The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2010-02-27 Reply Admin

Yes. I find that I have to fool-proof my instructions as well even surrounded by so called techs.

2010-02-28 Reply Admin

Kuba:
[text omitted]

Holy copy-pasted novel, Batman!

woodle · 2010-02-28 Reply Admin

Shinji:
Yes. I find that I have to fool-proof my instructions as well even surrounded by so called techs.

I find fool-proofing the application to be a more productive option. Then you can catch, or at least diagnose, all sorts of errors regardless of whether they are caused by a bad installation or by something changing or failing in the runtime environment, which is far more likely.

2010-03-03 Reply Admin

jdw:
Anonymous:
Yep, been through this pain before. Forget common sense, forget logic, forget that these people are even human because honestly, I doubt they are. They are robots sent to try us with their preposterously literal intepretation of everything we say.
A lot of people will defend the drones for just "following orders" but the whole situation reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode where a guy meets a genie and gets a bunch of wishes, but everything he wishes for comes true in a literal sense and completely screws him over. I always remember thinking "the wishes are sound, it's just that the genie is a COMPLETE ASSHOLE". Same goes for offshore developers. They're not "following orders", they are just complete assholes.
And this is why technical writers exist.

If you don't write precisely what you mean, you have no right to complain that people following your instructions can't seem to get it right. Sure, there's common sense, and after the first failure, I might be a bit more careful about the install procedure, but when someone says "do exactly this" and doing exactly that doesn't work, it's not the fault of the person following the instructions.

And this is why I choose to work with intelligent professionals -- people at least as intelligent as myself, if not smarter --not mindless automatons.

I don't want to spend all day writing out, to the letter, what needs to be done -- by the time I've done that, I could have practically done the whole task myself.

If my instructions are unclear, or imprecise, you should either attempt to divine the intent on your own, or at worst, ask me. "Uh, did you REALLY want me to type this string out literally?"

2010-03-08 Reply Admin

.:
jdw:
Anonymous:
Yep, been through this pain before. Forget common sense, forget logic, forget that these people are even human because honestly, I doubt they are. They are robots sent to try us with their preposterously literal intepretation of everything we say.
A lot of people will defend the drones for just "following orders" but the whole situation reminds me of that Twilight Zone episode where a guy meets a genie and gets a bunch of wishes, but everything he wishes for comes true in a literal sense and completely screws him over. I always remember thinking "the wishes are sound, it's just that the genie is a COMPLETE ASSHOLE". Same goes for offshore developers. They're not "following orders", they are just complete assholes.
And this is why technical writers exist.

If you don't write precisely what you mean, you have no right to complain that people following your instructions can't seem to get it right. Sure, there's common sense, and after the first failure, I might be a bit more careful about the install procedure, but when someone says "do exactly this" and doing exactly that doesn't work, it's not the fault of the person following the instructions.
And this is why I choose to work with intelligent professionals -- people at least as intelligent as myself, if not smarter --not mindless automatons.

I don't want to spend all day writing out, to the letter, what needs to be done -- by the time I've done that, I could have practically done the whole task myself.

If my instructions are unclear, or imprecise, you should either attempt to divine the intent on your own, or at worst, ask me. "Uh, did you REALLY want me to type this string out literally?"

If it was a business decision made by your company to outsource half of it's IT department somewhere else, How do you go about to "choosing only to work with people as intelligent as you?"

to be honest, I've met a lot more egotistical and thinks they are god's gift to software development from On Shore developers, which by their mindset ends up with overly-engineered systems, and or overly complex "workarounds".

perhaps lower the pedestal a bit?

2010-10-11 Reply Admin

I started reading the comments because it involved Ravi from Hyderabad, just to see how many comments would be along the lines of 'Indian Devs==Brain Dead'

If there is an 85 step installation procedure which is just to set up the environment for the actual work, I'd blindly copy paste the fields myself especially if I have an 85 line specific procedure documented in a text file. There is just no point trying to understand every step of the installation procedure if the whole thing is inconsequential to the actual work.

As a dev it would hurt my ego to make the mistake but there is a very good chance this could happen to me as well.

I work as an independent consultant(from India) to a UK based MNC which also has a Hyderabad center(I used to work there some years back). Just as there are very knowledgeable people in both offices there are idiots on both sides as well.

I could document some incredibly stupid things people do/did in both offices(and infact I've worked in multiple countries and its the same everywhere) but I wouldn't go about advertising 'this guy from this country' is so stupid as if this one guy is actually the whole team or the whole country.

People need to drop the holier than thou attitude.

2010-10-11 Reply Admin

couldn't agree more!!!

2022-09-02

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