• My Name (unregistered)

    Well, do you have a position available for a software developer?

    I need a job with such a good job security!

  • @CodeBeater (unregistered) in reply to My Name
    My Name:
    Well, do you have a position available for a software developer?

    I need a job with such a good job security!

    "Son, I've raised you using the shittiest methods posible, but it's time for you to get a job, I've heard Oracle is hiring developers for a Java 8 rewrite"

  • (cs)

    …and TRWTF™ is not using the “™” character. That's what it's there for!

  • Nobulate (unregistered)

    Slaps Frist with a smelly wet trout - deserved!

    It was a bit of a commonplace read. TRWTF is that it is still Wednesday!

  • eVil (unregistered)

    Cape, from the latin caput (meaning head).

    Caper, from the latin capreolus, via the italian capriolare (meaning to jump in the air).

  • ZoomST (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    Cape, falsely from German kaputt (meaning broken).

    Craper, from English slang craper (meaning creep + raper): urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=craper‎.

    FTFY. So the Cape Craper is a broken craper... or it is a Caped Crapper? so much meanings to think about...

  • Peter (unregistered)

    The real WTF is Lotus Notes...is anyone still using that? Most broken office software I ever used.

  • faoileag (unregistered)
    snoofle:
    After more than a year, the .Net team completed their first set of Agile story-boards and have finally started writing some actual code...
    So the team members of the .Net team have sat around a table and talked user stories for one whole year??? 8 hours a day, 22 days a month???

    I would probably have updated my cv after two weeks of that and gone on active job search because a) if you are an Agile developer, the temptation of banging your head on the table would be too large and there is only so much pain one can stand and b) if you are not yet an Agile developer, with that team in that company you will probably never become one.

    User stories normaly are to be supplied by the users; since in this case they are done retrospectively to dscribe an existing system, it would be the product owner, perhaps in collaboration with the tester, who should provide them.

    Same goes for the story boards which are basically nothing more than related user stories chained together.

    To get people started it would be enough to give them a few simple, fundamental user stories like "the user has to log in before he/she can do anything" and "the user can choose his/her actions from a menu". Then, while they're at it, you churn out more special user stories.

    Once you have a solid set of finished simple user stories you can look at stories and write story boards, identifying missing user stories as part of that process.

    I hope the .Net team at least wasn't rewarded with donuts on the company's expense for their "effort".

  • (cs)
    Capes are cool
    No capes! Do you remember.... Thunderhead?!?!
  • mister stick (unregistered) in reply to Peter
    Peter:
    The real WTF is Lotus Notes...is anyone *still* using that? Most broken office software I ever used.

    the people who have the responsibility for buying it don't use computers. RIM were also beneficiaries of this fact.

  • TroelsL (unregistered) in reply to faoileag

    I would seriously hope that OP meant 'production code', not just code in general. I would hope that some work had gone into building a framework or prototyping.

  • Balu (unregistered)

    Causing dispair? Really?

  • Balu (unregistered) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    That's what it's there for™!

    FTFY

  • Cujo (unregistered) in reply to Peter

    It's not that bad for office software but it's the worst email client I've ever used. Yes, I have to use it for email.

  • J. Strange (unregistered)

    The piece would have read better starting with "Derek E. works for..." and skipping the self-promotion. Also, no need to state that Notes isn't relational twice.

  • EvilSnack (unregistered)

    We have a department that today will be coding new features for our flagship products in COBOL.

    My department does stuff in C++. We have no plans to port the COBOL stuff to any other language. We have a small library that handles whatever interfacing goes on between the C++ and COBOL stuff. The user cannot tell what language we develop in.

    The WTFeries in the code I work with are all due to the initial decisions made during the design process, which would have resulted in WTFeries no matter what technology we used for implementation.

    If we were starting some of our new apps today, we would do them differently, but nothing gets ported here unless it's already going to be refactored for other reason.

  • caped crusader (unregistered) in reply to Cujo
    Cujo:
    It's not that bad for office software but it's the worst email client I've ever used. Yes, I have to use it for email.

    It's very bad for email and pretty bad for everything else. We still use it here for some crap and the version we're using is 6. Yes, we're currently using version 6.

    I would love the chance to rewrite the junk we have in forms into nearly any other medium.

    Captcha - haero: If I got rid of Lotus Notes, I'd be a haero.

  • Justsomedudette (unregistered) in reply to jkupski
    jkupski:
    Capes are cool
    No capes! Do you remember.... Thunderhead?!?!
    • 1

    Also read this in Edna's voice

  • (cs) in reply to jkupski
    jkupski:
    Capes are cool
    No capes! Do you remember.... Thunderhead?!?!
    Bah, I was going to post this:
    Bob: Yeah. Something classic, like, like Dynaguy. Oh, he had a great look! Oh, the cape and the boots...

    Edna: [throws a wadded ball of paper at Bob's head] No capes!

    Bob: Isn't that my decision?

    Edna: Do you remember Thunderhead? Tall, storm powers? Nice man, good with kids.

    Bob: Listen, E...

    Edna: November 15th of '58! All was well, another day saved, when... his cape snagged on a missile fin!

    Bob: Thunderhead was not the brightest bulb...

    Edna: Stratogale! April 23rd, '57! Cape caught in a jet turbine!

    Bob: E, you can't generalize about these things...

    Edna: Metaman, express elevator! Dynaguy, snagged on takeoff! Splashdown, sucked into a vortex!

    [shouts]

    Edna: No capes!

  • DQ (unregistered) in reply to Peter
    Peter:
    The real WTF is Lotus Notes...is anyone *still* using that? Most broken office software I ever used.

    Unfortunatly And we're even using a oooooooold version (6.5)

  • mrs_helm (unregistered) in reply to caped crusader

    Version 6! If you were still using Windows 98, you'd say that sucked too. And you probably have developers still writing like version 6, since that's what they're stuck with. No wonder it sucks. You've missed 13 years of upgrades. I feel sorry for you.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to Balu
    Balu:
    dkf:
    That's what it's there for™®©ⓅⓊ!

    FTFY

    FTFY At least I think it's kosher...

  • QJo (unregistered) in reply to J. Strange
    J. Strange:
    The piece would have read better starting with "Derek E. works for..." and skipping the self-promotion. Also, no need to state that Notes isn't relational twice.

    No quack. Lotus Notes BE THAT.

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    snoofle:
    After more than a year, the .Net team completed their first set of Agile story-boards and have finally started writing some actual code...
    So the team members of the .Net team have sat around a table and talked user stories for one whole year??? 8 hours a day, 22 days a month???

    I would probably have updated my cv after two weeks of that and gone on active job search because a) if you are an Agile developer, the temptation of banging your head on the table would be too large and there is only so much pain one can stand and b) if you are not yet an Agile developer, with that team in that company you will probably never become one.

    User stories normaly are to be supplied by the users; since in this case they are done retrospectively to dscribe an existing system, it would be the product owner, perhaps in collaboration with the tester, who should provide them.

    Same goes for the story boards which are basically nothing more than related user stories chained together.

    To get people started it would be enough to give them a few simple, fundamental user stories like "the user has to log in before he/she can do anything" and "the user can choose his/her actions from a menu". Then, while they're at it, you churn out more special user stories.

    Once you have a solid set of finished simple user stories you can look at stories and write story boards, identifying missing user stories as part of that process.

    I hope the .Net team at least wasn't rewarded with donuts on the company's expense for their "effort".

    Here Here!!! If code was not being produced by the start of the second iteration/sprint (typically one month) then something was seriously wrong and should have been being addressed. By many standards (including mine) even that is late.

    I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Software-30-Days-Customers-Competitors/dp/1118206665

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to TheCPUWizard
    TheCPUWizard:
    I recommend http://www.amazon.com/Software-30-Days-Customers-Competitors/dp/1118206665
    That sounds interesting, might well end up my next order at amazon :-)
  • (cs) in reply to Cujo
    Cujo:
    It's not that bad for office software but it's the worst email client I've ever used. Yes, I have to use it for email.
    Back in the day (1997-1999) when I worked for a significant AV vendor (not to be named here, sorry), we used Notes for an assortment of stuff including email. It's the only email system I've ever seen where you could do what one technologically inept(*) colleague used to do: she would write multiline emails entirely within the subject field, complete with paragraph breaks and everything.

    (*) No, this is not the WTF you might think it is. She was (and still might be for all I know) the chef for the employee canteen. IT-wise inept, but skilled at producing tasty food in an industrial-scale kitchen.

  • Jim (unregistered) in reply to Peter

    Actually, yes... Lotus Notes is a powerful tool. The problem with powerful tools is that someone opens up a quick study guide or a how-to manual and proceeds to build applications with it without having the "other" knowledge needed. I've come in MANY times and rewritten applications written by someone who thought they knew what they were doing because they read a "program this in 30 days" book.

    IBM Notes' biggest failure is not in its design or architecture, but in the IBM itself for not marketing it properly.

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    So the team members of the .Net team have sat around a table and talked user stories for one whole year??? 8 hours a day, 22 days a month???

    I would probably have updated my cv after two weeks of that and gone on active job search

    Indeed. And once you did leave, along with everybody else who had any clue of what they were doing and why it was all wrong, who would be left on the team?

    The kind of people who sit around a table talking about user stories as a career. They spend a week or so every month working on progress reports, then reorganizing and re-prioritizing for another week followed by five days of arranging schedules, inviting all of the required parties and making sure that all the correct meeting rooms are booked. On average there are four days lost every month because at least one of the committee members is out of the office, so that leaves the third Tuesday afternoon for productive work.

    Unless there's a company BBQ that day. Or if it's Rosh Hashanah, Groundhog Day, Veterans' Day, Memorial Day or Remembrance Day. Then the whole agenda needs to be postponed until next month and a whole lot of pre-meeting work will need to be done to ensure that the agenda is correct, the correct blends of coffee are prepared and the conference table is the right shape for all of the attendees.

    This "Agile" thing isn't nearly as easy as it looks, you know.

  • (cs)

    Oh dear, people who use terms like "sprints" and "stories" without even the slightest hint of sarcasm.

  • D (unregistered) in reply to Jim
    Jim:
    IBM Notes' biggest failure is not in its design or architecture, but in the IBM itself for not marketing it properly.

    But what would you expect, IBM and proper marketing are mutually exclusive.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to J. Strange
    J. Strange:
    no need to state that Notes isn't relational twice.

    But that's the whole point! Because Lotus Notes isn't relational, the data isn't normalized, and thus many facts must be stated twice.

  • Jay (unregistered) in reply to English Man
    English Man:
    Oh dear, people who use terms like "sprints" and "stories" without even the slightest hint of sarcasm.

    I have trouble taking any methodology seriously when it is obvious that the inventors spent the bulk of their time thinking up cute names for things. Especially when they are cute new names for ideas that have been around for ages. We used to call "user stories" "functional requirements". But now that we have a cute new name, we can be so much more productive.

  • (cs)

    Well, yes, versioning is a ... caper. Then the story took a left turn at Albuquerque and slewed into something else entirely.

    Something so horrible it gave me the heebie jeebies just thinking about it.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to DCRoss
    DCRoss:
    And once you did leave, along with everybody else who had any clue of what they were doing and why it was all wrong, who would be left on the team?

    The kind of people who sit around a table talking about user stories as a career.

    You are not suggesting I should have sympathy for them, are you?

    DCRoss:
    This "Agile" thing isn't nearly as easy as it looks, you know.
    Indeed it is not. That is why a lot of companies proclaiming to be Agile are not. I can remember sprints that were nothing more than 2-week projects organized by the waterfall model, with the waterfall milestones disguised as scrum cards.

    But Agile being not as easy as it looks is not an excuse for doing nothing for a whole year.

    I would not leave a company because some colleagues are not good at Agile or prefer sitting around a big table eating donuts to actual work, but I would leave a company where management would let the .Net team mentioned get away with it.

    It is management's job to see that things get done, and if management doesn't understand the methology used, then management should either read up or hire competence.

    I do not know what size the .Net team had, but with 5 being quite a good number for a scrum team (2 + 2 + tester), we are talking serious money here. Definitely a middle-range six-digit number in wages alone, for what? Just a few story boards?

    I know that some companies just have money to burn by the truckload but for your average company such a waste should trigger alarms. It certainly does for me and I prefer leaving myself to being made redundant once the bean-counters try to stop the company making a loss.

  • AN AMAZING CODER (unregistered) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    English Man:
    Oh dear, people who use terms like "sprints" and "stories" without even the slightest hint of sarcasm.

    I have trouble taking any methodology seriously when it is obvious that the inventors spent the bulk of their time thinking up cute names for things. Especially when they are cute new names for ideas that have been around for ages. We used to call "user stories" "functional requirements". But now that we have a cute new name, we can be so much more productive.

    They acheive the same goal, but "user stories" and the definition/format of them are easier to explain to and understand by businessey people than "functional requirements".

    Which is the entire point.

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    DCRoss:
    And once you did leave, along with everybody else who had any clue of what they were doing and why it was all wrong, who would be left on the team?

    The kind of people who sit around a table talking about user stories as a career.

    You are not suggesting I should have sympathy for them, are you?

    DCRoss:
    This "Agile" thing isn't nearly as easy as it looks, you know.
    Indeed it is not. That is why a lot of companies proclaiming to be Agile are not. I can remember sprints that were nothing more than 2-week projects organized by the waterfall model, with the waterfall milestones disguised as scrum cards.

    But Agile being not as easy as it looks is not an excuse for doing nothing for a whole year.

    I would not leave a company because some colleagues are not good at Agile or prefer sitting around a big table eating donuts to actual work, but I would leave a company where management would let the .Net team mentioned get away with it.

    It is management's job to see that things get done, and if management doesn't understand the methology used, then management should either read up or hire competence.

    I do not know what size the .Net team had, but with 5 being quite a good number for a scrum team (2 + 2 + tester), we are talking serious money here. Definitely a middle-range six-digit number in wages alone, for what? Just a few story boards?

    I know that some companies just have money to burn by the truckload but for your average company such a waste should trigger alarms. It certainly does for me and I prefer leaving myself to being made redundant once the bean-counters try to stop the company making a loss.

    I joined a job a few years ago where just this sort of shit happened. We had scrums, they consisted of standing around saying things like, "I talked about the wireframes with Coddlebutt again, tried to come to a consensus." And: "We're approaching an agreement on when to hold the next progress meeting." And: "The architecture document version 99.8 is almost ready, but they've decided that since we've got a new version of Java released since we started, we're going to have to go through the authorisation process again so as to get upper management to accept this change to the top-level requirements."

    Fuck, that was one shit job. We finally got down to working on it and we were just starting to get somewhere when the company was bought out by someone else and they decided to do it in-house instead. The good news is that they paid us for the 18 months of our time that they'd squandered.

  • Zapp Brannigan (unregistered) in reply to caped crusader

    Lotus Notes is still better than SharePoint.

  • Anonypony (unregistered)
    Since Notes is non-relational, Notes is web-scale.

    I always knew that Notes wasn't bad, just ahead of it's time and misunderstood.

  • Harrow (unregistered) in reply to J. Strange
    J. Strange:
    The piece would have read better starting with "Derek E. works for..." and skipping the self-promotion. Also, no need to state that Notes isn't relational twice.
    Notes is not relational??
  • Bruce W (unregistered) in reply to Harrow
    Harrow:
    J. Strange:
    The piece would have read better starting with "Derek E. works for..." and skipping the self-promotion. Also, no need to state that Notes isn't relational twice.
    Notes is not relational??
    Back in '90s I worked for a large accounting firm that loved Notes (actually, most big accounting firms loved Notes). I remember two WTFs from the people side of working with Notes:
    • We had a recruiter that would tell candidates that the next version of Notes is supposed to be relational.
    • Our Notes architecture team would always talk about "writing a Notes API". I was always confused by the statement wondering why they needed to write the API and not Lotus. Finally I realized they were writing a program using the Notes API...
  • TDWTF123 (unregistered)

    The bank was actually right. Notes has everything required built-in. If the data already exists in Notes documents, it's the work of a few minutes to set up a LotusScript that'll handle it and pass it on to the right place in the right format.

    So yes, TRWTF is that the OP is pissing on the suggestion to use Notes despite not having a clue about what Notes is capable of. Whoever didn't realise this was a half-hour project using a tool already on every user's desktop fucked up monumentally. They've not only insisted on reinventing the wheel, but on hand-crafting their wheel whilst sitting on the steps of a wheel-factory - and then criticising the person who told them to just buy a goddamn wheel in the first place.

  • Gubminter (unregistered)

    My office has spent the past year attempting to salvage last year's failed online e-learning project. Management gave it a shiny new name to appeal to the budget big-wigs, but it's still the same old turd. The big selling point is converting existing Flash templates to cross-browser HTML5, because it's the new hotness.

    We're not redesigning anything or validating its usefulness, mind you - just converting the same Flash functionality based on ancient PPT specs. We've never spoken to an end user in the past 3 years, so nobody knows why we're building this or what they actually need/want. Every request to determine customer needs is met with supervisory derision. The only feedback from an SME was "nobody wants this."

    Now 10 months in, we have a mountain of creative content no customer has ever seen, w/no working framework to put it in for testing. 90% of our creative team will be laid off this month due to budget cuts, so they're rushing to finish...

    We have ~50 half-tested, desktop-only HTML5 prototype templates (no time to discuss or design a mobile UI!). No customer will see anything until product launch. Of course, it will magically fit/work on an iPad and the end-users will love it, because it's the new hotness.

    As a backend for our shiny new HTML5 creation, the process for creating the data model and layout for each of the ~500 individual activities still goes: Individual Word Doc -> manual input to clunky XML generator -> XML production code. ... What's a database? That sounds hard.

    This particular monstrosity is actually a much-improved rehash of a 2-yr project that went live & was immediately taken down due to errors & typos. 1000s of man-hours and at least $1M tossed on a "big bang"/waterfall solution in search of a problem.

    The cobbled-together Flash templates we're now retrofitting were hijacked from another prior project, which has been Frankensteined into at least 3 other spinoffs with their own catchy names and identical crappy functionality.

    As for the cross-browser HTML5 approach that was the ONLY clear requirement, management & the head of programming decided last week (w/o telling anybody) that it's too hard to change the old XML generator so we're only going to support MP4 videos. For my 8th attempt at explaining why this makes no sense, I'm thinking of enlisting sock puppets.

    Captcha: causa ... Causa needa paycheck & can't quit juuust yet.

    My personal Frist post. Trying to learn as much as I can ;)

  • np (unregistered) in reply to Gubminter
    Gubminter:
    The cobbled-together Flash templates we're now retrofitting were hijacked from another prior project, which has been Frankensteined into at least 3 other spinoffs with their own catchy names and identical crappy functionality.

    All the projects that are still supported at my work are cobbled-together POS that was started by some intern years back. Some team inherited it, keep it going, then it became mission-critical and our techops manage the machine running.

    We spend years with some project plan to unify them to be supported by all the teams. The plan ends up with hundreds of pages of functional specs. Funding for the project never really appears, but the POS above has already been deprecated (no one maintains the code, just techops keeps it running). We end up spending millions on some closed-source Windows-only crap from some big company that doesn't meet any of the requirements, doesn't have any API. Turns out a couple VPs between the companies are buddies, so they don't really care about the details but just scratching each-others backs.

    Ugh. Time to write another pile of steam and lob it over.

    Gubminter:
    As for the cross-browser HTML5 approach that was the ONLY clear requirement, management & the head of programming decided last week (w/o telling anybody) that it's too hard to change the old XML generator so we're only going to support MP4 videos. For my 8th attempt at explaining why this makes no sense, I'm thinking of enlisting sock puppets.

    I like MP4 videos and HTML5. It works for my iPad, so I support their decision. VLC seems to work well with MP4 videos as well although Chrome doesn't... Oh well, at least I have my iPad. Good luck with the sock puppets.

    Gubminter:
    Captcha: causa ... Causa needa paycheck & can't quit juuust yet.

    Normally I don't mention captchas, because it is kind of stupid. But I got the same captcha as you. I think there are only like 10 in TDWTF's database (or xml file).

  • DonaldK (unregistered)

    Sorry I fell asleep. How did the article end?

  • Maurizio (unregistered)

    Guys, as the most illuminated of us know very well, the main goal of IT is to give a (good) income to IT people. This require constantly running huge projects that have to fails, require reinventing the wheel, require inventing new programming languages and fancy methodologies and so on ....

    This story is a success story, not a WTF.

    Maurizio

  • (cs) in reply to Jay
    Jay:
    J. Strange:
    no need to state that Notes isn't relational twice.

    But that's the whole point! Because Lotus Notes isn't relational, the data isn't normalized, and thus many facts must be stated twice.

    +1 +1

  • Gubminter (unregistered) in reply to np
    np:
    I like MP4 videos and HTML5. It works for my iPad, so I support their decision. VLC seems to work well with MP4 videos as well although Chrome doesn't... Oh well, at least I have my iPad. Good luck with the sock puppets.
    Our main project requirement was that it must work in all major browsers. MP4 is fine for IE9+ and Safari (desktop or mobile). However, Chrome, Opera, and Firefox don't natively support it. They might play via plugin in another tab/window, but HTML5
  • terjon (unregistered) in reply to Gubminter

    When all fails just say these words: "The user's will refuse to use it unless we do X."

    If that doesn't help, then do the aforementioned captcha and punch that clock like a good little code monkey. There's no help for people who ignore those words.

  • Bill C. (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    Jay:
    J. Strange:
    no need to state that Notes isn't relational twice.
    But that's the whole point! Because Lotus Notes isn't relational, the data isn't normalized, and thus many facts must be stated twice.
    +1 +1
    There were two good points on the lotuses that I was relational with.
  • Bruce (unregistered)

    Those who claim VB is the real WTF are those who have yet to encounter Notes.

    Lotus Visual Basic (I forget what it's called) is just like the Microsoft one, except where it isn't.

    Why license VBA when you can write a crappy clone...

Leave a comment on “The Cape Caper”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #:

Log Out

« Return to Article