The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Nagesh · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Matt Westwood:
Jupiter:
Mason Wheeler:
progree:
Kuba:
BlackBart:
frits:
Was this C++? I would have looked for uninitialized variables before even contacting the customer. I also would have looked for stack overflows and buffer overruns. C and/or C++ is the devil's playground in most developers hands, idle or not.

Clearly this wasn't C or C++. C and C++ are not advanced enough to be configured to generate a dump file without a lot of work or adding a dump routine - which Vince would surely have disallowed as being too likely to catch a virus.
I think TRWTF is that C/C++ compilers can be at best expected to produce warnings about that. There should be a way to force a C/C++ compiler to simply initialize everything. It should only be disabled on the little (if any) code where benchmarks show significant and useful speed gains.

I respectfully disagree - c is not intended to be safe; it is intended to be a convenient step above assembly language. There are many instances where it just isn't necessary to initialize areas of data. Unsafe, yes. Necessary, no.

I must respectfully disagree. C was created with the explicit purpose of OS programming, specifically, to write UNIX in. OSes need to be secure, and C fails miserably at that. We've known that since 1989, and consistently ignored it for just as long.

Considering the amount of damage that's been done in the last 22 years due to buffer overruns and similar C flaws, shouldn't writing any network facing software (OSes, browsers, Internet tools of all kinds) in C or derivatives (C++, Objective-C, etc) be considered an act of criminal negligence by now?

what the hell would you have written it in?

FORTRAN of course. No fucking brainer like usual on this fucking site.

Gud luk with that!!!

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

the real trtrwtf:
Lucent:
the real trtrwtf:
Trouble is, I'm a Phil Ochs leftist calling you that...
You identify your ideology by the name of an entertainer.
Makes about as much sense as identifying your ideology by a relative direction... "ten degrees to the left of center in the best of times, ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally"

Hmmm... try reading that again.

I was saying that deriving one's beliefs from the lyrics of a signer is insipid, which you then demonstrated, but I'm not surprised because that's how people go about these things. Believe what the cool people believe and you can be cool too.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Lucent:
the real trtrwtf:
Lucent:
the real trtrwtf:
Trouble is, I'm a Phil Ochs leftist calling you that...
You identify your ideology by the name of an entertainer.
Makes about as much sense as identifying your ideology by a relative direction... "ten degrees to the left of center in the best of times, ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally"
Hmmm... try reading that again.
I was saying that deriving one's beliefs from the lyrics of a signer is insipid, which you then demonstrated, but I'm not surprised because that's how people go about these things. Believe what the cool people believe and you can be cool too.

I assume that this is you pretending to take this seriously in some sort of hip ironic way - or are you really stupid enough to think that an off-hand reference to a funny line is actually a complete and correct summary of my political views?

On the off chance that you're a moron: no, I actually don't model my politics on Phil Ochs. I like some of his songs, that's about it. Sorry to disappoint you.

You can go on dragging this out if you want, though. It's funnier when you use the Nagesh personality, though.

C-Octothorpe · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

the real trtrwtf:
C-Octothorpe:
Anketam:
And as always: remember when a boss asks you to do something stupid or unethical always get it in writing. So when it comes out you can point to the email or chat log and take out your boss and reap some sense of retribution at their demise. <insert evil laughter>
All the memo-to-notes, email trails, etc. are nice, but mostly look good in theory. I say that because your bosses boss likely doesn't know you nor does he give a shit what you think. All he knows is that your boss is the guy he has been golfing with for the past six years and he trusts his opinion (unless it's a monumental WTF, time after time).
I've seen this first-hand a few times, and every time your bosses boss looks at you and you boss like a parent witnessing their kids arguing in a resteraunt: they're embarrased you're doing it and just want both of you to shut the fuck up.

But this isn't absolute and is an unfortunate reality. I do agree however, that trying to CYA is probably the safest way to go.

You know, I hadn't really thought about it, but yeah, I think this is right. I generally do pretty well at avoiding this sort of situation, so I've never been in a position where I'd be tempted to pull out a wad of paperwork, but I think for the most part a situation like this is usually going to be resolved by replacing the most junior person in the conflict, not by figuring out who's right. It's just easier. Even if it leaves long-term problems in place (like the subordinate's immediate boss, for one) it's still easier in the short term to make someone else hire a new subordinate and get them trained up than to hire a new person yourself. This might be an ancillary clause to the Peter Principle.

The only time I've ever seen the opposite (superior getting the axe) was in a situation where he was failing to meet deadlines, promises, etc. on a consistent basis, coupled with treating his underlings like shit.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

the real trtrwtf:
Lucent:
the real trtrwtf:
Lucent:
the real trtrwtf:
Trouble is, I'm a Phil Ochs leftist calling you that...
You identify your ideology by the name of an entertainer.
Makes about as much sense as identifying your ideology by a relative direction... "ten degrees to the left of center in the best of times, ten degrees to the right of center when it affects them personally"
Hmmm... try reading that again.
I was saying that deriving one's beliefs from the lyrics of a signer is insipid, which you then demonstrated, but I'm not surprised because that's how people go about these things. Believe what the cool people believe and you can be cool too.
I assume that this is you pretending to take this seriously in some sort of hip ironic way - or are you really stupid enough to think that an off-hand reference to a funny line is actually a complete and correct summary of my political views?

On the off chance that you're a moron: no, I actually don't model my politics on Phil Ochs. I like some of his songs, that's about it. Sorry to disappoint you.

You can go on dragging this out if you want, though. It's funnier when you use the Nagesh personality, though.

Someone's getting upset.

Do I think it's likely that some random dufus heard some motivating song lyrics about the woes of the working man and embraced the underlying mentality? Uh, yeah. Have you met people before?

Do I think you did? I don't know you, but there's something about naive idealism that inspires those who feel before they think. Which is pretty much everyone, so given a random sample, I'd say there's a good chance. Where do you think 99% of hippies came from.

I don't usually drag my trolling out this far. You should feel honored.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

C-Octothorpe:
the real trtrwtf:
C-Octothorpe:
Anketam:
And as always: remember when a boss asks you to do something stupid or unethical always get it in writing. So when it comes out you can point to the email or chat log and take out your boss and reap some sense of retribution at their demise. <insert evil laughter>
All the memo-to-notes, email trails, etc. are nice, but mostly look good in theory. I say that because your bosses boss likely doesn't know you nor does he give a shit what you think. All he knows is that your boss is the guy he has been golfing with for the past six years and he trusts his opinion (unless it's a monumental WTF, time after time).
I've seen this first-hand a few times, and every time your bosses boss looks at you and you boss like a parent witnessing their kids arguing in a resteraunt: they're embarrased you're doing it and just want both of you to shut the fuck up.

But this isn't absolute and is an unfortunate reality. I do agree however, that trying to CYA is probably the safest way to go.

You know, I hadn't really thought about it, but yeah, I think this is right. I generally do pretty well at avoiding this sort of situation, so I've never been in a position where I'd be tempted to pull out a wad of paperwork, but I think for the most part a situation like this is usually going to be resolved by replacing the most junior person in the conflict, not by figuring out who's right. It's just easier. Even if it leaves long-term problems in place (like the subordinate's immediate boss, for one) it's still easier in the short term to make someone else hire a new subordinate and get them trained up than to hire a new person yourself. This might be an ancillary clause to the Peter Principle.
The only time I've ever seen the opposite (superior getting the axe) was in a situation where he was failing to meet deadlines, promises, etc. on a consistent basis, coupled with treating his underlings like shit.

Yep. Then the underling is a convenient excuse for doing what the uber-boss wants to do anyway.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Lucent:
Do I think it's likely that some random dufus heard some motivating song lyrics about the woes of the working man and embraced the underlying mentality? Uh, yeah. Have you met people before?

Met 'em. Didn't like 'em much, though.

Do I think you did? I don't know you, but there's something about naive idealism that inspires those who feel before they think. Which is pretty much everyone, so given a random sample, I'd say there's a good chance. Where do you think 99% of hippies came from.

I thought 99% of hippies came from Colorado, these days.

Used to shoot them from my porch, when I was living in Oregon, but Massachusetts has tighter gun control laws.

I don't usually drag my trolling out this far. You should feel honored

Oh, ever so.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

the real trtrwtf:
Lucent:
Have you met people before?
Met 'em. Didn't like 'em much, though.

A misanthropic humanist.

Actually, I run into these all the time.

I comes from being deeply bitter about other people (misanthropy), which then drives the need to be morally superior (humanism), but results in nothing but hot air.

pauly · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Where I work, we bill for taking a dump. Only get two breaks a day, and have to bill all time. Like a law firm without the connections.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Lucent:
I comes from being deeply bitter about other people (misanthropy), which then drives the need to be morally superior (humanism), but results in nothing but hot air.

Nothing to do with being morally superior, I just don't like people much. Not very bitter about it, either. The ones I like, I like fine, it's just that most of them aren't worth the paper they're printed on, that's all.

Your pyschoanalysis is hitting pretty wide of the mark. Does it have anything to do with your feelings about your mother?

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

From my experience, PMOs come about when there’s a lack of strong leadership in the traditional hierarchy of subordination and/or there’s overall “messiness” in organization’s management structure. In 3 companies that I have worked for in the past few years, including my present gig, PMs add very little value, while consuming precious resources and reducing the performance of the organization.

A typical PM will:

type a lot of needless documentation;
print all of it, repetitively (one particularly funny case – a PM here printed the same 50-page document twice during the day only because he made a few edits to it, needless to say, everyone has email and Word on their PCs) – anyone in the green party?
look at you, speak with you and otherwise act with a very serious intonation, – instinctively trying to make up for the lack of their usefulness;
hold meetings all day long, thus pulling people on both the IT side and the “other” side (be it marketing or customer service) from their responsibilities where time is already scarce, and ultimately hurting the organization;
consistently misrepresent facts and miscommunicate essential information, leading to confusion and poor results, which consequently leads to the whole IT department getting a bad rep;
create problems out of thin air, some of which then get communicated all the way up to executives, further alienating the business from the IT department;
hold lengthy phone conversations, discussing what needs to be done and what is getting done; (while developers sitting right next to him are actually banging out the code and thinking about how unfair is life)

… so you get the picture.

Yes, there are problems with IT; however, traditional hierarchy can and should be used to solve them (for example, CEO > CIO > App Dev manager > Team/project lead > Developers in the case of software development).

hatterson · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Personally I thought the following exchange was clever

There was an extremely long pause at the other end of the line. Eventually the customer said, "You work for a group of morons."
"The customer is always right," Rick said, "but I'm still going to need you to fax that over."

Functionally Rick saying to the customer that he's aware the request is incredibly stupid, but unfortunately he must comply.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

What, and unleash a virus into the wild? It's a wonder you're even employed.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

A very long time ago, when I was in college, I heard a commotion arise from the bathroom. Someone leapt out into the hall and grabbed me, "Dude, you have to see this." No, I didn't. But they dragged me in anyway. The entire floor had circled around one of the toilet stalls to view some mystery man's deposit. It was the diameter of a beer can and as long as a forearm. I really didn't need to see that, but the other 20 or so people on the floor thought this was the most amazing thing ever. No one fessed up to being the source.

Hey, I think that was mine! Did you go to SLC?

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Whatever, virus in the binary? Dump isn't executable after all. On side note, if virus IS there, media doesn't matter, you transferring exact bytes.

WTF

Matt Westwood · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Mr. TA:
From my experience, PMOs come about when there’s a lack of strong leadership in the traditional hierarchy of subordination and/or there’s overall “messiness” in organization’s management structure. In 3 companies that I have worked for in the past few years, including my present gig, PMs add very little value, while consuming precious resources and reducing the performance of the organization.
A typical PM will:

type a lot of needless documentation;

print all of it, repetitively (one particularly funny case – a PM here printed the same 50-page document twice during the day only because he made a few edits to it, needless to say, everyone has email and Word on their PCs) – anyone in the green party?

look at you, speak with you and otherwise act with a very serious intonation, – instinctively trying to make up for the lack of their usefulness;

hold meetings all day long, thus pulling people on both the IT side and the “other” side (be it marketing or customer service) from their responsibilities where time is already scarce, and ultimately hurting the organization;

consistently misrepresent facts and miscommunicate essential information, leading to confusion and poor results, which consequently leads to the whole IT department getting a bad rep;

create problems out of thin air, some of which then get communicated all the way up to executives, further alienating the business from the IT department;

hold lengthy phone conversations, discussing what needs to be done and what is getting done; (while developers sitting right next to him are actually banging out the code and thinking about how unfair is life)

… so you get the picture.

Yes, there are problems with IT; however, traditional hierarchy can and should be used to solve them (for example, CEO > CIO > App Dev manager > Team/project lead > Developers in the case of software development).

... and spend hours and hours creating insanely complicated Excel spreadsheets detailing a project plan which is thrown away again in a week's time because the customer has made a minor change to his specification again.

u50875 · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Rick here.

UNIX, C (not C++), 14 years ago. Flash drives were in the future. All floppies coming into the building went to a special department that scanned them for viruses. There was a backlog. Yes, I thought it was dumb even back then.

Normally I did my best to save Vince from his own idiocy, but that day I was feeling passive-aggressive. The suits DID take note, and asked the troops about this and several other interesting incidents.

I saw Vince coming out of his next performance review, and he was crying like a little girl. He moved on soon after that.

I don't blame you for disbelieving this story; I could scarcely believe it myself at the time.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

to bad they the job is barking the law by makeing the interns do that.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

BlackBart:
frits:
Was this C++? I would have looked for uninitialized variables before even contacting the customer. I also would have looked for stack overflows and buffer overruns. C and/or C++ is the devil's playground in most developers hands, idle or not.

Clearly this wasn't C or C++. C and C++ are not advanced enough to be configured to generate a dump file without a lot of work or adding a dump routine - which Vince would surely have disallowed as being too likely to catch a virus.

I'm gonna have to assume you're joking, because that's about the stupidest thing I've ever heard

CAPTCHA: odio - this article has a terrible odio...

Nagesh · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Mr. TA:
From my experience, PMOs come about when there’s a lack of strong leadership in the traditional hierarchy of subordination and/or there’s overall “messiness” in organization’s management structure. In 3 companies that I have worked for in the past few years, including my present gig, PMs add very little value, while consuming precious resources and reducing the performance of the organization.
A typical PM will:

type a lot of needless documentation;

print all of it, repetitively (one particularly funny case – a PM here printed the same 50-page document twice during the day only because he made a few edits to it, needless to say, everyone has email and Word on their PCs) – anyone in the green party?

look at you, speak with you and otherwise act with a very serious intonation, – instinctively trying to make up for the lack of their usefulness;

hold meetings all day long, thus pulling people on both the IT side and the “other” side (be it marketing or customer service) from their responsibilities where time is already scarce, and ultimately hurting the organization;

consistently misrepresent facts and miscommunicate essential information, leading to confusion and poor results, which consequently leads to the whole IT department getting a bad rep;

create problems out of thin air, some of which then get communicated all the way up to executives, further alienating the business from the IT department;

hold lengthy phone conversations, discussing what needs to be done and what is getting done; (while developers sitting right next to him are actually banging out the code and thinking about how unfair is life)

… so you get the picture.

Yes, there are problems with IT; however, traditional hierarchy can and should be used to solve them (for example, CEO > CIO > App Dev manager > Team/project lead > Developers in the case of software development).

This PMs not have any teknikal backgrund. So cause several severe prblems. Insted, you send them to proper traning and ones they cum out wel traned, you can utilise them to fulest.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

the real trtrwtf:
Lucent:
I comes from being deeply bitter about other people (misanthropy), which then drives the need to be morally superior (humanism), but results in nothing but hot air.
Nothing to do with being morally superior, I just don't like people much. Not very bitter about it, either. The ones I like, I like fine, it's just that most of them aren't worth the paper they're printed on, that's all.
Your psychoanalysis is hitting pretty wide of the mark.

I must have imagined statements you've made in the past concerning the plight of the working man (and the state of affairs you consider unethical surrounding his condition), people suffering under overpopulation (demonstrated a disapproval of human breeding), loss of government benefits for the impoverished (and how this is wrong), and the statement you just made earlier about how slavery is immoral.

You don't think very highly about people (I don't doubt it) but you also take the opportunity to make righteous statements about their sorry station (repeatedly observed). Others have noted the contradiction. You claim not to care when it suits you but also hold guilt over our heads when it suits you. Very liberal. Didn't Phil Ochs have a song where he mentions something like that?

What's it to be: Split personality? Delusional fool? Self-aggrandizing narcissist?

It's not like I expect you to agree with me and admit to any of this, though. You spent a long time getting as full of it as you are, it's not going to come out all at once.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Anon:
Kuba:
I've seen it first hand: the notion that somehow passing "unsafe data" through a human "monk" will automagically make it safe again.

Well obviously, the unpaid college interns should easily spot a virus in the pages and pages of printed hex code and raise an alert. No virus scanner beats an inexperienced and bored college kid squinting through a dump.

FTFY

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

progree:
Kuba:
BlackBart:
frits:
Was this C++? I would have looked for uninitialized variables before even contacting the customer. I also would have looked for stack overflows and buffer overruns. C and/or C++ is the devil's playground in most developers hands, idle or not.

Clearly this wasn't C or C++. C and C++ are not advanced enough to be configured to generate a dump file without a lot of work or adding a dump routine - which Vince would surely have disallowed as being too likely to catch a virus.
I think TRWTF is that C/C++ compilers can be at best expected to produce warnings about that. There should be a way to force a C/C++ compiler to simply initialize everything. It should only be disabled on the little (if any) code where benchmarks show significant and useful speed gains.

I respectfully disagree - c is not intended to be safe; it is intended to be a convenient step above assembly language. There are many instances where it just isn't necessary to initialize areas of data. Unsafe, yes. Necessary, no. c++... actually, c++ shouldn't exist (for various reasons). But, if you consider c++ to be a version of c which is supposed to compete with the higher-level big-boys, then maybe you have a point.

But I certainly don't expect uninitialized data in assembler to be flagged; thus, I don't expect c to flag it either.

CAPTCHA: ingenium - What ingenium thought you could take c and turn it into a real language? (apologies to stroustrap).

Horses for Courses. Any language is crap when it's abused. The "dangers" in C are what make it more powerful than many other languages. Granted, it means that you need programmers who know what they're doing, but it concerns me a little that the world seems to want to create Programming languages that can be used by Programmers who don't know what they're doing....

I've been spending the last few weeks teaching a Grad whose main experience is Java how to do things in C...Suffice it to say, the total lack of awareness about how computers actually use memory is a little concerning. I'm not (for a minute) saying the whole world should do everything in C, but rather that it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect people to know what they're doing (although I guess then we wouldn't need this site). Problems in process should not (usually) be fixed with technology. If the problem is that C fucks things up because people don't know how to use pointers, then teach them how to use pointers. Don't create languages like Java and C# that don't require the knowledge - it just creates less knowledgeable programmers.

Oh, and I've started to play with C++ (because I have to) and have realised it is nothing like C, and using it even remotely like C usually means your doing something wrong and should be using C. People who suggest that C and C++ are similat may not know what they're talking about - maybe any language that uses 'if' is mildly similar too. People who claim they are the same thing definitely don't.

FrostCat · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

At a place I used to work, there was a PM who would produce status reports with these great little bar charts showing both % complete and % incomplete of a project.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

the real trtrwtf:
Mason Wheeler:
Considering the amount of damage that's been done in the last 22 years due to buffer overruns and similar C flaws, shouldn't writing any network facing software (OSes, browsers, Internet tools of all kinds) in C or derivatives (C++, Objective-C, etc) be considered an act of criminal negligence by now?

You're a liberal, aren't you?

I'd be betting on Java Developer - Oh wait, that's heavily influenced by C too...

Maybe VB or COBOL?

http://bluebones.net/evolution/evo-prog-lang.png

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

gizmore:
Could this be a virus too?
seventy-two onehundredone onehundredfourteen onehundredone thirty-two onehundred-twentyone onehundredeleven onehundredseventeen thirty-two ninety-seven onehundredfourteen onehundredone thirty-three

Captcha: haero .... erm yes :)

Is that the same as: sixtyeight onehundredone onehundredfourteen onehundredone twentyeight seventynine onehundredeleven onehundredseventeen twentyeight eightythree onehundredfourteen onehundredone twentyseven

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Jay:
I'm reminded of when management at a place where I used to work issued a memo sternly warning that employees were not permitted to upload photos of their family, pets, or whatever to use for wallpaper, because JPEG files brought in from home might contain a virus.

Ummm, wasn't there a bug in a jpg library that MS patched a few years back, where a malformed metadata entry in a jpg file could trigger a buffer overflow?

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Mr. TA:
From my experience, PMOs come about when there’s a lack of strong leadership in the traditional hierarchy of subordination and/or there’s overall “messiness” in organization’s management structure. In 3 companies that I have worked for in the past few years, including my present gig, PMs add very little value, while consuming precious resources and reducing the performance of the organization.
A typical PM will:

type a lot of needless documentation;

print all of it, repetitively (one particularly funny case – a PM here printed the same 50-page document twice during the day only because he made a few edits to it, needless to say, everyone has email and Word on their PCs) – anyone in the green party?

look at you, speak with you and otherwise act with a very serious intonation, – instinctively trying to make up for the lack of their usefulness;

hold meetings all day long, thus pulling people on both the IT side and the “other” side (be it marketing or customer service) from their responsibilities where time is already scarce, and ultimately hurting the organization;

consistently misrepresent facts and miscommunicate essential information, leading to confusion and poor results, which consequently leads to the whole IT department getting a bad rep;

create problems out of thin air, some of which then get communicated all the way up to executives, further alienating the business from the IT department;

hold lengthy phone conversations, discussing what needs to be done and what is getting done; (while developers sitting right next to him are actually banging out the code and thinking about how unfair is life)

… so you get the picture.

Yes, there are problems with IT; however, traditional hierarchy can and should be used to solve them (for example, CEO > CIO > App Dev manager > Team/project lead > Developers in the case of software development).

And email everyone minutes to a meeting (or some document that is super important for the meeting), then print out enough copies for everyone in the meeting, plus enough for their partners, plus some arbitrary number (usually 5) - and while the attendees may have printed them 4 pages to a sheet in black and white, the PM prints them on the largest paper [s]he can find in full colour (and seems to get bonus points for including some sort of photos in the doc).

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

the real trtrwtf:
any position allowing slavery would be wrong. On slavery, extremism is the correct position.

What about partial slavery? Wouldn't that be OK?

Say, for two years somebody else owns you and can ship you anywhere in the world they want and put you in harm's way and work you day and night in terrible living conditions and if you survive then you're free to go on about your life.

Hint: military draft.

Or, two days a week you have to work and don't get paid for it. The rest of the week is yours to do as you please; earn an income and keep your pay. You're only 40% a slave.

Hint: 40% combined tax rate between federal and state income taxes, sales tax etc.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

I am wondering why nobody raised a concern about the dump containing some of the customer's confidential data.

Zylon · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

FrostCat:
At a place I used to work, there was a PM who would produce status reports with these great little bar charts showing both % complete and % incomplete of a project.

[image]

Mason Wheeler · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Paul:
Or, two days a week you have to work and don't get paid for it. The rest of the week is yours to do as you please; earn an income and keep your pay. You're only 40% a slave.
Hint: 40% combined tax rate between federal and state income taxes, sales tax etc.

You mean you don't get money for it. (You really should talk to an economist sometime if you don't understand the difference.) Yes, we grumble about taxes, but we'd be in a really lousy state as a nation without the roads they build and the essential services they provide. It's not "slavery;" it's paying your share of what you use everyday.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

FrostCat:
At a place I used to work, there was a PM who would produce status reports with these great little bar charts showing both % complete and % incomplete of a project.

Oh, yes, and then when a bar moves from 37% complete to 39% complete they strut around like a rock star taking full credit for their great achievement never realizing that all those percent-completes are total B.S.

There are only two meaningful complete statuses in an I.T. project task: Done and Not Done.

Most PMs are a waste of oxygen; a negative net value as others have detailed. I recently encountered one who could actually understand a data structure and I am shocked! This is more rare than gold!

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Mason Wheeler:
Paul:
Or, two days a week you have to work and don't get paid for it. The rest of the week is yours to do as you please; earn an income and keep your pay. You're only 40% a slave.
Hint: 40% combined tax rate between federal and state income taxes, sales tax etc.

You mean you don't get money for it. (You really should talk to an economist sometime if you don't understand the difference.) Yes, we grumble about taxes, but we'd be in a really lousy state as a nation without the roads they build and the essential services they provide. It's not "slavery;" it's paying your share of what you use everyday.

Most of the stuff that money goes to I neither use nor want. Road building is a very small slice of the pie.

I guess you assume that income and sales taxes (my examples) are the only possible ways to pay for roads. Not gas taxes, or tolls...

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Mason Wheeler:
Paul:
Or, two days a week you have to work and don't get paid for it. The rest of the week is yours to do as you please; earn an income and keep your pay. You're only 40% a slave.
Hint: 40% combined tax rate between federal and state income taxes, sales tax etc.

You mean you don't get money for it. (You really should talk to an economist sometime if you don't understand the difference.) Yes, we grumble about taxes, but we'd be in a really lousy state as a nation without the roads they build and the essential services they provide. It's not "slavery;" it's paying your share of what you use everyday.

Oh, you're, like answering him seriously and stuff. I was just going to call him a moron, but okay, reasonable is good too.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Ralph:
FrostCat:
At a place I used to work, there was a PM who would produce status reports with these great little bar charts showing both % complete and % incomplete of a project.
Oh, yes, and then when a bar moves from 37% complete to 39% complete they strut around like a rock star taking full credit for their great achievement never realizing that all those percent-completes are total B.S.
There are only two meaningful complete statuses in an I.T. project task: Done and Not Done.

Most PMs are a waste of oxygen; a negative net value as others have detailed. I recently encountered one who could actually understand a data structure and I am shocked! This is more rare than gold!

This. Exactly this.

How long will a coding task take? I'll give you an estimate I can't be certain without actually doing the task - even to investigate the effort, I probably have to work out EXACTLY what's required - and that's something that basically requires doing it, if I'm to have any confidence it actually works.
How are you doing with this task? We can be in one of several states... a) Not started b) Working on it c) Delegated the n00b to do it d) Stalled/forgotten/not working on it e) Complete
How complete is it? Either complete, or Not complete.

Aside from everything else, we developers are an arrogant lot who think we can create FB in a day. We don't believe we can fail, so our estimates are usually absolutely best case scenarios, assuming we get everything totally right 1st time. It's up to managers to realise this and add some fat to our estimates, but in reality, it takes as long as it takes. Even changes that may appear simplistic often have hidden complications that are unlikely to be seen by even the best developers, unless they already have a working solution.

I think I'm copying someone else (I forget who) when I say that 90% of the work takes up the last 10% of a task (arbitrary numbers used to sound clever). I often find that if I quote 5 days for a task I reckon can be done in a day, I get a seemingly working prototype working on day 1. Then I rest on my laurels for 3 days. Then I realise there's a little bit of unexpected behaviour, so we tweak a little bit. Halfway through day 5, while having another look at it just to satisfy myself it's ready for testing, I notice some really wierd shit (or get a coredump, or something) and this is when the 90% of the work kicks in to find it and fix it before I look like an idiot in front of the test team. Until that point it's "Almost Ready" (After that point it's "We've hit a snag, and had to redo most of it") - It's never (except in hindsight) 50% complete or 73.65472895926456123456749% (roughly) complete

Silverhill · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

pa:
up up down down left right left right B A

No, no, it's "south; east; south; north; get all; southeast; north; down; east; east; XYZZY."

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Joe:
to bad they the job is barking the law by makeing the interns do that.

Is this supposed to mean something?

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

JamieC:
Troll:
"Rick rolled his eyes and explained why this was an extremely unlikely possibility."
Am I the only one who though that sentence was gonna be a rickroll link?

Nope, I totally did too.

It is. You just didn't look at the source.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

I have the opposite of this story. I needed a public key from a huge bank so that an application we were designing for them could securely email something to one of their people. So the head of their IT sent me their entire set of public and private keys and didn't seem to understand the magnitude of his error even as I hinted that not only should he not have sent them to me but really shouldn't be emailing them at all. At least it made testing that the emails were properly encrypted easier.

Coyne · 2011-10-11 Reply Admin

What Rick should have done was tell Vince: "I know how we can solve the problem. I'll have them hex dump the memory and then encrypt it with ROT-13. Then they can send us the encrypted file. The encryption will keep anyone from adding a virus."

See, on the one hand, there is NOTHING worse than an idiot with access to a trade magazine (except maybe a software guy with a soldering iron). But, on the other hand, idiots are nice because they are so easy to out-flank.

2011-10-11 Reply Admin

Peter:
Joe:
to bad they the job is barking the law by makeing the interns do that.
Is this supposed to mean something?

It does in Internese.

Zemm · 2011-10-12 Reply Admin

YUOE:
the PM prints them on the largest paper [s]he can find in full colour (and seems to get bonus points for including some sort of photos in the doc).

I've never seen anyone print on A3, except for technical drawings and other sane uses for large paper. (Except myself, where I once enlarged a "buy one get one free" pizza coupon onto A3, just because I could ;-) Too bad I didn't have access to the plotter, which can make full colour images a metre wide and as long as you want (IMSMR at least 30m).

2011-10-12 Reply Admin

golddog:
To me, the real WTF (and what makes the story unbelievable) is, once the Rick found that the customer wasn't a total moron, Rick and the customer didn't just say, "fax me a couple of pages of hex crap while sending me a dump electronically," so would think he won while solving the problem effectively.

Yes this is what I don't get. When someone is just wrong and unreasonable, you just smile and nod and then do things the way they need to be done. You won't fired even if they find out and try to make an issue of it.

2011-10-12 Reply Admin

Roger:
Jay:
I'm reminded of when management at a place where I used to work issued a memo sternly warning that employees were not permitted to upload photos of their family, pets, or whatever to use for wallpaper, because JPEG files brought in from home might contain a virus.
Ummm, wasn't there a bug in a jpg library that MS patched a few years back, where a malformed metadata entry in a jpg file could trigger a buffer overflow?

Correct. Another way to exploit was something with thumbnails preview (you could have custom DLL code to run, even with autorun off)

And nowadays, PDF could contain virus.

Also, did you get that brand-new mouse as a gift? Congrats, it contains malicious plug-and-play driver with keylogger.

2011-10-12 Reply Admin

Now, tell me, which brand of fax machine doesn't print the page number on each page received. I don't know any ;-)

2011-10-12 Reply Admin

I don't believe a word of it.

I think it's time that I stop reading TheDailyWTF.

Severity One · 2011-10-12 Reply Admin

Johnny:
Horses for Courses. Any language is crap when it's abused. The "dangers" in C are what make it more powerful than many other languages. Granted, it means that you need programmers who know what they're doing, but it concerns me a little that the world seems to want to create Programming languages that can be used by Programmers who don't know what they're doing....

A thermonuclear device is also more powerful than high explosives. That doesn't mean it's more suitable, for instance when you're digging a tunnel.

I've been spending the last few weeks teaching a Grad whose main experience is Java how to do things in C...Suffice it to say, the total lack of awareness about how computers actually use memory is a little concerning. I'm not (for a minute) saying the whole world should do everything in C, but rather that it shouldn't be unreasonable to expect people to know what they're doing (although I guess then we wouldn't need this site). Problems in process should not (usually) be fixed with technology. If the problem is that C fucks things up because people don't know how to use pointers, then teach them how to use pointers. Don't create languages like Java and C# that don't require the knowledge - it just creates less knowledgeable programmers.

Quite frankly, I don't give a damn how memory and pointers work. I've done my share of assembly (three processor families no less) and C, and the fact that Java handles things like memory management and buffer checking for you, means that you can actually focus on programming. You know, putting statements and method invocations after another, without worrying that at any given moment, you might expose a vulnerability that allows remote root exploitation.

Oh, and I've started to play with C++ (because I have to) and have realised it is nothing like C, and using it even remotely like C usually means your doing something wrong and should be using C. People who suggest that C and C++ are similat may not know what they're talking about - maybe any language that uses 'if' is mildly similar too. People who claim they are the same thing definitely don't.

C++ was invented by a demented Dane who thought that backwards compatibility was a good thing. Given how successful C, C++, Java and C# have been over the years, I think you can decide for yourself how wise that design decision was.

2011-10-12 Reply Admin

Oh, that and a PM being able to stop technical people from taking the right actions. Fails smell test

you've been lucky in where you've worked, then... seems to happen fairly often that PMs become effectively in charge of a project and end up doing all the non-technical work (and interfering in the technical work when possible). That's the most believable bit of the story, to me

Steve The Cynic · 2011-10-12 Reply Admin

gizmore:
Could this be a virus too?
seventy-two onehundredone onehundredfourteen onehundredone thirty-two onehundred-twentyone onehundredeleven onehundredseventeen thirty-two ninety-seven onehundredfourteen onehundredone thirty-three

Captcha: haero .... erm yes :)

There I am, indeed.

(What, did nobody else get it?)

Taking a Dump

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