• Chaz (unregistered)

    CTOs/CIOs should be required to read this site on a daily basis.

  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder

    Oh yes, I've "used" Blackboard for all of five minutes with one of my classes before. Truly the most wretched piece of fancy pants software I've ever seen in an academic setting...

    ... except for my alma mater's huge failure of a registration/grading/class standing/information system that was almost entirely an out-of-the-box Oracle system for what appeared to be some sort of system intended for HR departments. (but it wasn't PeopleSoft) The Oracle logo was even plastered all over the thing for goodness sake!

    Each new semester's registration involved me signing up for one class online, and then registering for the rest with an "advisor" (a poorly paid administrative assistant, basically) because the system ALWAYS complained that I didn't meet the pre-req's for courses when I clearly did.

    BTW, was this story about Ohio State's registration system from the mid to late 90's? OSU's system was just as horrific then as the one described in this story.

  • (cs) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    The Real WTF is that they're using the same room as both a coat room and a broom closet.

    Read the article again. The primary server was in the coat room and the backup was in the broom closet. That's what I call "off-site backup".

  • san (unregistered) in reply to Crabs
    Crabs:
    (omg..why would they make the back button useless?),

    Because they're making an application, not a web application. It only happens to run in a browser....

  • Andrew (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    "handled 85,000 registrations each semester and brought in about $400 Million a year"

    That's nearly $5,000 per registration... WTF?!

    Many universities cost more than $5,000 per semester. It cost me more from 1990-1994, and U.S. tuition has increased dramatically since then.

  • Christophe (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    The Real WTF is that they're using the same room as both a coat room and a broom closet.

    Polymorphism in action!!!

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to NewbiusMaximus
    NewbiusMaximus:
    Developers at XXX Corp claimed that this was impossible, as they had thoroughly load-tested Mother, but eventually agreed to investigate their testing code.
    Yeah, I've been on the other side of that "thoroughly load-tested" statement. Every time some customer was told that, it meant they sat down one tester with (maybe) two client computers and (if you're really lucky) some kind of automated or scripted testing software that they might know how to use.

    Which, of course, gives you spectacular, catastrophic failure when more than 4 people try to use the application simultaneously. Hilarity ensues.

    Note to self: get in on the wine-and-dine, "get-a-big-bonus when your shitty $4 million Rube Goldbergian system is finally cobbled together" side of the game instead of the "make things work on a reasonable budget" side of the game.

    I'd just offer to expand my working system to what they wanted for a bargain price of $2M.

  • Mr. Php Newb (unregistered)

    I'm curious about "breaking the back button"... when "developing" how do I avoid the message that's something like "your request has expired post data" or whatever when clicking back?

    I'd like to just clear $_POST but that didn't work. Perhaps I can just use $_GET?

    Love my newb status! And yes I put "WebMaster" on my resume :-p

  • Crabs (unregistered)

    Right, I've got "your message has expired post data" as well. I also like "Your changes have already been submitted.".

    I get this banner message when I go to search for classes to add. I get a list, hit the back button, and try to perform another search. You're not allowed to go back without scrolling all the way to the bottom of the list and clicking the "Class Search" button. Annoying, to say the least.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Mr. Php Newb
    Mr. Php Newb:
    I'm curious about "breaking the back button"... when "developing" how do I avoid the message that's something like "your request has expired post data" or whatever when clicking back?

    I'd like to just clear $_POST but that didn't work. Perhaps I can just use $_GET?

    Love my newb status! And yes I put "WebMaster" on my resume :-p

    Simple: your post requests can redirect to get pages that are display only. This avoids the post request problem.

  • (cs) in reply to Anonymous User

    All the smart kids just telneted into the VAX servers rather than SSH or the Website which would boot you off, we also figured out that if you write a script to pummel the server from 6 different machines you'll get in fairly quickly.

  • morry (unregistered)

    If that was me, I'd get no raise and a performance evaluation saying "needs to exhibit more initiative".

  • (cs)

    I smell BS too.

  • (cs) in reply to rettigcd

    I am with the people calling BS on this article.

    Server threw a Java Stack dump in the early 90's? Very interesting considering Java's first public version was in 1995. I am pretty sure the servlet spec was in 1997 or 1998.

  • Bryan K (unregistered) in reply to Christophe

    Thread over, thanks for playing....

    Make sure to tip your waitress on the way out

  • George Nacht (unregistered)

    This must be very close to reality (i.e. - possibly true). Everyone here is so pissed off by this or similar story, that no one yet posted the most obvious quotation:

    ,,Mother, how do we kill it?"

    DOES NOT COMPUTE

    ,,Mother, what are our chances?"

    DOES NOT COMPUTE.

  • Anon E. Muss (unregistered) in reply to Joshua Ochs
    Joshua Ochs:
    These universities DO have a huge talent pool willing to work for a couple extra credits; why don't they ever take advantage of that?

    Well...

    It could have to do with the fact that most of that talent pool is extremely transitory. I work in a university and see it happen often. Somebody needs a database to do such and such or a small program to do this and that. A student works great... Until they graduate and you get another one who says "X languagage/tool is terrible, I'll write it in Y". So they start all over every couple years. Typically, the most qualified students are seniors. So you train them to have them leave before the training really pays off? The transient nature of the student talent pool makes it a lot more difficult than it sounds at first glance.

  • (cs)

    My cat's name is Mother.

  • Jon J (unregistered) in reply to AMerrickanGirl

    AHAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHA!!!!!

    Banner at a University???? VSU in southside VA is still trying to get that dog to walk... Students cant get transcripts.. Scheduling is broken. Who knows what the deal is with email.

    HOWEVER the old working system needed to go as they needed to burn up some budget money.

  • Jon J (unregistered) in reply to Scurvy

    It also helped to know A) the people who wrote the software and/or B) the people who had admin access to the system. I don't think I ever didn't get into a class I wanted in my ahem 7 years there.[/quote]

    Hey even better, When I graduated I ended up teaching at a 'career school'. They have an awesome system that they spent millions on and it was supposed to provide email to students and all kinds of cool record keeping.

    But due to turnover only a few people actually know how to use it and the email system doesnt work as its applet based on an appliance. (no outlook support so useless for office class)

    Here is the best part: The password for EVERY DEPARTMENT IS THE SAME WORD!!!!! You can basically do anything in the system if you just change your login name! Trust me the login names were not hard to figure out since email accounts tended to match the department.

    What a sad joke. Sadder is that the school has changed names and is still open.

  • Jeff (unregistered) in reply to Steve
    Steve:
    "handled 85,000 registrations each semester and brought in about $400 Million a year"

    That's nearly $5,000 per registration... WTF?!

    Furthermore, how should/could a registration system "bring in" any money? I thought students were paying to attend classes, not sign up for them?

  • Jeff (unregistered) in reply to Joshua Ochs
    Joshua Ochs:
    These universities DO have a huge talent pool willing to work for a couple extra credits; why don't they ever take advantage of that?

    Because then they couldn't hand out a $100 million contract to the president's nephew's consulting company (or senator's in the case of a state school). Ahem: https://apps.uillinois.edu/selfservice/

  • Hiredman (unregistered) in reply to snoofle

    I found one today that wanted 3 years of Java and 2 years of programming experience.

    Maybe they meant they wanted: 3 years of Java and 2 years of real programming experience.

    I KEED, I KEED!

    One of my favorite ads was in around 2002 and they wanted someone with "10 years experience in streaming video". Good luck with that.

    =tkk

  • (cs) in reply to Hiredman
    Hiredman:
    One of my favorite ads was in around 2002 and they wanted someone with "10 years experience in streaming video". Good luck with that.
    Sounds like an applicant whose resume was passed around for my team members' comments. He had "five years' experience in .Net technologies" -- in 2002.
  • SomeCoder (unregistered) in reply to George Nacht
    George Nacht:
    This must be very close to reality (i.e. - possibly true). Everyone here is so pissed off by this or similar story, that no one yet posted the most obvious quotation:

    ,,Mother, how do we kill it?"

    DOES NOT COMPUTE

    ,,Mother, what are our chances?"

    DOES NOT COMPUTE.

    For the record, I did think of that. I just didn't post it :)

    Bring back life form. Priority One. All other priorities rescinded.

  • (cs) in reply to Scott
    Scott:
    This bothers me that the 2 developers didn't get anything of a reward when their system worked so well. I'm on GRG's side!
    Why would anyone not be?
    Scott:
    Also, I still believe that 2 developers that work well together can get more done than a large team, it's about working well together and forming a relationship with one-another so you can accomplish things.
    One skilled developer is even better... if the job is small enough or the deadline far enough away that a single developer can get it done, there's no way to beat a single developer when it comes to efficiency.

    The simple fact is that as soon as there's more than a single developer, communication becomes an important part of the job as the code of different people needs to be compatible. As team size grows, communication becomes increasingly inefficient and you also need good architecture and management. This is what development processes are all about.

    But if you have a decent process and management, a large team most certainly can beat a 2-man team.

  • (cs)

    So my University developed their registration system in-house in two years for probably half a mil and it was a smashing success from Day 2 (Day 1 was...hectic). It handles course registration, academic adviser approvals, scheduling for work, private lessons, etc., and allows for changing a schedule at any point in the semester. Work supervisors can log on and view student schedules. Advisers can handle all email communication via the web app, and a student's entire academic history (GPA, schedules, etc.) is stored for as long as the student is enrolled. At rollout it was considered one of the most advanced and efficient online course registration systems in the US. This replaced the "stand in line for three hours in four different buildings before being told you were missing one signature and had to go secure the signature on the other side of campus (assuming the guy who needed to sign was in his office) then come back and do it all over again" method. Know how some cities riot when their sports teams do well? We almost had a student riot for joy the year the system went live.

    I don't brag much, but I definitely give praise every year that our CIO is pretty smart about what what we can do in-house and who we should hire.

    The last place I worked, however, spent four years developing a quality-control solution in Access with the aide of an HPC. Hilarity ensued when we upgraded from one version of Office to the next (not 2007...crap, that's gonna kill them). Further hilarity ensued when they realized that Access' limitations wouldn't get them what they needed and, halfway through the project, they needed to switch to SQL Server.

    Moral of both stories - right tool for the right job.

  • Hay Blue (unregistered)

    Why not identify the university and the programming company? Whassamatta?

  • (cs) in reply to Jeff
    Jeff:
    Joshua Ochs:
    These universities DO have a huge talent pool willing to work for a couple extra credits; why don't they ever take advantage of that?

    Because then they couldn't hand out a $100 million contract to the president's nephew's consulting company (or senator's in the case of a state school). Ahem: https://apps.uillinois.edu/selfservice/

    O ye cynic.

    More to the point, if I were a, I believe you call it a "college" over there, unless it's prepended with the word "state," in which case it's obviously a university -- why on earth would I give anybody a "couple extra credits" for dinking around with production software? Particularly since they're, by definition, going to leave in three years if they're already uninformed (ie a Freshman) or in one year if they've got some faint clue about what they're doing (ie a Senior)?

    Would you give a theological student "a couple extra credits" for walking around the campus explaining the Pelagian heresy to engineers and cute blondes? (Not that I'm saying that engineers can't be cute and/or blonde, just in case we get into that whole Asberger's thing again.)

    What's a credit worth, anyhow? And is it balanced with a debit? If not, there's no justice in the American version of the academic world.

  • NewbiusMaximus (unregistered) in reply to Jeff
    Jeff:
    Steve:
    "handled 85,000 registrations each semester and brought in about $400 Million a year"

    That's nearly $5,000 per registration... WTF?!

    Furthermore, how should/could a registration system "bring in" any money? I thought students were paying to attend classes, not sign up for them?

    My thought exactly. It seems to me that such a claim would only be made by someone that needs to feel their contribution is significant (or who stands to gain if the bonus-givers buy their claim).

  • boston_guy (unregistered) in reply to Hay Blue

    Boston University.

    I've seen its horrors.

  • iNFiNiTyLoOp (unregistered) in reply to SomeCoder
    SomeCoder:
    ...Anyone here used Blackboard? That's gotta be the worst system to ever be designed by man.

    BlackBoard looks good compared to WebCT Vista, the bastard child of WebCT and BlackBoard. 700kb is downloaded every time you log in, excluding pictures. Complains about invalid security certificates. Complains about your java not working even though it works. Any files you turn in have to first be uploaded to this virtual filesystem tree. They didn't bother to implement delete or move, so it gets super cluttered. Judging by the way the coursework is arranged, this also applies to the profs. It's the worst thing I ever intentionally aimed a browser at.

  • Russ (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    Steve:
    "handled 85,000 registrations each semester and brought in about $400 Million a year"

    That's nearly $5,000 per registration... WTF?!

    Many universities cost more than $5,000 per semester. It cost me more from 1990-1994, and U.S. tuition has increased dramatically since then.

    If you guys are bitching about $5000 per semester, that explains the wtf's on this site, and also why none of you course registration systems worked.

    My school was around $20k per year (although I got most of that in scholarship), and although our system looked like crap, I think it worked fine. I believe they used peoplesoft. Blackboard also worked fine, although we didn't use it heavily. I think the real wtf is people expecting their schools to be perfect when they pay less then $5k per semester.

  • Melbourne Uni Student (unregistered)

    When I was studying at the University of Melbourne, we were given a case study on a similarly botched system. Our lecturers could hardly contain their glee when they revealed the case study was on RMIT, a competitor university down the road that lost thousands of students due to their PeopleSoft enrollment system collapsing.

    We were actually studying its failure while RMIT was still defending it as 'working'. The RMIT vice-chancellor made a classic comment that explained the problem: "We all thought that this project was actually going OK"

  • Zachary Pruckowski (unregistered) in reply to Jeff
    Furthermore, how should/could a registration system "bring in" any money? I thought students were paying to attend classes, not sign up for them?

    For 95% of the classes, I could just walk in and pretend to be a student. Heck, most professors could be bluffed into believing someone who showed up for office hours with a legit question is a student, even while looking at the enrollment sheet.

    Students are paying to get a transcript and a degree. Without being registered, you don't get a grade, and you don't get a transcript, and you don't get a pretty piece of sheepskin, and you don't get to use the University's name on your resume. While it is a stretch to say that the registration system "brings in" the money, it is a crucial component in the administrative/financial side of the university. If you're not registered for classes, the University can't send a bill home.

    (And while this story may not be 100% true in the particulars, this sort of scenario has definitely played out at my college - they're spending millions of dollars on a system that's two years late and will require them to rename and renumber all the courses. The current system is so bad that there's a very low limit on students allowed to sign in. It's such a limitation that a few students closing their browser windows without logging off the system can leave it hopelessly tied up.)

  • Greg van Paassen (unregistered) in reply to Ie
    Ie:
    That's the most depressing WTF in a while. :(

    Yeah, it illustrates why I left development.

    It got depressing seeing, erm, "managers" with the reasoning skills of drunken jellyfish remove solid, reliable, well built systems, replace them at vast and unnecessary expense with Rube Goldberg (or Heath Robinson, if you're English) contraptions that ... almost ... work, on a good day, and get bonuses for it.

    I saw this not just once. Not twice. I guess I'm a slow learner, but after the fifth repetition I reluctantly accepted there was a pattern.

    I have too much self respect to join one the three-letter consultant or its ilk and aid the construction of one of those "better" systems. I find I have too much self respect to work for incompetents, too.

    I'm gonna go work where what I do is valued - probably, boil cow hides at the local meat works.

  • (cs)
    Peter Amstutz:
    Then somebody got the bright idea to build an online registration system. However, instead of building or adopting a system designed for the needs of a large university, they decided to adopt -- wait for it -- PeopleSoft.

    Oh god... Our university has that system. The only difference is that it is hacked together with a million other equally un-usable systems that were made by someone who seemed to like creating websites, but never got round to the usability part of it.

  • M. D. (unregistered)

    Student self-administration systems seem to be this kind of stuff everywhere.

    In a certain post-communist Central European country (state) universities have an obligatory choice of two systems. Both require a monstrous server farm, both can't handle the load when it's really important (course registration week, exam registration month, etc - the times when people actually use it), and both were developed by completely unknown companies (with only these systems in their portfolio) for loads of money (taxpayers' money). And both have bugs and WTF-s of the kind that everyone writes while learning some new technologies or programming language.

  • (cs) in reply to ServZero
    ServZero:
    My college just dropped $20,000 on a content management system for its new website when Joomla or Drupal would have done the same thing for free.
    That's nothing, I'm contracting for a healthcare provider who just dropped over £50,000 ($100,000) on a proprietary CMS that doesn't work properly and doesn't have half the features they need. As far as I can tell, they did it because one of their specifications was "must be developed in .Net and use MS SQL Server - no MySQL". Yes, "no MySQL" was written into the procurement docs.

    Of course, for the same money they could have installed Joomla and employed a web devleoper for 2 years to do all the design and customisation work...

  • biziclop (unregistered) in reply to SNF
    SNF:
    Goddamn that makes me angry.

    Me too. I simply can't get myself to laugh or even smile.

  • biziclop (unregistered) in reply to M. D.
    M. D.:
    Student self-administration systems seem to be this kind of stuff everywhere.

    In a certain post-communist Central European country (state) universities have an obligatory choice of two systems. Both require a monstrous server farm, both can't handle the load when it's really important (course registration week, exam registration month, etc - the times when people actually use it), and both were developed by completely unknown companies (with only these systems in their portfolio) for loads of money (taxpayers' money). And both have bugs and WTF-s of the kind that everyone writes while learning some new technologies or programming language.

    Is one of them named after an Ancient Greek god? :)

  • RMITted (unregistered)

    RMIT university in Melbourne, Australia had similar success with installing Peoplesoft. They ended up scrapping the project after spending $47m and making life hard for a lot of students. From memory they had similar problems of the system not handling the load, and pretty much just not working.

    http://www.theage.com.au/articles/2003/02/27/1046064164879.html

  • (cs)

    This story could be repeated in any sector but translating it into banking-speak this would be a existing "Tactical" solution in Access and the replacement would be a "Stategic" system in ASP.Net + SQLServer/Oracle and would take two or three years and rather more millions and untimately fail to cover all the functionality and then after implementation require another tactical system to do the stuff they'd left out.

    However the architecture diagrams would look very good in powerpoint and there would have been enough BA paperwork to cover the enire trading floor to a depth of several feet.

  • Liam Clark (unregistered) in reply to Peter Amstutz
    Peter Amstutz:
    Since PeopleSoft is an "enterprisy" HR system, students were now "employees", courses were now "work groups" and semesters were now "fiscal years". There was no integration of the actual course descriptions into the system, so you still needed to refer to a completely different web site (or get the phonebook-sized course guide) to figure out what classes to sign up for.

    You know, I'd always wondered why SPIRE had such a poor interface and broke so many conventions, and now I know.

  • zero (unregistered)

    Oh god this entire story sounds like I wrote it, except my system has been running for twelve years (even though we were warned it would soon be replaced even when I started it) and I never got a raise (I was an undergrad casual-wage "lab assistant").

  • stevil (unregistered)

    Anyone else sick of reading pathetic comments beginning "the real WTF is...". If you think using a room to house a computer and hang coats is worse than wasting nearly a million dollars on a half arsed system then you dont belong in the engineering community.

  • (cs) in reply to Fred
    Fred:
    They were surprised that college kids were up at 3 A.M? WTF!!! That's prime time in college time.

    Nah. They were surprised that at 3AM the kids were still sober enough to want to register for classes. <g>

  • Raiko (unregistered) in reply to NewbiusMaximus

    If I remember correctly, our renewal license cost was about $20,000 or so.

    We use it though. I'm building the software to link our Student Information System to Blackboard currently. We don't use one of the directly supported systems, so I have to build the bridge.

    Good times...

  • Raiko (unregistered) in reply to Raiko
    Raiko:
    If I remember correctly, our renewal license cost was about $20,000 or so.

    We use it though. I'm building the software to link our Student Information System to Blackboard currently. We don't use one of the directly supported systems, so I have to build the bridge.

    Good times...

    Oops.. didn't quote the original. It was in response to this post

    SomeCoder: Anyone here used Blackboard? That's gotta be the worst system to ever be designed by man.

    Yeah, it struck me as having been poorly thought out. Fortunately, 99% of the profs had the same opinion, and chose to use other avenues for communication. I wonder how much my university paid for it to sit there unused?

  • (cs) in reply to snoofle
    snoofle:
    conservajerk:
    Hmmmm... I just looked at jobs on the certain 3 letter company's website. They seem to think an intermediate/senior java developer in Victoria, B.C. needs only a minimum of 2 years java experience and 3 years it experience. This is senior? WTF?
    Sadly, it's not just them. Scan Dice/HotJobs/Monster, and you'll see countless ads for "senior developers" with 3 years of experience.

    I found one today that wanted 3 years of Java and 2 years of programming experience. (no, that's not a misprint).

    Well, if the most senior developer you have only has 1 year of experience, a 3-year person would, then be your senior developer.

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