The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

chubertdev · 2014-05-09 Reply Admin

Mark:
lurking woman:
... is unsure how many posts on this thread are trolls, and how many are legit misogynists.
I don't hate women. I do recognize that men and women are different, despite what liars insist. I also wonder why our laws are written to insure that on average, a woman will be a more expensive hire than a man -- since that almost guarantees discrimination.

Since when were laws written as anything but examining a situation, then reacting to it completely inappropriately since lawmakers only strive to further their own agenda?

2014-05-11 Reply Admin

anonymous:
John Appleseed:
rekcuf rehtom uoy siht esrever:
TRWTF is that I was actually asked to reverse a string in a job interview once - because that comes up some often in real world programming.

I always ask candidates to reverse a string. It's normally the first technical question I ask, and the questions get progressively more difficult, but about a quarter of the people I interview can't perform this trivial task, and it's a good way to terminate that interview early.

Question 2 is generally to ask them to print out all the unsigned integers from the highest possible down to 0. Some things that go wrong here:

the loop increments rather than decrements (!)

getting the step wrong, normally by having 2 decrements per loop, I just don't...

using an int not an unsigned int

starting from some arbitrary value (eg: 100) - apparently higher numbers don't exist ?

looping infinitely because they just used while(i-- > 0). This is very common

I'm not anal about whiteboard code. I don't care if you use printf() without #including stdio.h I don't care if you miss a semicolon at the end of a line. I do care if you use an int when I asked for unsigned ints though because your code's logical structure doesn't do what I asked.

I've asked that loop question over 100 times. Maybe 5 people have got it right first time. 5. [sigh]

To be fair, using while (i-- > 0) is something that could trip up even an experienced programmer now and then. Especially if they're not allowed to test-run their code. Getting it exactly right on the first try is a steep requirement.

So I urge you both to try out this "test-run" thing. "while (i-- >0)" can't possible result into an infinite loop. That being said I think it's more practical to use the prefix operator. I.e.

  unsigned int i = 0;
  while (--i > 0) {
    printf("%u\n", i);
  }

2014-05-12 Reply Admin

Evan:
anonymous:
It's still not in the best interests of your employer to have someone who's trained and familiar with their job to leave, even if you worked it out beforehand and gave them plenty of time to train someone else to replace you.
First, that's why I said that if your company could hire you back you're still potentially less risk than an unknown hire. Second, even if that's not true, it doesn't explain why taking a break would look any worse than moving to a different company. The original statement was that a long break looks really bad ("In the US, taking 6-12 months off is generally career suicide"). How often do you see someone say "in the US, changing jobs is generally career suicide"?
The risk to your employer seems the same in both cases. Why would one look at least acceptable and the other suicidal?

Having 6-12 months where you weren't working makes it look like you were fired or let go with no new job lined up, and it took you the better part of a year to find someone else who'd hire you.

2014-05-12 Reply Admin

I was skeptical of Fizzbuzz too, until it was my turn to fill a tech position (and had just convinced my boss that it would be wise to have your senior tech guy actually talk to tech candidates before hiring them). Here was my experience of two candidates with very similar resumes:

Competent candidate: (reads problem) Really? (bangs out answer)

Incompetent candidate: (looks confused, hunts and pecks at the keyboard for 10 minutes until I stopped him)

2014-05-12 Reply Admin

Ahh.. because we're human? Why should a company allow bathroom breaks or drinking coffee? It's the employee's choice to do so.

Let's pretend we are machines instead of living beings.

Kivi · 2014-05-13 Reply Admin

256th!

chubertdev · 2014-05-13 Reply Admin

JRI:
Ahh.. because we're human? Why should a company allow bathroom breaks or drinking coffee? It's the employee's choice to do so.
Let's pretend we are machines instead of living beings.

there is no spoon

2014-05-16 Reply Admin

David:
John Appleseed:
- looping infinitely because they just used while(i-- > 0). This is *very* common
That being said I think it's more practical to use the prefix operator.

This is why its hard to hire developers. The original code won't loop forever, it will skip 0, and using the prefix operator will skip UINT_MAX. This is pretty much the exact use case for a do{...}while(i!=0); On the plus side knowing that the interviewer doesn't know their shit is a good sign that I don't want to work there.

2014-05-17 Reply Admin

nope:
David:
John Appleseed:
- looping infinitely because they just used while(i-- > 0). This is *very* common
That being said I think it's more practical to use the prefix operator.
This is why its hard to hire developers. The original code won't loop forever, it will skip 0, and using the prefix operator will skip UINT_MAX. This is pretty much the exact use case for a do{...}while(i!=0); On the plus side knowing that the interviewer doesn't know their shit is a good sign that I don't want to work there.

This is why it's hard to hire developers. The original code won't loop forever, it WILL NOT skip 0, it will skip UINT_MAX for the same reason that using the prefix operator will skip UINT_MAX. Although the original code executes the loop when i is UINT_MAX before decrementing, the internals of the loop execute with the decremented value of i. Although the original code exits the loop when i is 0 before decrementing (wrapping around), the internals of the loop already executed when the last iteration already decremented i to 0.

2014-06-03 Reply Admin

chubertdev:
Maternity leave by country
(food for thought)

But those countries don't provide anything. They use the power of government to force the employer to do it. The employer isn't compensated. This image is also only concerning the law, with no thought given to what the state of affairs actually is. I'd expect a nation concerned with freedom to have zero. So, go U.S.A.

2014-08-03 Reply Admin

I'm guessing I know which gender you are.

2014-08-15 Reply Admin

Learn your lesson: female bosses will destroy work places with their irrational behaviour.

Cbuttius · 2014-10-07 Reply Admin

He should just use a secret camera to report the conversations he is having with her.

He should then take them to HR. She has clearly broken the law twice with sexual and age discrimination for starters.

Sadly, I know this goes on far too much.

2016-09-12 Reply Admin

“What the hell was that? I have never, never been so humiliated in my life.”

TRWTF is how she can have lived this long and, apparently, somehow managed never to have had a real problem.

2017-09-12 Reply Admin

the craziest part (imo) is that a WOMAN refused to admit that getting pregnant was a valid reason for wanting to work part time! i could understand a man saying that, but for a WOMAN to say that about another WOMAN is just plain nuts!

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