The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

While we're throwing blame around, it's often a good idea to blame management.

Upper management at my company is seemingly often wowed by things like pretty pictures and friendly salesmen. Contractors are often friendly salesmen (or have friendly salesmen represent them), and are frequently equipped with pretty pictures. Hence, management chooses developers on criteria which don't accurately reflect the quality of their would-be work.

The other reason to blame management is that they too much about getting something done NOW (IE, quick hack), and not enough about getting something done properly. Often times, the lowest bidder says they can hack something together quickly, and they'll get the nod from management. But doing the job properly (from the start and/or revamping existing code) is overlooked because it costs money and doesn't usually feature pretty pictures.

The moral of the story (we've found) is to use pretty pictures.

DaveE

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
Amended again: this rule only applies to companies whose customers are made up of less than 10% by federal, state, and local governments. Furthermore, a contractor for any government agency is 10 times the bottom-feeder of a company programmer and I have yet to meet one that I would trust to replace a coffee filter.

Yeah, funny thing about the recession and the government spending all kinds of money: private sector is down and government sector is way up.

My company is still fairly small, and actually does some good work. That's mostly because we'll virtually take over the project. But you're right, the big contractors will hire anyone with a pulse. When we work with other contractors or, god help us, other agencies, it's an abortion.

It's like watching a train wreck, only you're sitting through a powerpoint slideshow with both conductors on speakerphone explaining why they need to increase speed to hurry up and find a solution to the impending catastrophe.

And then everyone is shocked at the wreckage, and they decisively spend vast amounts of money to make new trains, new tracks and do it again.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

NMe:
...and you think you're the rule here? Or maybe the exception? :P

All contractors claim to be the exception, whilst they're invariably hopeless would-be developers that think they're great because they never had to live with their own shitty code - that's the rule for you right there.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

wibble:
d.k. Allen:
Ze Grammar Nazi:
Jellineck:
justsomedude:
[quote user="A Contractor] would have a pregnant over.

Dammit Colbert. Why'd you have to go and encourage reddit.

Dammit Jellineck. Why'd you have to go and forget about the question mark?

Dammit Nazi. Why'd you have to go and spell Damnit wrong?

its spelled dammit...

Damnit wibble, why can't you just play along?

Erasmus Darwin · 2010-09-27 Reply Admin

ysth:
So are you saying the real WTF is storing the database in the source file, not using Data::Dumper?

I'm not sure where you're getting that. They're both WTFs, though rewriting the source file is the bigger WTF.

When I mentioned using Data::Dumper to edit stuff, it was generally in the context where I needed to edit the contents of a tied hash as a one-off, and it wasn't worth the effort of putting together a proper editor. Sometimes dumping it to a text file, editing that by hand, and loading it back into the database is the easiest way to fix something out of the ordinary.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Steve H:
NMe:
...and you think you're the rule here? Or maybe the exception? :P

All contractors claim to be the exception, whilst they're invariably hopeless would-be developers that think they're great because they never had to live with their own shitty code - that's the rule for you right there.

... says the angry developer who can't cut the cheese by finding and successfully landing another developer gig...

Luck and BS can only carry you so far. Eventually the crappy developers take on full time roles (not all, but the 'lifers' as I like to call them).

There are however a large amount of very high quality developers in full-time jobs because they've done the contracting circle and want some stability (family, etc.).

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

I think, when discussing contractors and FTEs, it's important to consider the size of the company.

Small companies generally fail pretty quickly if they have poor developers, especially if IT is a significant part of what they do. Thus, I would postulate that most successful and fairly small tech companies are staffed with fairly competent developers.

Large corporations, on the other hand, tend to all have large internal IT shops, and from my experience, these tend to have very poor internal developers. These are the developers who love to sit around and do as little work as possible, collect their paychecks, and stab each other in the back when a perceived opportunity to move up arises. This is my current engagement, where absolutely nothing would get done were it not for contractors. Some of the more legacy apps are staffed with more competent employees who know what they are doing, but as a rule of thumb, 90% of the internal .net developers are lazy and/or stupid.

I have seen some large corporations who seemed to have their IT shops in order, but the last two corporations I've worked in have been fairly egregious offenders.

I think it is also important to distinguish staffing firms from consulting companies. Companies who focus on staff augmentation, in my opinion, tend to produce lower quality contractors than those who focus on fixed bid projects. I've noticed in my own engagements that if you get stuck with a client, with no end date in sight, you tend to stagnate a little bit as far as staying up to date. This effect is only multiplied if you are an FTE.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

The Judge:
A Contractor:
justsomedude:
A Contractor:
You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

I wager the real truth is just that out of any group of 10 developers, 6-8 of them will produce things that the other 2-4 would have a pregnant over. It's not so much a function of contractor vs. career employee, instead I think there are simply a good share of developers who write code that isn't exacly golden.

Wrong. It's exactly what I said. Employees get link to companies for the same reason that women get married young. You're stupid, lazy, and a terrible cook, but because you're pretty, you can put a man in bondage forever.
I DEMAND THAT THIS BE MADE A FEATURED COMMENT.

Why, because he essentially called himself a whore whose good at temporarily satisfying someone but doesn't have the other skills or personality required to be part of a meaningful, lasting relationship?

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging.

There's a selection bias at work here.

An incompetent contractor will generally leave evidence of his incompetence in many more places for a potential TDWTF submitters to subsequently discover than an incompetent in-house developer will. That naturally makes contractors overrepresented among the originators of published WTFery.

As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF

By nature, however, your observations overrepresent companies whose management and/or in-house staff are particularly inept; such companies are more likely to need to bring in contractors repeatedly.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Government Contractor:
My company is still fairly small, and actually does some good work. That's mostly because we'll virtually take over the project. But you're right, the big contractors will hire anyone with a pulse. When we work with other contractors or, god help us, other agencies, it's an abortion.

Please tell me you meant "abomination"

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

No, NO, anything but marketing! How about piano player at a brothel?

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

NMe:
A Contractor:
The Perl script had started out as a quick hack by an in-house developer

You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.
...and you think you're the rule here? Or maybe the exception? :P

I think all programmers are worthless and damaging.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

FTE:
The Judge:
A Contractor:
justsomedude:
A Contractor:
You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

I wager the real truth is just that out of any group of 10 developers, 6-8 of them will produce things that the other 2-4 would have a pregnant over. It's not so much a function of contractor vs. career employee, instead I think there are simply a good share of developers who write code that isn't exacly golden.

Wrong. It's exactly what I said. Employees get link to companies for the same reason that women get married young. You're stupid, lazy, and a terrible cook, but because you're pretty, you can put a man in bondage forever.
I DEMAND THAT THIS BE MADE A FEATURED COMMENT.

Why, because he essentially called himself a whore whose good at temporarily satisfying someone but doesn't have the other skills or personality required to be part of a meaningful, lasting relationship?

My god man, get over it... It's just a job! Maybe its just me, but I've never bought all that 'we love our employees' and 'our employees are family' BS. I do my 7.5 or 8 hours (or overtime as required) and go home. I like the people I work with but they are not my family as I already have one. Sounds jaded? Naw, just that there are a limited amount of hours in the day, and I would like to spend as few of them at work...

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Alex, dude, you should seriously find an English major who will work as TDWTF's editor and proofread your articles.

Alex Papadimoulis:
I mean most of the time: it'd typically took an a good three or four attempts...

That's a good idea dude.

Typically it takes an a good three or four attempts before it'd has good grammr

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

ÃƒÆ’Ã†â€™Ãƒâ€ Ã¢â‚¬â„¢ÃƒÆ’Ã¢â‚¬Â ÃƒÂ¢Ã¢â€šÂ¬Ã¢â€žÂ:
Alex, dude, you should seriously find an English major who would otherwise be waiting tables at Olive Garden.
Alex Papadimoulis:
I mean most of the time: it'd typically took an a good three or four attempts...

That's a good idea dude.

Typically it takes an a good three or four attempts before it'd has good grammr

FTFY

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
"A Contractor" isn't very bright.:
"Wrong. It's exactly what I said. Employees get link to companies for the same reason that women get married young. You're stupid, lazy, and a terrible cook, but because you're pretty, you can put a man in bondage forever."
Being a contractor isn't any sort of guarantee that you're any good as a developer. There are plenty of good company developers and plenty of good contractors. There are, however, lots of lousy developers too.

Oh and yeah, gross generalizations are always the last bastion of the clueless. You win a prize.

I can't thank you enough for proving my point. I can't even fathom why some people, when they want to refer to someone else's comment, fail to realize that there is a button right next to the reply button that says "quote." Failing that, simple investigation (using the BBCode Okay link) tells you exactly how to do it.

So, which government agency are you currently a contractor for?

The IRS.

Prepare to be audited.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

cappeca:
wibble:
d.k. Allen:
Ze Grammar Nazi:
Jellineck:
justsomedude:
[quote user="A Contractor] would have a pregnant over.

Dammit Colbert. Why'd you have to go and encourage reddit.

Dammit Jellineck. Why'd you have to go and forget about the question mark?

Dammit Nazi. Why'd you have to go and spell Damnit wrong?

its spelled dammit...

Damnit wibble, why can't you just play along?

Damn it wibble, it's spelled it's!

hoodaticus · 2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Closing the mark:
Larry:
justsomedude:
A Contractor:
You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

I wager the real truth is just that out of any group of 10 developers, 6-8 of them will produce things that the other 2-4 would have a pregnant over. It's not so much a function of contractor vs. career employee, instead I think there are simply a good share of developers who write code that isn't exacly golden.

TRWTF is quotation marks.
Only if you don't use them in pairs

Some people use those to denote minutes, seconds, feet, and inches.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Coincoin:
@Deprecated:
JSelf:
Son of the Dancing Pigeon:
A Contractor:

As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place.

+1 to that!

Not a contractor, but feel for you guys nonetheless! I think one of the reasons contractors obtain the tainted rep on this site is purely for the ironic value...hiring someone at $50-$250 an hour and they end up making more of a mess than to begin with, I think, should be a line in Alanis' next Ironic remix ;)

----Edit----

Not my intention for this quote to read that all or even the majority adhere to what I state; its just that one effed up egg can ruin your omelette...or something like that.

Errr, that song is more about bad luck and poor planning, than it is about irony...

Someone who doesn't know what irony is making a song about it... now THAT'S irony.

She does know what irony is. She intentionally wrote a song about irony in which there was no irony.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

"A Contractor" isn't very bright.::
A Contractor:
"A Contractor" isn't very bright.:
"Wrong. It's exactly what I said. Employees get link to companies for the same reason that women get married young. You're stupid, lazy, and a terrible cook, but because you're pretty, you can put a man in bondage forever."
Being a contractor isn't any sort of guarantee that you're any good as a developer. There are plenty of good company developers and plenty of good contractors. There are, however, lots of lousy developers too.

Oh and yeah, gross generalizations are always the last bastion of the clueless. You win a prize.

I can't thank you enough for proving my point. I can't even fathom why some people, when they want to refer to someone else's comment, fail to realize that there is a button right next to the reply button that says "quote." Failing that, simple investigation (using the BBCode Okay link) tells you exactly how to do it.

So, which government agency are you currently a contractor for?

The IRS.

Prepare to be audited.

What grade are you? Oh, wait, contractor, so GS-nothing.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Fixed?

%hash = (
   'admin' => "83fcb0032cfb59c0327401d4fab13ea7",
   'joeb' => "afc7090be5e7b01296850e5436a88872",
   'alexp' => "b385c5b6899594b3aa220f34e493ab39"
);

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
The Perl script had started out as a quick hack by an in-house developer

You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

In my experience its just 9 out of 10 devs, no matter contractor or inhouse, that is the real wtf.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

swedish tard:
A Contractor:
The Perl script had started out as a quick hack by an in-house developer

You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

In my experience its just 9 out of 10 devs, no matter contractor or inhouse, that is the real wtf.

Both a mixed bag: agreed. However, 9/10 contractors are diligent, skilled, and worth their pay, whereas 1/10 (I'm being very generous) company employees are worth their salt. Of course I realize the dangers of generalization, so I will amend this. My statement applied to the programming level. Low-management and middle management are even lower in terms of quality, but as you approach the level of CEO (and others that have direct control of the success of the company) quality increases. In fact, 99% of companies that have been in business for 5 years or more will have a diligent, skilled, and competent CEO.

Amended again: this rule only applies to companies whose customers are made up of less than 10% by federal, state, and local governments. Furthermore, a contractor for any government agency is 10 times the bottom-feeder of a company programmer and I have yet to meet one that I would trust to replace a coffee filter.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Eons ago, back in the dial-up BBS days, a freind of mine was writing his own BBS software. After I got his permission to test it's security, I managed to crash the 'gamble time' feature (since there was a limited number of phone lines, user login time was limited, but there was an option to gamble a number of minutes for a 1:3 chance of doubling the number) by gambling a negative number of minutes, hence 'losing' my way to a larger number of minutes, causing an integer overflow.

That dumped me into the basic interpreter, but still redirected over the modem. I found that he had the user/password database appended to the code like "10034 DATA "User", "Password"...

I helped him get all those issues fixed up, adding a simple hash to the data; adding a disconnect user and restart on fatal errors, and limiting the input and output of the gambling function.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
swedish tard:
A Contractor:
The Perl script had started out as a quick hack by an in-house developer

You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

In my experience its just 9 out of 10 devs, no matter contractor or inhouse, that is the real wtf.
Both a mixed bag: agreed. However, 9/10 contractors are diligent, skilled, and worth their pay, whereas 1/10 (I'm being very generous) company employees are worth their salt. Of course I realize the dangers of generalization, so I will amend this. My statement applied to the programming level. Low-management and middle management are even lower in terms of quality, but as you approach the level of CEO (and others that have direct control of the success of the company) quality increases. In fact, 99% of companies that have been in business for 5 years or more will have a diligent, skilled, and competent CEO.

Amended again: this rule only applies to companies whose customers are made up of less than 10% by federal, state, and local governments. Furthermore, a contractor for any government agency is 10 times the bottom-feeder of a company programmer and I have yet to meet one that I would trust to replace a coffee filter.

Nah. Its really that the majority of anything cant be "good". Be it developers, singers or what the hell else. If the majority has that skill level, it's avarage, not good. So, to a good dev, the majority of devs you come in contact with are bad compared to yourself. That is, if you can correctly tell your own skill, which most people cant. :)

And I find it annoying when other devs are surprised by me reading books on programming on my spare time. Or sneaking in on classes in the university just because they seem interresting. If they dont want to improve thei skills, or dont enjoy programming... Please, for the love of boobies, switch profession so My paycheck gets even better. ;)

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

This is why we can't have nice things.

aptent: Morning glory denting your precious platemail.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Gondolf:
This is why we can't have nice things.
aptent: Morning glory denting your precious platemail.

Boobies are nice things. And we can have them.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

swedish tard:
A Contractor:
swedish tard:
A Contractor:
The Perl script had started out as a quick hack by an in-house developer

You see, the overwhelming attitude of this site is that all contractors are worthless and damaging. As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

In my experience its just 9 out of 10 devs, no matter contractor or inhouse, that is the real wtf.
Both a mixed bag: agreed. However, 9/10 contractors are diligent, skilled, and worth their pay, whereas 1/10 (I'm being very generous) company employees are worth their salt. Of course I realize the dangers of generalization, so I will amend this. My statement applied to the programming level. Low-management and middle management are even lower in terms of quality, but as you approach the level of CEO (and others that have direct control of the success of the company) quality increases. In fact, 99% of companies that have been in business for 5 years or more will have a diligent, skilled, and competent CEO.

Amended again: this rule only applies to companies whose customers are made up of less than 10% by federal, state, and local governments. Furthermore, a contractor for any government agency is 10 times the bottom-feeder of a company programmer and I have yet to meet one that I would trust to replace a coffee filter.

Nah. Its really that the majority of anything cant be "good". Be it developers, singers or what the hell else. If the majority has that skill level, it's avarage, not good. So, to a good dev, the majority of devs you come in contact with are bad compared to yourself. That is, if you can correctly tell your own skill, which most people cant. :)

And I find it annoying when other devs are surprised by me reading books on programming on my spare time. Or sneaking in on classes in the university just because they seem interresting. If they dont want to improve thei skills, or dont enjoy programming... Please, for the love of boobies, switch profession so My paycheck gets even better. ;)

What part of "diligent, skilled, and worth their pay" don't you understand? Many company employees are far more concerned with where to put the curly bracket and how much whitespace and comments there are than 1) what their users want and need, and 2) whether the software actually meets their wants and needs.

Moreover, I challenge your statement 'the majority of anything cant be "good".' Most doctors are "good" doctors. This is because of rigorous training and licensing. "Bad" doctors either don't make it through school or have their license revoked. This, incidentally, is the definition of professionalism. Most company programmers are NOT professionals despite being in a career where it is expected.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

P.S., on the topic of professionalism, I would suggest that you sneak into a few remedial English classes.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
Wrong. It's exactly what I said. Employees get link to companies for the same reason that women get married young. You're stupid, lazy, and a terrible cook, but because you're pretty, you can put a man in bondage forever.

That's a retarded comment......

I wager the real truth is just that out of any group of 10 developers, 6-8 of them will produce things that the other 2-4 would have a pregnant over. It's not so much a function of contractor vs. career employee, instead I think there are simply a good share of developers who write code that isn't exacly golden.

this is right on the mark!

frits · 2010-09-27 Reply Admin

swedish tard:
Gondolf:
This is why we can't have nice things.
aptent: Morning glory denting your precious platemail.

Boobies are nice things. And we can have them.

That's true. I see plenty of men with them.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

frits:
swedish tard:
Gondolf:
This is why we can't have nice things.
aptent: Morning glory denting your precious platemail.

Boobies are nice things. And we can have them.

That's true. I see plenty of men with them.

You are an idiot and should be banned from using your mommy and daddy's modem.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
What part of "diligent, skilled, and worth their pay" don't you understand?

The part where you shamelessly reserve this praise for contractors only. That's the part I don't get.

A Contractor:
Most company programmers...

Enough with the generalizations already. You haven't worked with most company programmers.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

The problem here is that Sturgeon's law applies to programmers, too.

*Ninety percent of in-house coders are crap.

*Ninety percent of consultants are crap.

*Ninety percent of code is crap.

Justice · 2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
Moreover, I challenge your statement 'the majority of anything cant be "good".' Most doctors are "good" students. This is because of rigorous training and licensing. "Bad" doctors either don't make it through school or have their license revoked. This, incidentally, is the definition of professionalism.

FTFY. There are some very good doctors, and a whole lot of really stupid ones. The ability to grind your way through medical school and a residency may get you licensed to practice medicine, but it doesn't mean you're any good at it.

And while we're discussing professionalism, even if a doctor is good at medicine, it doesn't mean he's any good at running a practice.

Point is, going to professional school or getting some certification or whatever does not make you competent or any sort of a professional. As Richard Nixon was once told, what it takes to get through law school is an iron butt.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Back in '98 I had my first day at my first real job. My mentor was counting the days until retirement. He told me "the internet here is instant". I guess, compared to his dial-up at home, it appeared instant but it was slower than my home connection today.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Justice:
A Contractor:
Moreover, I challenge your statement 'the majority of anything cant be "good".' Most doctors are "good" students. This is because of rigorous training and licensing. "Bad" doctors either don't make it through school or have their license revoked. This, incidentally, is the definition of professionalism.

FTFY. There are some very good doctors, and a whole lot of really stupid ones. The ability to grind your way through medical school and a residency may get you licensed to practice medicine, but it doesn't mean you're any good at it.

And while we're discussing professionalism, even if a doctor is good at medicine, it doesn't mean he's any good at running a practice.

Point is, going to professional school or getting some certification or whatever does not make you competent or any sort of a professional. As Richard Nixon was once told, what it takes to get through law school is an iron butt.

Your statements are so contradictory and illogical that it's stunning. It's clear you fall into the typical iq-level of the government contractor.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Lego:
cappeca:
wibble:
d.k. Allen:
Ze Grammar Nazi:
Jellineck:
justsomedude:
[quote user="A Contractor] would have a pregnant over.

Dammit Colbert. Why'd you have to go and encourage reddit.

Dammit Jellineck. Why'd you have to go and forget about the question mark?

Dammit Nazi. Why'd you have to go and spell Damnit wrong?

its spelled dammit...

Damnit wibble, why can't you just play along?

Damn it wibble, it's spelled it's!

Damn it, Lego, you missed the quotes around the word "it's".

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
Your statements are so contradictory and illogical that it's stunning. It's clear you fall into the typical iq-level of the government contractor.

You sure do hate government contractors; you keep bringing up the subject, completely unprovoked.

So what happened, did your wife leave you for a government contractor?

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

9/10 developers who aren't me are the real WTF. I'm great at my job and do everything right, for my own definition of right, it's everyone else who doesn't agree with my conventions, idiom, and choice of architecture who is the real WTF.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

Justice:
A Contractor:

People, what part of "Do not feed" did you not understand? For the first two posts, it could have been just a conceited human. After that it became obvious.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
Both a mixed bag: agreed. However, 9/10 contractors are diligent, skilled, and worth their pay, whereas 1/10 (I'm being very generous) company employees are worth their salt.

You definitely live in Fantasy Land. Here on Earth it isn't a matter of being contractor or FTE, because both groups have their share of idiots who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, just as swedish tard said.

Some contractors however might give others a bad rep, not because they can't code well, but because they just don't care. If a FTE willingly produces WTF-level code they're stuck maintaining the beast, whereas the contractor just packs up and go to the next job.

Of course I realize the dangers of generalization,

Then why don't you avoid them?

as you approach the level of CEO (and others that have direct control of the success of the company) quality increases. In fact, 99% of companies that have been in business for 5 years or more will have a diligent, skilled, and competent CEO.

WTF? Haven't you learn anything from Dilbert OR the real life? Oh wait, Fantasy Land, that's right.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

While the debate rages about "contractors vs employees" and all that, I'd like to take a minute to ask a terminology question. I currently work for a very small open-source software company which has a core product and writes custom extensions to our core product for a fee.

So I'd like to know if I fall under the umbrella of "bone-idle 9-to-5er subsisting on the back of a company's incompetence" or am I a "dumb as paint contractor who couldn't hack it at a real job and so drains an innocent company like a vampire before being fired and moving on to his next victim"? Because I really need to know what to refer to myself as.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

frits:
Cbuttius:
Anyone know how to decrypt those passwords?

You'll need to harness the power of rainbows.

Google is a better friend

but anyway, someone is one step ahead, almost

$ echo -n alexp | md5 b385c5b6899594b3aa220f34e493ab39 $ echo -n joeb | md5 afc7090be5e7b01296850e5436a88872

but wait

$ echo -n admin | md5 21232f297a57a5a743894a0e4a801fc3

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

UR doing it rong, Bert.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

the beholder:
A Contractor:
Both a mixed bag: agreed. However, 9/10 contractors are diligent, skilled, and worth their pay, whereas 1/10 (I'm being very generous) company employees are worth their salt.
You definitely live in Fantasy Land. Here on Earth it isn't a matter of being contractor or FTE, because both groups have their share of idiots who couldn't code their way out of a paper bag, just as swedish tard said.
Some contractors however might give others a bad rep, not because they can't code well, but because they just don't care. If a FTE willingly produces WTF-level code they're stuck maintaining the beast, whereas the contractor just packs up and go to the next job.

Of course I realize the dangers of generalization,
Then why don't you avoid them?
as you approach the level of CEO (and others that have direct control of the success of the company) quality increases. In fact, 99% of companies that have been in business for 5 years or more will have a diligent, skilled, and competent CEO.
WTF? Haven't you learn anything from Dilbert OR the real life? Oh wait, Fantasy Land, that's right.

You appear to be a moron, so this is a response to those in college or right out. I simply gave expert testimony from 30 years of contracting experience. Yes, most CEOs and upper management DO know what's going on, because if they don't, their asses are on the line. They keep the company afloat through smart decisions and working 20 hours, 7 days a week for sometimes years at a time. Yes, I read Dilbert and I laugh, but the stupidity of the PHB is generally (as I stated earlier) relegated to lower and middle management. The typical company man (programmer) is Wally, and while Alices exist, there are twenty times the number that think they are than actually exist.

Oh, and remember that decisions that may seem incomprehensible to privates make perfect sense from the standpoint of a general.

2010-09-27 Reply Admin

A Contractor:
As a contractor myself, I have to say that my observation is that 9 times out of 10 "company employees" are the real WTF and are the incompetent ones who never produce anything and are the reason we have to be hired in the first place. I am not now nor ever will be content to milk any company until retirement. I would be ashamed of myself.

Of course, that's because the only companies that hire you obviously have problems with their in-house development.

My company has never hired a contractor ever -- every line of code was written in-house, and while I won't say I've never found anything that made me cringe, it's certainly not very often. Even most of the issues I deal with in old code are choices that made sense ten or twenty years ago when the scope of our software was much smaller that ended up being inconvenient as that scope expanded.

2010-09-28 Reply Admin

DittoToo:
Back in '98 I had my first day at my first real job. My mentor was counting the days until retirement. He told me "the internet here is instant". I guess, compared to his dial-up at home, it appeared instant but it was slower than my home connection today.

How was the coffee?

2010-09-28 Reply Admin

I'm sorry, was someone actually saying that releasing code using Data::Dumper or whatever debugging thing Perl has is understandable? Or something you might actually expect someone to do? Man, that's unbelievably dumb. You have no skills, and are stupid.

2010-09-28 Reply Admin

Look, I might be "stupid, lazy, and a terrible cook", but I'm damn sure I didn't get hired because I'm pretty!

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