• (cs)

    Oh, this is the real life inspiration for Mandatory Fun Day isn't it.

  • (cs)

    So... he worked for two weeks?

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered)
    His optimism, admittedly, wasn't unrelated to the fact that he'd be billing close to $300 and hour.
    Only close to 300 dollars? Doesn't take much to perk him up, as that sounds closer to 150 ATM visits to me. Maybe Mr. hour whom he was also billing was offering more?</pedant>
  • Joshua Ochs (unregistered)

    I'm more than a bit skeptical of this. Given that I have an old Dell server (with an incredible TWO 400Mhz Pentium II's! And 256MB of memory!) next to me that runs Windows 2000 quite well, this guy sounds a bit incompetent. Reload the OS, move it out into the hallway if necessary, and get to work.

    We've seen some major WTF's, but here I'd say it's Lee and his inflated hourly.

  • Josh (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that they were using Windows as a monitoring tool.

    What's going to watch the watcher?

    What monitor is going to make sure that your monitor comes back online after its requisite weekly reboot?

  • (cs) in reply to WhiskeyJack
    WhiskeyJack:
    So... he worked for two weeks?
    2 weeks @ $300/hour = $24,000.

    12,000 * $2 ATM fee = $24,000.

    Coincidence?

  • (cs)

    We'll send him crappy hardware The worst ever made But Lee says when you get lemons You make lemonade Now if you're wondering how he beat the cold And other science facts Just remember it's a WTF You should really just relax For Daily W. T. F. Three thouuusaaannndddd

  • (cs) in reply to KattMan

    For $300/hour, I'd wear a parka, snow pants, heated socks, gloves, and happily sit in the mens room if necessary.

    Ok, it was an aborted effort, but he made a nice chunk of change in a short time, and on his resume, he can put stuff like:

    - performed hardware performance analysis as part of network capacity planning
- recommended server upgrades to support projected usage
- verified that the climate control system in the server room was right-sized
- tested and validated secure-access mechanisms to network facilities
- engineered methodologies to maximize throughput with limited hardware facilities and budgets

    Lee wins!

  • Man 987876980 (unregistered) in reply to Josh
    Josh:
    TRWTF is that they were using Windows as a monitoring tool.

    What's going to watch the watcher?

    What monitor is going to make sure that your monitor comes back online after its requisite weekly reboot?

    Have you actually ever used Windows Server versions? Or even any Version newer than WinME... it runs for weks or months quite happily if you don't visit those dodgy sites...
  • Tom Servo (unregistered) in reply to EpilepticFridgeBoy
    We'll send him crappy hardware The worst ever made But Lee says when you get lemons You make lemonade Now if you're wondering how he beat the cold And other science facts Just remember it's a WTF You should really just relax For Daily W. T. F. Three thouuusaaannndddd

    I'm not totally surprised to see an MST3k reference... But a reference to the KTMA-era theme song. Wow! I'm impressed.

    May your forehead grow like the mighty oak!

  • inhibeo (unregistered)

    what's wrong with a windows box, he should just be glad it wasn't novell "netware" (aka pre-SLES to you young'ins) that was a DOS unix hybrid WTF... Though it could run for YEARs without crashing/rebooting it really didn't so much when it was running so there was a point. Heck I've seen eDirectory servers running on old POS boxes that have < 1Gb ram :(

  • Tom Servo (unregistered) in reply to Tom Servo

    Oops. Sorry, I messed up the quoting there. But, give me some credit. I'm trying to type and I'm a robot with arms that don't work.

  • Former Jr. Programmer (unregistered)

    I don't get that last sentence in the article.

  • Former Jr. Programmer (unregistered)

    OH. He's working for a BANK and made $24000. Got it. Nevermind.

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    "faze"

  • Jfruh (unregistered)

    This is unrelated to the content but ...

    It's faze. Faze. FAZE. As in "That didn't faze him." Not phase. Faze.

    Sorry to be a pedant, but this shows up on TDWTF (which I love) all the time. Just thought maybe I could stop the madness?

  • Herohtar (unregistered)
    Shivering and miserable, Lee sent an email to Clark. This took a while because, unfortunately, the system apparently did have a hard time running Office.

    TRWTF is using Office to write an email!

  • (cs)

    My wife makes double the money she should be making based on her qualifications and experience. However she has to work odd hours (5am - 8:30am on weekdays and all day Saturday).

    If they are paying you $300/hour you have no room to complain about it being cold or having a slow computer. Deal with it. You are being overcompensated for your inconvenience.

  • notJoeKing (unregistered)

    So he worked for 2 weeks and only earned $300 plus "hour"? Man I would never work for that little... unless that hour could be used at any point in time, then I could use it to go back and buy stock or a winning lotto ticket. :)

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    The real WTF is an $300/hr-consultant having trouble to send an e-mail with "only" 256 MB of RAM. Seriously, I've programmed and surfed with a quarter of that.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    The real WTF is an $300/hr-consultant having trouble to send an e-mail with "only" 256 MB of RAM. Seriously, I've programmed and surfed with a quarter of that.

    When was the last time you could get a machine with 64MB of memory? I think you are talking back in the DOS days when you didn't have images on web pages, only text, and the development tools of the day didn't have things like intellisense.

    These days, 256MB of memory is needed just for the OS leaving almost nothing for the user.

    I know, I know, back in the old days we had to code in the snow, uphill, both ways, with no boots on. And we liked it!

  • Micah Rousey (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    Nice!!! Wanna write my Resume?

  • morry (unregistered)

    I'd work in Baghdad for $300 an hour.

  • MindChild (unregistered) in reply to KattMan

    Are you serious? 64MB on Windows 98 was COMMON.

    Windows 2000 can run fine on it. It isn't snappy, but it isn't THAT BAD. Sure, you can't have outlook open, word open, 10 tabs in firefox open, Visual Studio 2005 open, all at the same time, but I think people forget how they used to use computers.

    Especially at a bank, they have done it the same way for as long as they can. They never got used to having applications needlessly open just because you didn't feel like closing it.

    Especially on contract, you have to be able to deal with cruddy situations. This is why you emacs/nano folks should still know vi. You never know when you have to telnet into a SunOS 2.6 machine where that is the only editor you have.

  • (cs) in reply to MindChild
    MindChild:
    Are you serious? 64MB on Windows 98 was COMMON.

    Windows 2000 can run fine on it. It isn't snappy, but it isn't THAT BAD. Sure, you can't have outlook open, word open, 10 tabs in firefox open, Visual Studio 2005 open, all at the same time, but I think people forget how they used to use computers.

    Especially at a bank, they have done it the same way for as long as they can. They never got used to having applications needlessly open just because you didn't feel like closing it.

    Especially on contract, you have to be able to deal with cruddy situations. This is why you emacs/nano folks should still know vi. You never know when you have to telnet into a SunOS 2.6 machine where that is the only editor you have.

    Thank you for answering my question, even though you think you were arguing my point. 64MB of memory was fine 8-10 years ago. Today's systems require so much more.

    Personally I think it is all bloat and we really don't need all that fancy stuff, and a win2k machine will still run today just fine, but the answer is 8 years ago this was top.

  • (cs) in reply to Jfruh
    This is unrelated to the content but ...

    It's faze. Faze. FAZE. As in "That didn't faze him." Not phase. Faze.

    Sorry to be a pedant, but this shows up on TDWTF (which I love) all the time. Just thought maybe I could stop the madness?

    Oh, don't mind them. They're just going through a faze.

  • SomeCoder (unregistered) in reply to KattMan

    Really, the real WTF is that 256 MB of RAM won't run Microsoft Office (AKA Microsoft Bloatware).

    My office PC with 1 GB of RAM has major issues running MS Office 2008. This is with very little else running. That's a huge WTF in my opinion.

  • sweavo (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    MindChild:
    Are you serious? 64MB on Windows 98 was COMMON.

    Windows 2000 can run fine on it. It isn't snappy, but it isn't THAT BAD. Sure, you can't have outlook open, word open, 10 tabs in firefox open, Visual Studio 2005 open, all at the same time, but I think people forget how they used to use computers.

    Especially at a bank, they have done it the same way for as long as they can. They never got used to having applications needlessly open just because you didn't feel like closing it.

    Especially on contract, you have to be able to deal with cruddy situations. This is why you emacs/nano folks should still know vi. You never know when you have to telnet into a SunOS 2.6 machine where that is the only editor you have.

    Thank you for answering my question, even though you think you were arguing my point. 64MB of memory was fine 8-10 years ago. Today's systems require so much more.

    Personally I think it is all bloat and we really don't need all that fancy stuff, and a win2k machine will still run today just fine, but the answer is 8 years ago this was top.

    Does the story give a date? It certainly seems to have been written in the past tense.

  • (cs) in reply to sweavo
    sweavo:
    Does the story give a date? It certainly seems to have been written in the past tense.

    Doesn't matter, I was responding to the guy saying he surfed the net and programmed with only 64MB of memory. I asked when that was valid, answer, with technology 10 years old. No way you could get away with it now, and trying to run Win2k on 64MB of memory would still make it crawl. The story has no relevance to this really, as it talks of Win2k and 256MB of memory, hence my statment of "back in the day..." Read the rest of the thread before remarking on relevance, as there really isn't any.

  • Konamiman (unregistered)

    $300/hour!!! For this money I would agree to develop a Windows Vista clone for the NES!

  • Konamiman (unregistered) in reply to MindChild
    Sure, [on 64MB] you can't have outlook open, word open, 10 tabs in firefox open, Visual Studio 2005 open, all at the same time, but I think people forget how they used to use computers.
    If you can open Visual Studio 2005 alone with 64MB, you are either God or Chuck Norris. :-)

    But you are right. My first computer had 64KB, my first PC had 1MB, my first Pentium had 16MB, and all of them worked fine. (Well, actually, running Windows 95 with 16MB was quite "funny")

  • RLARIOS (unregistered) in reply to MindChild
    MindChild:
    Especially on contract, you have to be able to deal with cruddy situations.

    Tell me about it!!! on a past job (LAST YEAR) i was handed a PC with a Pentium 3, with 128 MB of RAM and windows 98 to mantain a gigantic Web Application. I was getting used to too many OutofMemoryErrors.

    once i had to insert 500000 records on a HashTable for a test... well the pc didn't liked it and died on the spot.

    Thankfully my next PC was a pentium 4 1.5 GHz and 256 MB of RAM. Talk about upgrading your misery!

  • BEFore (unregistered)

    You're forgetting that the system was also running whatever monitoring they were doing. They didn't give him a separate box to develop on. It's entirely possible that the system was already running at near-capacity when he tried to fire up outlook.

  • (cs) in reply to RLARIOS
    RLARIOS:
    MindChild:
    Especially on contract, you have to be able to deal with cruddy situations.

    Tell me about it!!! on a past job (LAST YEAR) i was handed a PC with a Pentium 3, with 128 MB of RAM and windows 98 to mantain a gigantic Web Application. I was getting used to too many OutofMemoryErrors.

    once i had to insert 500000 records on a HashTable for a test... well the pc didn't liked it and died on the spot.

    Thankfully my next PC was a pentium 4 1.5 GHz and 256 MB of RAM. Talk about upgrading your misery!

    This is why, when contracting, I show up with my own laptop and if at all possible use that. Granted some places won't let you, but they are the ones paying the bill after all.

  • (cs) in reply to Konamiman
    Konamiman:
    Sure, [on 64MB] you can't have outlook open, word open, 10 tabs in firefox open, Visual Studio 2005 open, all at the same time, but I think people forget how they used to use computers.
    If you can open Visual Studio 2005 alone with 64MB, you are either God or Chuck Norris. :-)
    Or else you're Bruce Schneier.
  • Anonymouse (unregistered)
    directly above a vent that pumped 50° air into the room (and up Lee's pant leg)

    The real WTF is using a measurement system only a hand full of countries use without specifying so. (Is a simple 'F' really that hard?)

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    TRWTF is that anyone is still measuring temperatures in Fahrenheit..

    50 degrees? Mmm, toasty :)

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymouse
    Anonymouse:
    The real WTF is using a measurement system only a hand full of countries use without specifying so. (Is a simple 'F' really that hard?)
    No, no, no.. those are arc degrees. The air was being blown at an angle.

    [10ºC btw]

  • (cs) in reply to Lexarius
    Lexarius:
    This is unrelated to the content but ...

    It's faze. Faze. FAZE. As in "That didn't faze him." Not phase. Faze.

    Sorry to be a pedant, but this shows up on TDWTF (which I love) all the time. Just thought maybe I could stop the madness?

    Oh, don't mind them. They're just going through a faze.

    In that case, I could care less.

  • (cs) in reply to Mel

    Seriously though, if you're going to write in a language, at least learn it first!

  • Dave Grammar (unregistered) in reply to Jfruh

    "... he'd be billing close to $300 and hour."

  • stupergenius (unregistered) in reply to Jfruh

    Didn't phase me a bit.

  • Harrow (unregistered) in reply to Mel
    Mel:
    Seriously though, if you're going to write in a language, at least learn it first!
    Well, nobody at Microsoft ever seems to do that, and look how well they're doing.

    -Harrow.

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    Ok, it was an aborted effort, but he made a nice chunk of change in a short time, and on his resume, he can put stuff like:
    You wouldn't be interested in a resume/performance-review preparation gig, would you? I've always had a hard time translating what I actually do (make sure everything works and everyone knows how to use it) into buzzword-compliant or manager-friendly bullet points.
  • Dan (unregistered) in reply to KattMan
    KattMan:
    This is why, when contracting, I show up with my own laptop and if at all possible use that. Granted some places won't let you, but they are the ones paying the bill after all.

    ding ding ding

    Or you could, you know, just deal with it. I mean, I currently run a 1 GHz/256 MB Mac with 10.3 at home... yes, it's rather ossified, but it works just fine and I'm still able to be productive on it. We only upgraded our work computers from similar configurations last year (running XP), and we were doing some heavy-duty compiling and debugging on those.

    I'm not saying he was wrong to request a better machine, at the very least so they'd be getting their money's worth of productivity out of him. But anyone I hire for $300/hour better be at least as capable as I am of making do with what amounts to an inconvenience at best.

    Dan.

  • Recycled contractor (unregistered)

    Wow, this sure sounds familiar. Well, except for the $300/hr part...

    In my case, we were downloading pretty much the entire contents of a database to a Sybase DB running on a Novell 4.x server, operating on a speedy IBM PS/2 model 80. The initial load was I think 400 megabytes, broken up into 20 megabyte chunks because the bank's Token-Ring network was a little flaky, and sometimes you'd get a corrupt file. Or Novell would go for a little vacation. Or Sybase would spontaneously decide you had a duplicate key. Or any other number of hard-to-reproduce errors that we'd have a tough time explaining to the bank representatives.

    There were 3 of us on the project, and we were taking turns sitting in the refrigerated closet with the server watching the file transfer go. The fun part is the architect had decided that this transfer would run nightly. Of course, after he spent his shifts in the igloo, he came up with the idea to only send over nightly deltas of only a few megabytes, which had a much greater chance of success, and might could run unattended. Mostly. We think.

    It worked long enough for the check to be cashed, anyway.

  • CynicalTyler (unregistered) in reply to EpilepticFridgeBoy
    EpilepticFridgeBoy:
    We'll send him crappy hardware The worst ever made But Lee says when you get lemons You make lemonade Now if you're wondering how he beat the cold And other science facts Just remember it's a WTF You should really just relax For Daily W. T. F. Three thouuusaaannndddd
    EPIC WIN!
  • (cs) in reply to Dan
    Dan:
    But anyone I hire for $300/hour better be at least as capable as I am of making do with what amounts to an inconvenience at best.
    Hard to argue with that. However, if you're paying someone that much money, why not *listen* to his suggestions? Is the price of memory that much higher where you live? Did you not understand the title of this article?
  • (cs) in reply to Jfruh
    Jfruh:
    This is unrelated to the content but ...

    It's faze. Faze. FAZE. As in "That didn't faze him." Not phase. Faze.

    Sorry to be a pedant, but this shows up on TDWTF (which I love) all the time. Just thought maybe I could stop the madness?

    Seconded! FAZE. That's not so hard of a word, now, is it?

  • (cs) in reply to Jfruh
    Jfruh:
    This is unrelated to the content but ...

    It's faze. Faze. FAZE. As in "That didn't faze him." Not phase. Faze.

    Sorry to be a pedant, but this shows up on TDWTF (which I love) all the time. Just thought maybe I could stop the madness?

    You might as well faze the fax: you can't never stop there looser madness.

Leave a comment on “Penny-Wise, Pound-Foolish”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article