edward, five years in Oracle's marketing department, and I'm still not making as much as some of those unstylishly dressed programming dweebs.

    "Guru" 2: Let's start our own consulting firm and rake in the big bucks. How do you like the title "guru"?

    "Guru" 3: Wait, what about technical knowledge?

    "Guru" 4: Oh, we can pick that up. How hard can it be to just press some keys all day?

    "Guru" 5: Yeah, the only hard part is coming up with a succinct way to communicate our vast experience. Let's add up our years a Oracle.

    "Guru" 1: Well, 5 plus 4 plus 3 plus 3 plus, um, 10 months, is 25 years. That sounds impressive, doesn't it?

    --RA

  • xcor057 (unregistered)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

     

    I'll spare you Dustin's reply, but suffice it to say that he was "transitioned off the liaison role" shortly thereafter. Amazingly, he hasn't been able to convince anyone to boot them out door yet.

     Obviously Dustin was transitioned off.  I'm surprised he still works there.  The certainly wouldn't hold an executive accountable for hiring a dumbass vendor.

    One can find many small and agile companies to do business with.  Many move around enough so the feds can't catch them.  Not the best criteria when searching for a vendor.

  • marekxxx (unregistered)

    This only prooves my impression of "it/cs-businesses".

     experience != knowledge

     I have seen several people who have tons of "experience", but has less knowledge than the intern who started last week.
     

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)

    hmm... site is still running. DailyWTF doesn't have too much readers as Slashdot. Someday, when a site got blown up, people will ask "were you slashdoted or wtfucked? huahua

     p.s.: captcha is always 1337? Wtf...
     

  • my name is missing (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    Clearly Paula is the CEO of the consultancy.

     

  • (cs) in reply to Jay
    Anonymous:

    I'll spare you Dustin's reply, but suffice it to say that he was "transitioned off the liaison role" shortly thereafter.

     
    No! I want to see it! :-D

    It was probably along the lines of:

    Dear [Consultants]:

    You just asked me how to do an amazingly basic task. You also wanted to take the time of one of our professional staff to answer something that you should know if you're as qualified as you say you are.

    This shows your ignorance in several key ways:
    1. You don't know how to do the basic parts of your job.
    2. You can't even be bothered to look up the answer on google.
    3. You didn't look up any newsgroup help.
    4. Apparently, you don't even know how to read. You should read the Spanish Love Story "Manual".
    5. Your local support network (i.e. coworkers) doesn't know how to do this task.

    You have also asked me to contact Oracle on your behalf. If you are Oracle "gurus", then how come you don't know how to contact them yourselves? It's clear to me that you have almost no Oracle experience. The only reason you even HAVE Oracle is because I bought you a copy on eBay.

    Quite frankly, you're a fraud. I've found you out. If you're still here when I come in tomorrow, I'm going to take my collected proof of your incompetence and bring it to our boss. People like you - who inflate credentials, fake compentence, and just flat-out lie - are the reason MY industry (note that I do NOT include YOU in it) has a bad reputation. I hope you do something flat-out illegal and get caught. I'll even visit you in jail, because I'd want to see it with my own eyes.

    Sincerely,
    [Dustin]
     

    Uh, not that I've had the daydream of saying that to anyone I work with... ;)

  • (cs)
    Edward Oracle Expert:

    Dustin,

    That'd be great! Could you ship your QA server to us:
      [mailing address]

    Thanks,
    Edward

    This has to be a joke or else an artifact of anonymization. Nobody seriously asks somebody to ship a physical server, do they? What good would that do them, I wonder?

    [Editors Note: Per the <font color="#4c7a9e">Editorial Guidelines</font>, this is not an artifact of anonymization. The gurus did in fact expect the physical server.]

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward

    Anonymous:
    Hmm... site is still running. DailyWTF doesn't have too much readers as Slashdot. Someday, when a site got blown up, people will ask "were you slashdoted or wtfucked? huahua

    The day that "DailyWTFed" is as commonly-used as "Farked" will be a happy one indeed.

    catpcha: mustache (?!)

  • David (unregistered)

    Oracle is f*cking complicated. Everyone knows that.

     captcha: wtf
     

  • PumaCub (unregistered) in reply to marekxxx
    Anonymous:

    This only prooves my impression of "it/cs-businesses".

     experience != knowledge

     I have seen several people who have tons of "experience", but has less knowledge than the intern who started last week.
     

     

     And education != knowledge

    I can't even count the number of graduates I've worked with who have absolutely no clue what they're doing. We hired this one guy, just graduated, who's major was in Web Development, I constantly had to explain to him the difference between client-side and server-side execution, and he had never heard of CSS.

  • Fedex SUCKS (unregistered) in reply to Howi
    Howi:

    EDIT: Speaking of FedEx, did you know that the creator of that company designed it as a business model for a university assignment in a business degree or some such. He failed. Now THAT'S ironic :) 

     

    Somehow I'm not surprised. No other shipping company has as bad a service as them.. Once I was trying to have some stuff sent to me (San Diego) it ended up in Yemen (San'a). According to FedEx, they have the same airport code. I think about that every time I check in my bags at the airport and they put that little tag that says SAN on them. Then I think about it again when they don't show up at the baggage claim. The point is, no matter how many times they lose my bags no one ever tries to tell me they are in Yemen because the two cities have the same airport code. I believe that is mainly because San'a's airport code in SAH.

  • Poy (unregistered) in reply to savar
    savar:

    This has to be a joke or else an artifact of anonymization. Nobody seriously asks somebody to ship a physical server, do they? What good would that do them, I wonder?

     
    We actually had somebody ship us a build machine for a large C++ project once, after weeks of trying to configure all the undocumented environment variables, very specific versions of various tools, etc that the other guys knew about but never bothered to tell us.  Sometimes just shipping a hard drive/actual server is the easiest thing when outsourcing (though obviously not in this case).

  • Felix Gilcher (unregistered) in reply to Poy
    Anonymous:
    savar:

    This has to be a joke or else an artifact of anonymization. Nobody seriously asks somebody to ship a physical server, do they? What good would that do them, I wonder?

     
    We actually had somebody ship us a build machine for a large C++ project once, after weeks of trying to configure all the undocumented environment variables, very specific versions of various tools, etc that the other guys knew about but never bothered to tell us.  Sometimes just shipping a hard drive/actual server is the easiest thing when outsourcing (though obviously not in this case).

    We do this all the time. Often the soon-to-be-production-server is used for the final tests to see wether you get the expected performance. It's also way easier to install and configure a server that's sitting on a desk in front of you or in a room two doors down the hall than one that is in a secured intranet at the clients site. Sometimes during stress testing, some hardware problems crop up and switching components once the server is on site is way more difficult as well. Shipping is not that costly nowadays, so why not. Actually asking the client wether they'd supply their own testing server they use for development hasn't happened yet - but I can imagine that this might be part of a contract when exotic hardware or configurations are required that are difficult and expensive to replicate exactly.

    regards

    fg 

     

  • Chad Martin (unregistered) in reply to Fedex SUCKS
    Anonymous:

    Somehow I'm not surprised. No other shipping company has as bad a service as them.. Once I was trying to have some stuff sent to me (San Diego) it ended up in Yemen (San'a). According to FedEx, they have the same airport code. I think about that every time I check in my bags at the airport and they put that little tag that says SAN on them. Then I think about it again when they don't show up at the baggage claim. The point is, no matter how many times they lose my bags no one ever tries to tell me they are in Yemen because the two cities have the same airport code. I believe that is mainly because San'a's airport code in SAH.

     

    Also, the actual airport code for San Diego would be KSAN, since every North American airport's identifier starts with a K.  This is often dropped since most air traffic occurs within the U.S.  Even if the airport in Yemen was SAN, it wouldn't be KSAN.  Any international shipper should know this and have software that uses the full four-character identifier.  That person you talked to was full of shit on a few different levels.
     

  • Your Name (unregistered) in reply to Chad Martin
    Anonymous:

    Also, the actual airport code for San Diego would be KSAN, since every North American airport's identifier starts with a K.

    "as our KSANs go rolling along" ? 

  • Dustin (unregistered) in reply to foo

    Anonymous:
    When some people work at a place for ten years they get ten years of experience, other people work at a place for ten years and get one year of experience ten times.

     Classic.

     Trust me, this was just the tip of the iceberg with these guys.  Now they want their own performance testing environment so they don't have to share with other projects.  And of course, they want it on the same scale as production.   Let me see if I have another 32 processor unix box laying around.

  • M (unregistered)

    We had something similar happen with a subcontract to a certain prominent consulting company that shall go unnamed.  Said consultants are supposed to analyze our performance data.  So we gave them a copy of the MRTG data files and told them they were MRTG files.  They sent us back email asking what MRTG was, so we sent them a weblink.  About a week later, they sent us email telling us that they had searched the web, and found a link that described the data file format -- and included the same link that we had sent them already.  Another couple weeks passed, and they sent email saying that they weren't able to import the datafiles into Excel because they were too large.  So we asked them what they needed us to do, and they asked us to preprocess the data and get them certain statistical info.  So one of our programmers did so, and sent them the processed data.  At which point they finally got back to us and gave us the results of their analysis -- which was essentially regurgitating what our programmer had done.

  • dsfgsddsfgsdfgdsffg (unregistered) in reply to M
    Hi Dustin,
    Can you tell us what a database is?  Also, what's Oracle?
    Thanks,
    Edward
  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:


    Dustin,

    That'd be great! Could you ship your QA server to us:
      [mailing address]

    Thanks,
    Edward

     that has to be one of the best quotes i've ever seen on WTF... I wouldn't even know where to begin if someone asked us to just ship them out one of their servers... that is carnage

  • (cs) in reply to Chad Martin
    Anonymous:
    Also, the actual airport code for San Diego would be KSAN, since every North American airport's identifier starts with a K.  This is often dropped since most air traffic occurs within the U.S.  Even if the airport in Yemen was SAN, it wouldn't be KSAN.  Any international shipper should know this and have software that uses the full four-character identifier.  That person you talked to was full of shit on a few different levels.

    This is wrong, and if you looked up "airport code" on wikipedia you'd know. They are two different sets of airport codes, so no letter is 'dropped', and it's certainly not because "most air traffic happens in the US" (something I suspect is becoming less true anyway). I've never seen a four-letter code on baggage tag, and I've only flown to/from the US once.

    Anyway, K is mainland US, not "North America". Stop making things up, it makes you look bad ;)

  • chocobot (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous:

    hmm... site is still running. DailyWTF doesn't have too much readers as Slashdot. Someday, when a site got blown up, people will ask "were you slashdoted or wtfucked? huahua

     p.s.: captcha is always 1337? Wtf...

     

    +4 insightful 

  • Olddog (unregistered)

    This WTF proves.. there are people, when given a task and a sheet of blank graph paper, will flip it over expecting to find the instructions on the back side. Finding none, they'll flip it back and ask for another sheet.

  • (cs)

    Typical - the consultants didn't know anything (professing they did) when they should have had the in-house expertise from Oracle in their background.  the plan didn't have dustin managing these guys and since being "transitioned" the consultants were still around due to the budget.  <grr/>

  • (cs) in reply to Chad Martin
    Anonymous wrote the following post at 09-25-2006 10:45 PM:
    [image] Anonymous:

    Somehow I'm not surprised. No other shipping company has as bad a service as them.. Once I was trying to have some stuff sent to me (San Diego) it ended up in Yemen (San'a). According to FedEx, they have the same airport code. I think about that every time I check in my bags at the airport and they put that little tag that says SAN on them. Then I think about it again when they don't show up at the baggage claim. The point is, no matter how many times they lose my bags no one ever tries to tell me they are in Yemen because the two cities have the same airport code. I believe that is mainly because San'a's airport code in SAH.

     

    Also, the actual airport code for San Diego would be KSAN, since every North American airport's identifier starts with a K.  This is often dropped since most air traffic occurs within the U.S.  Even if the airport in Yemen was SAN, it wouldn't be KSAN.  Any international shipper should know this and have software that uses the full four-character identifier.  That person you talked to was full of shit on a few different levels.
     

    Sorry, not true. Airport codes are 3 letters.

    Examples:

    • LHR: Heathrow, London, UK
    • LGW: Gatwick, London, UK
    • YYC: Calgary, Canada
    • TOY: Toyama, Japan
    • DAY: Dayton, Ohio, US
    • NYC: New York, NY, US
    • BWI: Baltimore/Washington Intl., US
    • SAN: San Diego - Lindberg Field Int'l, CA, US
    • SAH: Sanaa (Sana'a) - Sana'a International, Yemen
    More here: http://www.nationsonline.org/oneworld/airport_code.htm
  • jessica (unregistered) in reply to Anaerin

    Did you read the article linked to at the bottom of the page YOU linked to?

     

    "Airlines use the three-letter codes internationally in their own network, Sita, for messages such as passenger loads and departure times. World ATC and weather agencies use a separate teleprinter network, the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunications Network (AFTN), which uses a four-letter "location indicator." Going from large area to actual airport, the first letter relates to the part of the world and the second letter the country. The third letter is a group of airports within that country. Most countries who use this particular convention use a letter to denote the FIR in which the airport is located. So F is Frankfurt FIR in Germany, M is Munich; P is Paris FIR, M is Marseilles. Other ways to use the third letter include identifying a group of airports with a common factor. For example, A was used in Germany for all Canadian and American air force bases. The last letter positively identifies a specific airport.

    Thus Aberdeen, Scotland, has the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) location indicator of EGPD—E for Northern Europe, G for United Kingdom, P for Scottish region, and D for Dyce field. Want to figure out LFPG? It's L for southern Europe, F for France, P for Paris FIR, and G for Charles de Gaulle airport. Easy! One more example is EDMM. E for northern Europe, D for Deutchland (Germany), M for Munchen (Munich) FIR, and M again for the Munich airport.

    So if London Heathrow has two codes — and it does, LHR and EGLL — how come I've heard Chicago O'Hare only called ORD? The answer is unique to the United States. In the 48 contiguous States the ICAO code is formed simply by adding a "K" to the FAA code. This explains why international flight plans refer to KORD, KMIA, KJFK, etc. A meeting of two rules is Key West, the FAA code is EYW (lose the 'K') and the IATA code is KEYW (add a 'K') which works great for KEY West."

     I think the code depends on WHO you're asking. I doubt FedEx is a reliable source on this, as they can't even get my postal code to town right, and they deliver packages there.

  • jessica (unregistered) in reply to jessica

    DAMN QUOTE BUTTON.

    I SERIOUSLY hate this forum. When I hit enter it wants to search half the time instead of post. 

  • Nathan (unregistered) in reply to jessica

    The real WTF here is that nobody on this forum has decided to get on their high-horse today and explain to the rest of us plebians what 'the real WTF here is'. In fact, we're all playing quite nicely today - go team!

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