• Coward (unregistered)

    So Sergio has replaced Hanzo then?

  • WTF (unregistered)

    WTF did I just read?

    I know it's called the daily WTF, but I think something got lost in translation here.

  • Summoner (unregistered)

    The real WTF is thinking this story has any entertainment value what so ever.

    captcha: damnum ... damm this sucks, um what's the point again?

  • Peon Pusher (unregistered) in reply to Coward

    So far, Sergio is an incompetent who begs everyone around him to do his work for him. Since such people are wildly successful in real life, these Sergio stories are completely unrealistic.

  • (cs)

    100 euros is a lot of beer in Spain.

  • (cs)

    And the third developer, who we'll meet next time, is of course the President's Daughter.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to WTF
    WTF:
    WTF did I just read? I know it's called the daily WTF, but I think something got lost in translation here.
    No, I rather think the author has lost it.

    With the "Hanzo" stories, you at least left with the impression that each article covered a separate wtf.

    With the "Casa de Quixote" stories, I'm left with the impression Erik is trying to find out into how many articles he can serialze one submission.

    This is just sad.

  • Don (unregistered)

    TRWTF: asking an mind-slobberingly drunk individual to explain why he wrote code in a particular manner in some vague distant past...

  • anonymous (unregistered)

    Is that déjà vu?

    My comment of the first topic:

    anonymous:
    ... If someone wrote something as stupid as this reflection scheme, would anyone reasonably believe that it would be any good getting in contact with the said person? Only two scenarios are possible if you ever get an answer: "Neat, huh?" (in this case, the guy is still as dumb as always) or "I'm really sorry, man! I was totally inexperienced, and thought it was a good idea..." (the guy learned his lession, but the code is crap because it is).

    Yeah, call me a furtune teller now.

    (BTW, the artistic license is making the stories dumb beyond measure. Please, stop ruining otherwise good stories with lame jokes and bloating the site with stuff like this. If you have nothing for today, better not post at all)

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to TGV
    TGV:
    100 euros is a lot of beer in Spain.
    Or badly researched embellishment.
  • TroelsL (unregistered)

    Wouldn't it be faster just to rewrite the entire code (assuming this is not an entirely fictional case) rather than try to track down 3 obvious idiots for help?

    CAPTCHA: ludus as in luduscrous

  • Hecho en Castillo (unregistered) in reply to Don
    Don:
    TRWTF: asking an mind-slobberingly drunk individual to explain why he wrote code in a particular manner in some vague distant past...
    TRWTF is Sergio thinks the world owes him a favor because he's Sergio.
  • Lord0 (unregistered)

    Sergio seems like a bit of a c0ck.

    Chasing up someone in a pub? Really?

    What a bell end

  • DonRobo (unregistered)

    What exactly was Sergio expecting from tracking down that developer? The code was bad, I get it, but what use would talking to the developer who wrote it be? It's not like the logic is so complex Sergio wouldn't be able to understand it by himself.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Peon Pusher
    Peon Pusher:
    So far, Sergio is an incompetent who begs everyone around him to do his work for him. Since such people are wildly successful in real life, these Sergio stories are completely unrealistic.
    The problem is, this story is so heavily embellished / anonymized, it is impossible to tell whether Sergio is the one who is incompetent or whether Erik is.

    I for my part think that Sergio is 100% fabricated.

  • (cs)

    If he knows how to fix the code, why the heck does he not just get on with it instead of spending company resources on a drunkard?

  • foobär (unregistered)

    This would be far better if they just showed the code, and left out the made up stuff...

  • cyborg (unregistered)

    Bad code was written. Those responible will be tracked down and terminated.

    CAPTCHA - populus : this approach will reduce it.

  • foobär (unregistered)

    Also why is everybody acting as if the fictional parts of the story were true?

  • Coward (unregistered)

    Maybe its a learning experience for Sergio in that he learns that he is TRWTF

  • WTF (unregistered) in reply to anonymous
    anonymous:
    Is that déjà vu?
    More like déjà moo
  • Excelsior (unregistered)

    Can't we give that story up and avoid the third (and maybe fourth) part ?

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to steenbergh
    steenbergh:
    And the third developer, who we'll meet next time, is of course the President's Daughter.
    Missing documentation, he tracks down his predecessors for help.

    Miguel, manager of Casa de Quixote, told Sergio he'd find the President's daughter at a beach in Torremolinos.

    Wearing faded shorts and his "Casa de Quixote" employee t-shirt, Sergio walked up and down the beach, checking the sunbathers' faces against a torn and faded polaroid.

    At the far end of the beach he saw a woman that just could be the third developer. He squatted down: "Are you the President's daughter?"

    When she confirmed, Sergio opened his laptop and showed her some code:

    try {
...
} catch (Exception ex) {
}

    "Why do you swallow all exceptions at this point?" he asked. "How am I supposed to debug the code?"

    The President's daughter shrugged her shoulders. "Dunno, probably because if not the program would crash?".

    "Ok, how about this." Sergio showed her some other piece of code. "Why did you use == to compare two strings and not the 'equals' method??"

    "Strings have an equals method?"

    Sergio sighed.

    "Any luck with the President's daugher?" Miguel asked the next day.

    "Absolutely not. She was as uncooperative as a bucket full of sand. Besides, she couldn't code her way out of a wet paper bag."

    "That's the President's daugher to you." Miguel said. "BTW, did I mention she will be back after summer as head of software development?"

    Sergio's scream could probably still be heard in Torremolinos.

  • foo AKA fooo (unregistered) in reply to Coward
    Coward:
    So Sergio has replaced Hanzo then?
    My thoughts exactly when I read the first paragraph.

    Only one question remains: Is it Sergi AKA Sergio or Sergio AKA Sergioo? Dying to know!

  • spike (unregistered)

    The real WTF is why I keep coming back.

    Well that's decided, I'm deleting the link.

    CAPTCHA: ratis says it all really/.

  • EvilSnack (unregistered)

    The only sane reason for tracking down former developers is to deal with the insane situation of management demanding that the original reason for code be documented prior to any changes being committed.

  • (cs)

    this ongoing saas-bahu serial brought to you by TheDailyWTF.

  • (cs) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    steenbergh:
    And the third developer, who we'll meet next time, is of course the President's Daughter.
    "Why do you swallow all exceptions at this point?" he asked.
    At least the president's daughter swallows.
  • Blah (unregistered)

    I think everybody has this all wrong. Sergio is a F*&KING genius. He takes a new job, find that his boss in mind-numbingly naive, convinces him that the code is SO bad that only the previous devs can explain the stupidity, then spends days hunting them down doing almost nothing on the job.

    After all that, when his boss knows that the old guys were even more useless than he thought when he fired him, Sergio steps up a bit (with ideas he obviously already has) and fixes the mess as best his lazy ass can and is now a hero to his boss.

    Brilliance....

    captcha: illum. Gotten this one enough times for Chrome to auto-complete it for me!

  • RakerF1 (unregistered) in reply to faoileag

    Better than today's submission...

    ++1

    captcha: inhibeo - don't feel inhibeo when submitting stories to TDWTF

  • the beholder (unregistered)

    Wow. I'm usually quite complacent but for the first time I have to say the WTF isn't in the story but it is the story itself.

    I'm not even complaining about the way Erik Gern spin the story. My beef is with WHY THIS WAS PICKED for an article at all?

    And TRWTF is Sergio. He gets what the code is doing yet feels the need to track down the previous devs, who have no reason to help him at all, just to push their former code on their faces while saying "See how this code is bad? LOOK HOW IT IS BAD!" Also as someone already mentioned up above, what did he expect to learn from people who write code ugly like that?

    I'm just thankful that Casa de la Mancha didn't use a dozen other devs previously. One more article like this will be torture enough.

  • John (unregistered)

    Why do people always expect developers to remember their thought process behind every line of code they ever wrote? I barely remember what I did last week.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to the beholder
    the beholder:
    I'm not even complaining about the way Erik Gern spin the story. ... And TRWTF is Sergio. He gets what the code is doing yet feels the need to track down the previous devs...
    And what exactly gives you reason to believe that the way Sergio behaves is anything but Erik spinning the story?

    Simply ask yourself the question: you leave your job at X (volutarily/forced, doesn't matter). Half a year from now, could your former boss at X tell a new recruit where to find you?

    Now, if Sergio had looked up Luis on facebook, checked his status ("getting drunk in Los dos botellas, Toledo") and used that information to find Luis, ok. That would be plausible.

    But a former boss being able to pinpoint his previous employee's favourite watering hole after he had obviously moved to a different town? Ridiculous (unless of course Miguel and Luis are still buddies).

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to John
    John:
    I barely remember what I did last week.
    There was a week before this?
  • Incredibly Dumb Story (unregistered)

    Hanzo turns to Gertrude and says "That was weird. I just got a call from Casa de Quixote. Apparently the developer there has been trying to track down anyone who has ever worked there.".....

    Stay tuned. I'm sure this will become a future article

  • ANON (unregistered)

    At least only one more to come: http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/Last-but-not-Least.aspx

  • (cs)

    The problem with this (and most Erik Gern stories) is that for all we know the original submission was just the code and a note about how three previous guys left, and the rest of this "Track down the developers" bullshit is for flavor.

    The problem is that there's embellishment and there's just a load of bullshit, and this (and the Hanzo stories before it) fall into that latter category. It's one thing to embellish a story to make it sound better than "New guy takes a job with crappy code and finds out the three guys before him all went missing", and another thing entirely to just drag a story out to where the actual story is lost.

    This isn't a creative writing site, it's to laugh and bitch about crazy WTFs in IT. This kind of embellishment is too much since it becomes the focal point of the story, not the WTF itself.

  • (cs)
    "I want to go over some code, figure out some unusual programming patterns you used." He opened a copy of the Java package and showed it to Luis. "This, for example. It's part of the code that generates bank transaction statements. Why didn't you make this thread-safe? SUFIJO could be changed during any part of this process."

    How big of an asshole would you have to be to track somebody down and ridicule their bad code in the guise of "asking questions about it"?

    Or, is Sergio really dumb enough to think there was a conscious reason behind that?

  • Chris P. Peterson (unregistered) in reply to Don

    Yeah. I'd like to punch Sergio in his GD throat. Freaking idiot. Hope that they don't publish his next installment.

  • anonymous (unregistered)

    Can we not have these imaginary scenarios where some developer takes a couple snips of terrible code, tracks down "that guy", and grills them on what, why, and were they drunk when they coded it? It's really not all that entertaining.

  • Haxxy (unregistered)

    ITT, developer spends time tracking down developers no longer being paid by his company to peer review their code, and gets no answers.

    Gonna need to see Erik's resume.

  • Not Hans (unregistered)

    Maybe Sergio needs to seek out Hanzo for advice.

  • (cs)

    I won't spoil but I've read the third installment and it's even more ridiculous than this one, and resolves nothing. I mean it literally adds nothing of value to the story. In fact, neither did this one. The story itself makes no sense - why would Sergio track down these three developers just for documentation and/or to call them out for crappy code?

    I'm betting that 90% of this is Erik Gern's embellishment to drag the submission out. I'd bet dollars to donuts that the original was just snippets of bad code and a note there was no documentation, and maybe something from the submitter saying he wished he could track down the three previous. That somehow was picked up on and twisted out into this Don Quixote-esque ridiculousness.

    Stop, seriously. You don't need to write some crazy story around a submission; let the submission speak for itself, otherwise too much gets changed and the WTF gets lost.

  • No idea. (unregistered)

    From the 3rd article (Last but not least):

    "Well, so much for getting a few more comments out of our past developers. I hope you got enough documentation to start correcting more bugs."

    "Plenty," Sergio said. "But a coder's personality can tell you a lot, too. And this app was written by madmen and fools."

    That afternoon, Sergio emailed his resignation to Miguel on his ancient machine. He would leave behind enough documentation for his successor. His detective work had made him a better programmer, but he knew in what path madness lie.

    TL;DR for the three articles: He gets a new job, travels on the company's dime to find the previous developers, then when he's done and his boss expects him to fix the bugs he's been whining about, he resigns. That's TRWTF.

  • No idea. (unregistered) in reply to ObiWayneKenobi
    ObiWayneKenobi:
    I won't spoil

    There is nothing to spoil.

    ObiWayneKenobi:
    Stop, seriously. You don't need to write some crazy story around a submission

    I think the problem is that when the stories are embellished enough, we all come out of the woodwork and comment on them a ton (even if it's negative). Perhaps that is what they're trying to achieve.

  • Rodrigo (unregistered)
    Incredibly Dumb Story:
    Hanzo turns to Gertrude and says "That was weird. I just got a call from Casa de Quixote. Apparently the developer there has been trying to track down anyone who has ever worked there.".....

    Stay tuned. I'm sure this will become a future article

    cool, a WTF Crossover
  • AN AWESOME CODER (unregistered) in reply to No idea.
    No idea.:
    From the 3rd article (Last but not least):
    "Well, so much for getting a few more comments out of our past developers. I hope you got enough documentation to start correcting more bugs."

    "Plenty," Sergio said. "But a coder's personality can tell you a lot, too. And this app was written by madmen and fools."

    That afternoon, Sergio emailed his resignation to Miguel on his ancient machine. He would leave behind enough documentation for his successor. His detective work had made him a better programmer, but he knew in what path madness lie.

    TL;DR for the three articles: He gets a new job, travels on the company's dime to find the previous developers, then when he's done and his boss expects him to fix the bugs he's been whining about, he resigns. That's TRWTF.

    Yeah, I just read it.

    It's trash. Worse than this one. WORSE THAN FAILURE.

    Yet I keep coming back. Sigh :-/

  • Spaniard (unregistered)

    TRWTF is the CSB19 format these methods try to implement.

  • faoileag (unregistered) in reply to Haxxy
    Haxxy:
    ITT, developer spends time tracking down developers no longer being paid by his company to peer review their code, and gets no answers.

    Gonna need to see Erik's resume.

    "Writer, web programmer, hobbit."

  • the beholder (unregistered) in reply to faoileag
    faoileag:
    the beholder:
    I'm not even complaining about the way Erik Gern spin the story. ... And TRWTF is Sergio. He gets what the code is doing yet feels the need to track down the previous devs...
    And what exactly gives you reason to believe that the way Sergio behaves is anything but Erik spinning the story?

    Simply ask yourself the question: you leave your job at X (volutarily/forced, doesn't matter). Half a year from now, could your former boss at X tell a new recruit where to find you?

    Now, if Sergio had looked up Luis on facebook, checked his status ("getting drunk in Los dos botellas, Toledo") and used that information to find Luis, ok. That would be plausible.

    But a former boss being able to pinpoint his previous employee's favourite watering hole after he had obviously moved to a different town? Ridiculous (unless of course Miguel and Luis are still buddies).

    You misunderstood me. All I based my opinion on is the fact that Sergio goes after the former devs. Unless the story has been imagined from the start we know this must be a fact because it is the pinpoint of the story; if it is fabricated then once it is removed there is nothing left. Sergio may have behaved more kindly or bitchy than TFA shows but in the end just the fact he went through with the idea to track down the former devs is enough to call him TRWTF.

    I agree that the story doesn't do a stellar job when it comes to describing how exactly Sergio did find Luis. It could be via Facebook as you said, or it could be through the yellow pages - I don't care. I can overlook some misinformation as long as it's not central to the story, as in this case.

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