• Anon (unregistered)

    How do companies like this even get started? It looks like someone needs some FIST.

  • SB (unregistered)

    string sql; // @SQLSentence=0x02f0 if ((bool)(Configuration.GetValue("UseHardcodedSQL"))) { sql = "SELECT First from mytable"; }

  • Lee K-T (unregistered)

    Looks like standard salesmen bonus oriented dev. Can't see anything original in this story. Maybe I'm too disillusionned, time to find another job.

  • rewind (unregistered)

    Sales drive software development eh? Who would have thought.

  • Drew (unregistered)

    Atleast my sales people pretend to be apologetic when they ask me to rip out and rearrange a system for one customer.

  • @Deprecated (unregistered)

    Thank you, TDWTF, for giving me the strength to do my job for one more day...

    Or at least, scaring me into not quitting for one more day!

  • EmperorOfCanada (unregistered)

    Been down the same path and wanted include a plugin architecture that was rejected as unnecessary fluff. Without it simple mathematics eventually caught up and everything was doomed. That is the difference between a good developer and a great developer. A great developer pads the architecture with the correct future flexibility. I guess we all have to screw up this way until we learn to say no.

  • RBoy (unregistered)

    This was Frist, but it was frist before the application was installed, so it's just being reported now...

    Damnum!

  • (cs)

    I have a pretty good idea which company this is referring to. Two words, with a flagship product containing a number, popular with a lot of universities, mainly designed for Windows 9x, never really updated for anything more modern, usually configured to be ridiculously easy to crack, often used for really irritating purposes like disabling important menu items in common programs.

    Right?

  • (cs)

    I had planned to make this comment three months earlier.

  • (cs) in reply to ounos
    ounos:
    I had planned to make this comment three months earlier.
    Hey! Why the f#ck am I behind schedule???
  • (cs)

    I utterly believe every part of this WTF. There will be those who don't, and I envy them their ignorance of real life.

  • leppie (unregistered)

    WTF is going on with the homepage?

  • Jabrwock (unregistered)

    if (time_machine_is_present()) { reboot_universe(); } else { project = FAIL; }

  • IChrisI (unregistered)

    This is the story of FoolProof, isn't it? I guess that explains why it's always been so easy to get around...

  • (cs)

    The password creation technique of taking the most obvious word (usually a company name) and changing the vowels to numbers in a predictable way is something I've seen over and over.

  • JB (unregistered)

    I once had a sale guy tell me, after I pointed out that he flat out lied to a customer about a feature being "all ready in the can" when we hadn't even designed it yet, that I was "confusing implementation with delivery".

    I blinked twice and then just walked away. I had no idea how to come back with a response.

  • Robo (unregistered)

    Well at least they didn't ask Dave to make custom-made software, that would have been that last straw for me.

  • anon (unregistered)

    What, he quit just because of that? His boss didn't even suprise him in the bathroom!

  • ZP (unregistered)

    Forget the time machine... How did you get cameras in my office? And my name isn't David...

  • Been There (unregistered) in reply to dpm
    dpm:
    I utterly believe every part of this WTF. There will be those who don't, and I envy them their ignorance of real life.

    I think too many of us have been there. I also think not enough of us have.

  • Procedural (unregistered) in reply to Been There

    ... I, for one, still need therapy.

  • morry (unregistered)

    at the last company I worked at, the project management had a bad habit of wanting to "negotiate" development time after analysis and design were completed. basically they'd already promised the customer a timeline based on a high-level estimate made months or years before, and wanted to shoe-horn the dev estimate into that. I remember walking into one meeting, the first on a new project, being briefed on what it was, handed the scope and (incomplete) requirements document, and then the gannt chart (the timeline / dependancy thing, I think it's Gantt). Anyway one glance at the timeline showed that not only had I already completed analysis I was partially through design. However as a change of pace, I scolded her. Bigtime.

  • jhkjh (unregistered) in reply to Procedural

    atleast this company got paid for the features. My boss tells me to put in new changes, or rewrite core functions of the application for a FREE demo to a potential client. ... atleast it isn't backlogged though, and he always tells clients that it is done when it is done.

  • LU (unregistered) in reply to JB
    JB:
    I once had a sale guy tell me, after I pointed out that he flat out lied to a customer about a feature being "all ready in the can" when we hadn't even designed it yet, that I was "confusing implementation with delivery".

    I blinked twice and then just walked away. I had no idea how to come back with a response.

    How about a kick right in his face?^^
  • RC (unregistered) in reply to jhkjh

    Where I work I could often hear the sales people selling features that hadn't even been discussed yet. We used to create demo versions that were 80-90% complete and ended up going nowhere.

    We even forked the product to "streamline" things for one customer and ended up with two vaguely similar products with increasingly divergent features.

    Things are far better now, but only by comparison.

    Rick

  • Jay (unregistered)

    I used to work for a company like this. The marketing director, who was also president of the company, would make outrageous promises to customers. One time I pointed out to him that he was promising about $100,000 worth of work to make a $10,000 sale. He literally could not comprehend why I thought that was a problem. He replied, "But we made a $10,000 sale!" "Well, yes," I replied, "But it will cost us more to do the work than the amount of the sale." He stared at me blankly and said, "But it's better to make a sale than to not make a sale."

  • cf18 (unregistered)

    It may not be a 5 minute job or have enough data to please the client, but scanning history, cookie and cache of popular browsers don't need a time machine.

  • ell0bo (unregistered)

    I work for a company like this now. The business execs will give customers quotes on how long the project will take to complete the project, without even talking to us. Or if they do, they'll cut down the hours. Of course we catch flack then when the programming takes as long as we said.

    Oh, and they never seem to put maintenance on the contracts. So although we need to keep supporting the systems, we have to do it for free. Of course this makes our bottom line for the dev department look horrible, and although we've doubled the amount of work we haven't gotten raises in about two years, but they sure as hell have.

    <apparently I've had this captcha before, because it just auto filled for me...>

  • !? (unregistered) in reply to cf18
    cf18:
    It may not be a 5 minute job or have enough data to please the client, but scanning history, cookie and cache of popular browsers don't need a time machine.
    That is, if they are interested in browser usage.

    They might have asked for way more than this.

  • (cs) in reply to Salami
    Salami:
    The password creation technique of taking the most obvious word (usually a company name) and changing the vowels to numbers in a predictable way is something I've seen over and over.

    The architect at a company I once worked for wrote a program that created English-pronouncable words (using phonetic rules) that weren't in the dictionary. IIRC, you could give it a length range and possibly a number of syllables, and it'd spit out stuff like "gorfilac" and "zoobormagin". When we needed a password, we'd fire it up and run it until it came up with something we liked.

    Geek fun at its best.

  • distineo (unregistered) in reply to IChrisI
    IChrisI:
    This is the story of FoolProof, isn't it? I guess that explains why it's always been so easy to get around...
    Well, it's not called ProProof, now, is it...
  • (cs)

    Reminds me of why my friend quit his last job. I've mentioned this particular workplace before (sorry, no link handy)...

    My friend had to do some processing on a delimited text file. The boss gave him a step-by-step e-mail explaining exactly what to do. He followed the instructions to the letter, and sent off the results.

    Later that day, the boss came storming into my friend's office. "You screwed up that processing job big time, you didn't do $THING!" No, he hadn't done $THING... because it wasn't in the instructions. The boss insisted that it was, so when my friend pulled up the e-mail, the boss stared blankly for a minute, and then said the following:

    "You should have just known."

  • alex j (unregistered)

    ugh...I'm feelikng a panic attack coming on just reading about this. brutal.

  • Michael Itzoe (unregistered) in reply to RobFreundlich

    gorfilac is my new password.

  • (cs) in reply to Michael Itzoe
    Michael Itzoe:
    gorfilac is my new password.

    That was my password. But I just changed it to "password" so there wouldn't be any conflicts with yours.

  • (cs) in reply to wee
    wee:
    Michael Itzoe:
    gorfilac is my new password.

    That was my password. But I just changed it to "password" so there wouldn't be any conflicts with yours.

    I changed my password to "12345". That's the same combination I use on my luggage!

  • iMalc (unregistered)

    Alright you, you know who you are, you're three months late commenting on this article! There shall be disciplinary action involved. Explain yourself to the board!

  • (cs)

    I love when co-workers and supervisors are irrational. That gives me the right to be irrational back to them.

    It should take 5 minutes to implement a feature that tracks info from before the app was installed? Ok, here's what I finished in 5 minutes. You may notice that it doesn't do anything, but we'll take care of that in a previous version.

  • C (unregistered) in reply to ell0bo
    ell0bo:
    I work for a company like this now. The business execs will give customers quotes on how long the project will take to complete the project, without even talking to us. Or if they do, they'll cut down the hours. Of course we catch flack then when the programming takes as long as we said.

    Oh, and they never seem to put maintenance on the contracts. So although we need to keep supporting the systems, we have to do it for free. Of course this makes our bottom line for the dev department look horrible, and although we've doubled the amount of work we haven't gotten raises in about two years, but they sure as hell have.

    <apparently I've had this captcha before, because it just auto filled for me...>

    And how come you're still working there? o.O

    Actually, my auto-fill has been right about 30% of times lately... Guess you're new to posting here? >:-)

  • Cow Can Type (unregistered) in reply to dpm
    dpm:
    I utterly believe every part of this WTF. There will be those who don't, and I envy them their ignorance of real life.

    nods sympathetically It does remind me of the last time I worked in the computer industry.

  • ChaosOnion (unregistered)

    We just decided to license 5 features of the software separately. Licensing features to have different versions was never considered in the initial design. Integration test is supposed to end in two weeks. This decision was made in a sales meeting when they determined they had only sold half the functionality of the product.

  • Laughing Jack (unregistered) in reply to dpm
    dpm:
    I utterly believe every part of this WTF. There will be those who don't, and I envy them their ignorance of real life.
    It's photoshopped. I can tell from some of the pixels, and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.
  • Ben4jammin (unregistered) in reply to akatherder
    akatherder:
    I love when co-workers and supervisors are irrational. That gives me the right to be irrational back to them.

    It should take 5 minutes to implement a feature that tracks info from before the app was installed? Ok, here's what I finished in 5 minutes. You may notice that it doesn't do anything, but we'll take care of that in a previous version.

    Irrational AND smart-ass...good work. I am in infrastructure, not programming, and I have suddenly realized that after reading this site for months now I am absolutely terrified of buying software...EVER AGAIN. Any chance some of these software packages will be promoted like "as seen on the Daily WTF"? That would really help me out.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Michael Itzoe
    Michael Itzoe:
    gorfilac is my new password.

    I keep wanting to pronounce that as Gorillarific.

  • Member of Class (unregistered)

    [quote user=Small But Rapidly Growing]This lack of payment translated into cashflow problems, which in turn translated to late paychecks. Of course, because the bugs and feature delivery problem were always the developers' fault, they were generally the only ones made to suffer by receiving their paychecks weeks late.[/quote]

    Sounds like a class-action lawsuit for wage theft. Fortunately, due to the company policy of dealing with lawsuits first, that means all future paychecks would be right on time.

  • Square Jawed Randroid Ubermensch (unregistered) in reply to C
    C:
    ell0bo:
    I work for a company like this now. The business execs will give customers quotes on how long the project will take to complete the project, without even talking to us. Or if they do, they'll cut down the hours. Of course we catch flack then when the programming takes as long as we said.

    Oh, and they never seem to put maintenance on the contracts. So although we need to keep supporting the systems, we have to do it for free. Of course this makes our bottom line for the dev department look horrible, and although we've doubled the amount of work we haven't gotten raises in about two years, but they sure as hell have.

    And how come you're still working there? o.O
    He should fire his boss. Then using the seed capital he aquires from ??? he should start a company mining the asteroid belt. Profit! Then, he should marry Ann Coulter and hire his former boss to wash his car.

    It's called ECONOMIC FREEDOM you COMMUNISTS.

  • codehoser (unregistered) in reply to EmperorOfCanada
    EmperorOfCanada:
    Been down the same path and wanted include a plugin architecture that was rejected as unnecessary fluff. Without it simple mathematics eventually caught up and everything was doomed. That is the difference between a good developer and a great developer. A great developer pads the architecture with the correct future flexibility. I guess we all have to screw up this way until we learn to say no.

    I'm guessing you're not being sarcastic here.

    A great developer most certainly does not pad anything with anything. In all likelihood, you think you're adding great little nuggets of brilliance to the codebase but, in reality, you're adding some good stuff mixed in with a bunch of junk that will just have to be deleted or worked around once the actual requirements for the future problem (which may or may not actually come) are known.

    I realize you may have benefited from a plug-in architecture, eventually. The time to build it is when you first need it, when the requirements of it are actually known. Otherwise, you have an absurdly high risk of creating much more than you need, or creating it in some way that renders it ineffective by the time it gets used.

    Sorry to rant, but practices like this are the source of most of the WTFs I see on a daily basis. Seriously -- "correct future flexibility"? Come on!

  • Shhnap (unregistered) in reply to codehoser

    I think what he means is that you should write all of your code so that it is as easy to refactor as possible. You know, low coupling and high cohesion, and all that sort of thing. Basically, write your code so that you don't want to kill yourself when (not if) you have to change it around.

    I think he's essentially saying that good (as compared to shit) developers write their code in this manner. (Padding was perhaps the wrong word)

  • Mr.'; Drop Database -- (unregistered) in reply to codehoser
    codehoser:
    Sorry to rant, but practices like this are the source of most of the WTFs I see on a daily basis. Seriously -- "correct future flexibility"? Come on!
    Agreed; it's almost impossible to know in advance what the "correct" flexibility is going to be. Why spend five hours now if it has a 10% chance of saving five hours later? What if the code only costs even more time when a maintenance developer tries to reconcile it with the actual requirements later on?

    That kind of "flexibility" has little to do with good development practices, and a lot to do with developers scratching their own egos.

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