• The Real WTF (unregistered) in reply to me too
    me too:
    O.M.G.

    That is so much like an application I've had to support that I can't laugh.

    Ahh, I see we've found the "poor chump" mentioned.

    My condolences.

  • J (unregistered)

    Wow, this makes no sense to me.

  • ben (unregistered)

    What did the "CTO" think was going to happen? You're all boring, stupid people doing boring, stupid things, badly, with horrible technology that doesn't work. It fails. No-one other than you is surprised. Or interested. Yeah, some idiot hired some idiot to do something stupid neither of them understood and, yeah, it failed. Huzzah. Great. You must be so happy.

  • ben (unregistered)

    It's these "stories from Alex's day-to-day-life" which are the most pathetic. He runs a website about how idiots who try to use Microsoft products can't, yet every story is a feeble cry for help. What do you want us to do, Alex? Help you be less of a loser?

  • Martin (unregistered)

    It works for them so what?

  • Metal Lord (unregistered) in reply to mizchief
    mizchief:
    Poor chump? Hell I would update two buttons and add a db table once a year for $10,000 a month! Would spend the other 50 weeks of the year creating intresting software.

    I'd spend the rest of the year in Thailand.

  • bkkexpat (unregistered) in reply to Metal Lord

    hahaha, I am! :) :) :)

  • Metal Lord (unregistered) in reply to Jules
    Jules:
    me too:
    Employees and customers in the same table.

    Nothing necessarily wrong with that. What if an employee is a customer too?

    How about a person/entity/existential point of reference/what-have-you table that saves basic data and has a one-to-one with both "employees" and "customers" tables? like lesson 2 in any of ye olde database design courses.

    no excuse for defective design other than cluelessness, carelessness or stupidity.

  • (cs) in reply to Fraggle My Rock
    Fraggle My Rock:
    CRNewsom:
    I worked for a guy whose idea of server security was a metal cage around the server. Also, when the sysadmin quit, he had all the CAT5 in the building pulled up and replaced, just in case there were any "back doors" he could use to break into the server.

    Personally I would have also included the dogs with bees in their mouths but I suppose a metal cage is "good enough".

    I prefer sharks with frigging lasers on their heads.

  • Peterp (unregistered) in reply to dag

    I think he was referring to how complicated that must have been to do on the web.

  • topeka (unregistered)

    that's too bad, man!! then u really need to do something fun!! i'll give a suggestion: go to millionaireloves.com and date the girl u really wanna!! could be fun and benifiting!!

  • (cs) in reply to Justice
    Justice:
    Whether the money will get you a good woman is a different story.
    Who cares for a good woman when you can have beautiful women? ;-)
  • Jaco (unregistered) in reply to me too

    I once worked at a company where I had to develop a sales system, but one of their other systems were remarkably much like the one described, but no quite as bad.

    In the middle of our project they asked me to help them maintain that system, but I was not used to MS Access and so I asked them to show me how they use the system. Soon enough the CEO decided that this system doesn't look too complicated, he'll figure it out himself. I was quite relieved.

    The CEO then started complaining that our new system was not enough like this other system: "Why are the table names filled with acronyms?" "Why is everything in Java?" "Why is the background white and the buttons gray?" "Teach me SQL, so that I can maintain it myself." etc.

    By that time I was the only developer left on our project, the others having either left or been driven away by our CEO, because of constant public humiliation. I unfortunately didn't realize what was happening, so he had to actually cancel the project to get rid of me.

    He of course had a quite elaborate way to do this. He asked me to give him a quote on how much the remaining development will cost. This turned out to be about half of what could be expected from out original quote, but he still said that it was too expensive and that he would have to cancel the project. He also wouldn't pay me for the quote, even though I worked two weeks to calculate do it. (Had to finish the design to be able to quote accurately enough for him.)

    Hopefully, if I ever accept such a "quick job" again, I will actually be working with someone who knows how to handle company politics, and who knows how to put such a "know-it-all" CEO in his place.

    I do think I understand him a bit, though. We were not the first team he hired to develop the sales system, at one time I managed to convince them to show me the previous team's system. It seemed to me like a nice enough system, although I couldn't make head or tail of the code. It used strange libraries from disbanded Russian websites. They said their complaint about it was that it was only an empty shell with nothing inside. After the previous team's perceived trickery (I couldn't prove either way), he was very paranoid about all programmers, and his public humiliation tactics was actually his way of trying to show everyone that we were ALSO tricksters. He tried to show everyone that he was more knowledgeable about development than our team leader, and he had me explain, in public and with know preparation, why he should pay us per month, rather than when he is finally satisfied with the project.

    Whatever. I'm glad to be rid of him.

  • (cs)

    Agreed - the worst of the worst is the CEO/President/Owner who thinks that he's a certifiable genius because he started a company and knows how to do everything himself, just that he's too important/busy (all these owners claim to be so busy, but I never see them do shit) to do it, hence why he needs employees. Of course, because he knows everything already he expects to be able to just dictate off to developers what needs to be done, instead of trusting professionals to handle their specialty.

    How the fuck some of these idiots can even manage to own a company and be wealthy is beyond me. We need to find some way to put these morons in their place and on the street where they belong.

  • SteveB (unregistered)

    Reminds me of product I wanted to evaluate, a web application except to access to access the demo you have to open an RDC session onto the vendor's box.

    Shame our firewall doesn't allow outgoing RDC (or incoming, before anyone suggests that that's the RealWTF™)

  • FinnGamble (unregistered) in reply to Jaco
    Jaco:
    After the previous team's perceived trickery (I couldn't prove either way), he was very paranoid about all programmers, and his public humiliation tactics was actually his way of trying to show everyone that we were ALSO tricksters.

    Actually, what you are saying here makes me suspect that you may have run into someone with Narcissistic personality disorder. Those people can very dangerous - they will often use charisma and all kinds of mind games to rise to high positions in companies and very often end up ruining the both the business and other peoples' lives.

    See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narcissistic_personality_disorder

  • Fraggle My Rock (unregistered) in reply to Pritchard
    Pritchard:
    This is the same feeling I get when I see most custom .NET or Java code, compared to the stuff we were turning out on mainframes in the 80's and 90's.

    Uh oh ... I smell accelerant. Is that a flame thrower?

  • (cs)

    This apparently got anonymized out of the story, but the $10,000/month was the original developer's "support" price. The company wanted a support contract that was on the order of $10,000/year...

  • scott (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    I've been a consultant for over a decade, and all I've ever seen is that companies think that good decisions are to save money on the original capital expense rather than to hire the right people and get the right product.

  • AGuerren (unregistered)

    My company deployed an application in a similar fashion a while back. Basically we had a successful desktop application that needed to be accessible via the web. It was decided that the quickest way to accomplish this transition was to make it available via Citrix. There was an ongoing discussion (mainly in Marketing) about what it meant to be "Web Enabled" or "Browser Based" and whether or not this setup qualified as either. Regardless, the clients absolutely loved it, especially since it was configured for "Seamless Sessions" and appeared to be running locally. Eventually we put together a web front end, but we still have a few large clients that prefer the Citrix/TS route.

    WinNT/2K/XP/etc all shipped with a CAL. Strange, I didn't realize that Win95 lacked one.

  • Tom P. (unregistered) in reply to Jaco
    Jaco:
    [...snip...] He tried to show everyone that he was more knowledgeable about development than our team leader, and he had me explain, in public and with know preparation, why he should pay us per month, rather than when he is finally satisfied with the project.

    Whatever. I'm glad to be rid of him.

    Ummm, before you complain about someone elses incompetence you might want to review the correct use of the word "no". It would make you look less like a complete retard.

  • Sebastian Ramadan (unregistered)

    "receptionists second-cousins father-in-law" the receptionist and the cousin had a great grandparent in common. "father-in-law twice removed" implies that the father-in-law is the same person as the cousins cousins grandparent or grandchild, which implies that the cousins spouse is a cousin to the cousin. Am I right?

  • Lord of All! (unregistered) in reply to dag
    dag:
    "Though easy to fix through CreateMutex(), Robert was amazed at all the code the programmer must have used to create this feature."

    No code needed, surely, just set the remote desktop server to only allow one connection.

    How could a remote desktop accept multiple connections simultaneously?

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