• (cs)

    Most of the articles these days are only about social engineering, not software engineering.

  • Annoyed (unregistered) in reply to Noone
    Noone:
    Great find.

    Still, not even close to cliffhanger-worthy.

  • DB (unregistered) in reply to President
    President:
    Tye is probably my daughter.

    You're killing me...

  • john (unregistered)

    Defrag button on a Unix system. WTF ?

  • TBD (unregistered)

    Ohh, ohh, I know how this ends. It all boils down to how Aargle ...

    Aaah, I will finish this comment tomorrow.

  • Baboon (unregistered)

    Seriously the WTF here is not telling Tye to STFU, if anyone spoke to me that way I would seriously lay the verbal smackdown on them.

    I have worked with idiots like that in the past and mostly they just need to be put in their place.

  • IN-HOUSE-CHAMP (unregistered) in reply to Baboon
    Baboon:
    Seriously the WTF here is not telling Tye to STFU, if anyone spoke to me that way I would seriously lay the verbal smackdown on them.

    I have worked with idiots like that in the past and mostly they just need to be put in their place.

    Nobody who works as a developer has that kind of guts, so you must be a sysadmin of sorts.

  • eVil (unregistered) in reply to IN-HOUSE-CHAMP

    I do, but I also get told to stop rocking the boat at pretty much every job I've had. So most developers don't even have the stones to witness someone who DOES telling some deserving individual exactly how far they should fuck off.

  • Wada Uwan Nao (unregistered) in reply to IN-HOUSE-CHAMP
    IN-HOUSE-CHAMP:
    Baboon:
    Seriously the WTF here is not telling Tye to STFU, if anyone spoke to me that way I would seriously lay the verbal smackdown on them.

    I have worked with idiots like that in the past and mostly they just need to be put in their place.

    Nobody who works as a developer has that kind of guts, so you must be a sysadmin of sorts.

    Well, yeah, likely. :D

  • Xarthaneon the Unclear (unregistered)
    [image]

    Spoiler alert: consult image.

  • Kiwini (unregistered) in reply to Annoyed
    Annoyed:
    Cliffhangers? What is this, a soap opera?

    Please don't try to be clever. You're already failing at it.

    Touche'

    It's self-serving crap like this that drives readers away, and just because the White House plays with smoke and mirrors, there's no excuse for artificial theatrics here.

  • jay (unregistered)

    Oh, darn. I was hoping that in part 2 we would learn that the consultant was Paula Bean.

  • (cs) 
    Tune in next time for part 2 of our story:
  "fifty shades of sorting" 
     or
  "if at frist you don't succeed: Tye Tye again!"

...and now here's something we hope you'll really like!
  • verisimilidude (unregistered)

    I just figured it out. Tye is to read TDWTF today and we read about it tomorrow. If she recognizes herself and apologizes we get a happy ending. If she recognizes herself and immediately fires all those named in the article we get a tragic ending. And if she doesn't even recognize herself we get a CodeSOD article.

  • A. Nonymous (unregistered) in reply to J. Doe (jr)
    J. Doe (jr):
    Being confronted with the direct question "Would defragging solve the problem?" Aargle answered with a "yes".

    That was his death sentence.

    If it doesn't solve the problem (either because the system will be slow again after defragging, or because they won't be able to bring it back online fully operational) Tye will blame him, referring to his "yes".

    With people like Tye the Judo Of Negotiating is what has helped me quite often:

    1. Take care the other one takes his share of the responsibility:

    Why the heck didn't he ask back something like "What do you consider a solution? How fast would you want the system to be to consider the problem as solved? My answer depends on it!"?

    1. If unclear, understand things to your own favor:

    He might have risked a plain "No it wouldn't solve the problem!" and if asked why, tell Tye that even if the system was a bit quicker for 2 hours, it would be back to low speed after that - which he did believe no-one would regard a solution.

    1. Take away the "Oh that was a misunderstanding" emergency exit for the other one:

    The least Aargle could have done would have been to write an email to Tye telling her "I understood you want me to XYZ. If that was a misunderstanding, please tell me by hh:mm."

    1. Document that you warned and don't want to be blamed for other one's faults:

    A short email like "Btw, I'd like to warn you of the following possible consequences of your order - which I can't take responsibility for." would have put Tye on the spot - and not Aargle. Even little dictators like Tye can imagine situations in which such an email is hold against them by a superior.

    Thank you, Sir! I learned something today. "Judo Of Negotiating" should be learned at school!

  • (cs) in reply to A. Nonymous

    After reading half bake article, I realise that auther will come back to complete it.

  • Dann of Thursday (unregistered)

    My god, a lot of you are whiny babies today.

  • Baboon (unregistered) in reply to IN-HOUSE-CHAMP

    Nope, I'm a developer. You have just worked for the wrong kind of companies. I started working for a software house and I have been working in the industry for a long time. Everyone who knows me knows I and speak my mind.

    People like that need to be put in their place, the workplace should be about mutual respect and if someone is being an ass they should be called on it.

    I feel sorry for you, especially since you have never worked for a place where you can call people on unacceptable behavior. As a senior developer you should be the assisting in making sure decisions are done and implemented in a sensible way and not doing stupid things because someone is being a moron. If eventually you get overruled fine, but at least you have had your say. The WTF is that he kept quiet and didn't actually call someone on being a total assclown.

    Just my 2c

  • (cs) in reply to Baboon
    Lorne Kates:
    Needless to say, Aargle was going to take a very careful and risk adverse approach to this process.
    s/adverse/averse

    Aargle surely regarded risky conditions as adverse, so he was averse ("turned away") to them. </nitpick>

  • (cs) in reply to LeForgeron
    LeForgeron:
    As bet go on, here is mine: the expert specialist sort is a bubblesort. (well, it's an expert, so it's a true sort, not any of silly sorts such as mix-check-and-repeat-if-not-sorted).

    All was well until the amount of data grows, and scalability of the bubblesort get over the power of even the latest hardware.

    I found a bubblesort once in a piece of cra, er, code, I was maintaining. In fact, there were four sortable fields in the class which was to be sorted. So there were four bubblesorts, each separated by if{...} else {if {...} else {if {...} else {...}}}. When I asked why this is, I was told, "You can't trust the inbuilt Java sort function for something as critical as this." "This" was sorting reports (there would probably be about 10 of them) into order for a user to select one.

    Should have sent it in to TDWTF but by the time I'd found this site I had refactored it away, and damn the fool.

  • Dominic (unregistered)

    Sounds like Tye graduated from the Ayn Rand School of Management.

  • Kiwini (unregistered)

    Btw... why does the link to this half-empty unfulfilling tease say "Full article"?...

  • (cs)

    THIS DEFIANCE WILL BE YOUR LAST, MORTAL.

  • Matt (unregistered)

    Why did he ever tell her that a restore would improve performance? When management asks dumb questions, you lie to protect them.

    And for people talking about part 2. Unoptimised two hour implementation pulling even with a ridiculous amount of old code that wa being overpaid for? I think the dude won the battle.

  • jMerliN (unregistered)

    Tye sounds like the webmaster at my old university. Before I left and headed to SF in search of actual green pastures, there was a web developer position open up in her department. It paid 20% more, and was in a budget that could afford to give out yearly raises (unlike the 2 system IT budgets on campus, both of which had paid me at some point). From my previous work with her, she demanded her way was correct in all cases, and demanded we do what she asked. It was quite perplexing, really, but Tye fits her very well.

    We had a guy with a foreign accent who was a bit older with a degree in CS apply for this new opening. I had seen his name on code in various places and felt roughly the same as the person in this story. Paging through it, I thought "all of this.. needs to be replaced". Here I was, writing bash scripts and code in about 4 different languages to deal with various services/systems from OSX to Linux to 10 different versions of Windows all throughout our servers. I was even helping researchers with their C programs on our computing cluster, which I configured and administered. I was just an analyst, but I was writing, fixing, debugging, and breaking software all day, while trying to squeeze in research so that I could learn how to do my job better at the same time.

    Back to the new opening: I applied. I wasn't even invited in for an interview because my degree was in Math. What's perhaps interesting to note is that I was a mere 12 hours (the senior slave project, a database course which I was qualified to teach at this point, and 2 other classes that didn't make or break a CS student) from a CS degree, but because I learned almost nothing from my courses, I decided to pursue something that challenged and interested me. Most would call it a "CS minor" but really, 1 more semester and I'd have had both a CS and Math degree, except that there was some nonsensical limit on how many credits from a degree could apply to another, which meant I'd need to take another 3 semesters to get the second degree.

    Apparently, the filter in this department was "CS degree or nothing." I wasn't even given a chance to interview for the position, even though I had authored more web applications than anyone else on campus that were in active use by many faculty and students. I had debugged all of the web-based issues we had when moving from a basic FTP setup that served our website for years to a convoluted cloud-based CMS which shoehorned even static HTML content into PHP pages for what I must assume is the goal of slowing down website performance and demanding bigger hardware. When there was an issue in a web application which we (including all work before my time) had built or customized, I was immediately contacted and would promptly solve the problem. We spent an inane amount of money on enterprise solutions for identity management and integration with other systems and 2 major pieces of software to allow two separate pieces of software licensed by the same company didn't yet exist. I had to write middleware, significant back-end code, and several web interfaces to implement this. And I did it because we were doing things manually until I did, and the productivity of those doing it manually suddenly skyrocketed as most of their processes had been automated. I even built analytics reports that we had quoted at $4,000 a piece. By my back-of-the-napkin conservative measure, I had saved the university at minimum $250,000. I never saw a penny of this, and on the contrary, we just spent it all on other unnecessary crap, because the budgets for salaries and for services, software, and trinkets were separate, and if you didn't spend your budget, it got reduced the next year. Ahh, politics. How lovely.

    In spite of all of this, I wasn't even brought in for an interview.

    My manager, one of the best managers I've ever had, was pretty upset at this and made it publicly known. It wasn't a silent issue that a department had ignored possibly the best applicant entirely because some incompetent, unqualified person made an uninformed, bad decision. It really makes you wonder how the university would do if decisions like that weren't made all the time. And when I left, he publicly announced my departure to all involved (aware) parties, including everyone I had assisted in my tenure (which was most of the university, actually) that I was being offered relocation and a salary that the university could never match (it was upper-management or HR/librarian level salary, reserved for those people who actually earn that amount of money, you know, the people who build value for the university), and that the position was for software engineering, a position with more responsibility than the one I was NOT considered for at the university so recently. I found it epic. It was the best parting gift ever.

    Perhaps it was the best thing for me, as I'm building massive amounts of value for startups here in SF now, and enjoying every second of it. I look back on those days and have a nice story to tell. It's funny, and it resonates with a lot of WTF-ery on this site (so many stories, so many). I often wonder how that guy turned out in that position. I wish I could see the code. Surely I could fuel TDWTF's CodeSOD for the next few years on it.

  • George (unregistered)

    I've worked for a woman like Tye. While I appreciate all the calls for reason and logic (Negotiation and confrontation.) It just doesn't apply for a person like her.

    She is obviously out of her depth and scared of being exposed - this coupled by a sociopathic streak and position of absolute authority (Chances are that she receives 100 percent support from top managhement.) means that she will do everything in her power to avoid responsibility for anything negative and back you into a corner where you have to take responsibility. You'll find yourself being worked out of the company before you can blink if you threaten her.

    The only way out of these situations is to remove yourself from here sphere of influence.

  • J. Doe (jr) (unregistered) in reply to George
    George:
    I've worked for a woman like Tye. While I appreciate all the calls for reason and logic (Negotiation and confrontation.) It just doesn't apply for a person like her.

    She is obviously out of her depth and scared of being exposed - this coupled by a sociopathic streak and position of absolute authority (Chances are that she receives 100 percent support from top managhement.) means that she will do everything in her power to avoid responsibility for anything negative and back you into a corner where you have to take responsibility. You'll find yourself being worked out of the company before you can blink if you threaten her.

    The only way out of these situations is to remove yourself from here sphere of influence.

    May very well be. Depends on your standing and if they can do without you from one second to the next.

    I don't quite see how Tye could have reacted with a "No, it's your responsibility" to a "I'd like to warn you of the following consequences of your order".

    Because if she states that it's my responsibility I can easily answer "Ok, fine, thanks for giving me the responsibility of the situation. My decision is: the machine needs no defragging."

    If people try to give me orders as to how I have to do my work, I will always make clear that they are reducing me to a relay station. And relay stations just relay orders - but they don't take the responsibility of what they relay. Or would anyone blame a telephone for the content it relays?

  • George (unregistered) in reply to J. Doe (jr)
    J. Doe (jr):
    May very well be. Depends on your standing and if they can do without you from one second to the next.

    I don't quite see how Tye could have reacted with a "No, it's your responsibility" to a "I'd like to warn you of the following consequences of your order".

    Because if she states that it's my responsibility I can easily answer "Ok, fine, thanks for giving me the responsibility of the situation. My decision is: the machine needs no defragging."

    If people try to give me orders as to how I have to do my work, I will always make clear that they are reducing me to a relay station. And relay stations just relay orders - but they don't take the responsibility of what they relay. Or would anyone blame a telephone for the content it relays?

    By forcing the employee to give "yes or no"answers to a question she can easily abdicate responsibility. If you don't answer her in a situation luike that she can go to top management and say that you are obstructive or not competent enough to do your job. By answering "yes or no" you are not given an opportunity to explain the risks.

    I had a case with a manager like this who gave me great regular reviews but after a few months of professional negotiation and confrontation decided that I was a threat and she went to top brass to get me fired. When I argued that I was receiving great regular reviews she accused me of intimidating her in the reviews to get the good scores. Of course the CEO took her side (She had 100 percent support from upper management.)

    Someone like that will always have a way out.

    Being rational has very little to do with dealings with these people.

  • J. Doe (jr) (unregistered) in reply to George
    George:
    By forcing the employee to give "yes or no"answers to a question she can easily abdicate responsibility.
    Not necessarily. If you don't have the possibility to argue or ask back, then you just understand things to your own favour and then answer accordingly (here: with a "no").

    Secondly, the countermeasure against her abdicating responsibility is not to try to get around the plain "yes" or "no", but to document that she takes the responsibility as soon as she reduces you to a relay station. That's exactly the case when she doesn't tell you any longer only what you have to do but also how you have to do it.

    If you don't answer her in a situation luike that she can go to top management and say that you are obstructive or not competent enough to do your job. By answering "yes or no" you are not given an opportunity to explain the risks.

    I never wrote that I encourage not to answer this questions! Of course, you should answer here!

    I had a case with a manager like this who gave me great regular reviews but after a few months of professional negotiation and confrontation decided that I was a threat and she went to top brass to get me fired.

    As I said, this definitely depends on the value you currently have for the company. If they can afford to fire you, they will. Wrote that, as well.

    When I argued that I was receiving great regular reviews she accused me of intimidating her in the reviews to get the good scores. Of course the CEO took her side (She had 100 percent support from upper management).

    Seems the damage assessment showed that she could afford to fire you. Damage assessment includes losing credibility with upper management if she does this twice a week to someone.

    Let's look at it from a different angle:

    If Aargle lets Tye yell orders at him and also accepts that he is responsible (and hence, ready to accept any blame) for any negative outcome of these detailled orders (which don't address what to solve but dictate how to solve it), he will be fired and officially blamed (perhaps sued) for it anyway as soon as any of Tye's orders have negative consequences!

    So what's the BATNA here? Any situation which is equal or better than that is worth to be pursued, isn't it?

    So when being confronted with declining responsibility and well documenting it and being fired vs. willingly accepting responsibility and being fired as well, there is no good reason to volunteer for alternative #2.

    Being rational has very little to do with dealings with these people.

    Being rational is the key advantage you have over these people. Nothing more nor less.

  • RASG (unregistered)

    seriously, around here (BR) no boss is allowed to talk to an employee like this.

    easy lawsuit money...

    but, i lived in the States in 2006, and felt the cultural difference. my manager yelled at me, i yelled back.

    i got fired 1 hour later :)

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to J. Doe (jr)
    J. Doe (jr):
    George:
    I've worked for a woman like Tye. While I appreciate all the calls for reason and logic (Negotiation and confrontation.) It just doesn't apply for a person like her.

    She is obviously out of her depth and scared of being exposed - this coupled by a sociopathic streak and position of absolute authority (Chances are that she receives 100 percent support from top managhement.) means that she will do everything in her power to avoid responsibility for anything negative and back you into a corner where you have to take responsibility. You'll find yourself being worked out of the company before you can blink if you threaten her.

    The only way out of these situations is to remove yourself from here sphere of influence.

    May very well be. Depends on your standing and if they can do without you from one second to the next.

    I don't quite see how Tye could have reacted with a "No, it's your responsibility" to a "I'd like to warn you of the following consequences of your order".

    Because if she states that it's my responsibility I can easily answer "Ok, fine, thanks for giving me the responsibility of the situation. My decision is: the machine needs no defragging."

    If people try to give me orders as to how I have to do my work, I will always make clear that they are reducing me to a relay station. And relay stations just relay orders - but they don't take the responsibility of what they relay. Or would anyone blame a telephone for the content it relays?

    I only wish. But there's a flaw to your thinking. The scenario as you paint it goes something like this:

    1. Irrational manager gives unreasonable instructions.

    2. Employee replies with counter-suggestion.

    3. Manager responds to counter-suggestion with perfect reasonableness and rationality.

    Why do you suppose that the manager will behave rationally in the second part of the conversation when she did not behave rationally in the first part of the conversation?

  • IN-HOUSE-CHAMP (unregistered) in reply to George
    George:
    I've worked for a woman like Tye. While I appreciate all the calls for reason and logic (Negotiation and confrontation.) It just doesn't apply for a person like her.

    She is obviously out of her depth and scared of being exposed - this coupled by a sociopathic streak and position of absolute authority (Chances are that she receives 100 percent support from top managhement.) means that she will do everything in her power to avoid responsibility for anything negative and back you into a corner where you have to take responsibility. You'll find yourself being worked out of the company before you can blink if you threaten her.

    The only way out of these situations is to remove yourself from here sphere of influence.

    You worked for my wife?

  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to jMerliN
    jMerliN:
    Tye sounds like the webmaster at my old university. Before I left and headed to SF in search of actual green pastures, there was a web developer position open up in her department. followed by an ot 30,000 rant
    Oh my god. My ex wife found this site.
  • Paul Neumann (unregistered) in reply to George
    George:
    ... I was a threat and she went to top brass to get me fired. When I argued that I was receiving great regular reviews she accused me of intimidating her in the reviews to get the good scores. Of course the CEO took her side (She had 100 percent support from upper management.)...
    Be careful with your hurtful sexist comments! Bridgett99 may be reading the comments!
  • Maltz (unregistered) in reply to eVil
    eVil:
    I can't say whether I speak for everyone, but I reckon most readers come here for a 5 minute anecdote they can read, find some closure from, and maybe make some comments about before heading back to their regular working tasks.

    This. I don't come here to read half a story. No one likes it when TV shows do this, and I don't enjoy it any more here. If this becomes a regular thing (or even an occasional thing) I'll probably just delete this RSS feed from my list and find something else to give a daily few moment's entertainment.

  • Beernutts (unregistered)

    What a wussy. Seriously, if you're an engineer, and a manager is telling you to do something that is complete rubbish, make a stand, and have the facts to back it up.

  • (cs) in reply to Paul Neumann

    While most of the people in the articles end up at bad jobs, it seems like one of the users of this site pretty much did the same thing with a marriage.

    Paul Neumann:
    Oh my god. My ex wife found this site.
  • Kevin (unregistered)

    The comments aren't loading fast enough, YOU MUST DEFRAGMENT YOUR SERVER IMMEDIATELY!!! NO I DON'T WANT ANY OF YOUR COMPLICATED ALTERNATIVES! JUST DEFRAGMENT YOUR SERVER NOW!!!

  • Dominic (unregistered)

    Here's the correct response to anyone who "shushes" you right after asking you a question:

    [image]
  • J. Doe (jr) (unregistered) in reply to jay
    jay:
    I only wish. But there's a flaw to your thinking. The scenario as you paint it goes something like this:

    1. Irrational manager gives unreasonable instructions.

    2. Employee replies with counter-suggestion.

    3. Manager responds to counter-suggestion with perfect reasonableness and rationality.

    Why do you suppose that the manager will behave rationally in the second part of the conversation when she did not behave rationally in the first part of the conversation?

    No, I didn't suggest #2 (the counter-suggestion). I just argued that responding with a "No" to Tye's question would have been a better idea. Unless you take "No" as a counter-suggestion, you're referring to nothing I suggested.

    Furthermore, I don't see where your #3 is from. Not from any scenario I painted.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    Foolish. When someone asks you if doing something irrelevant will fix the problem, you say "No". You don't say "Yes, but..." and get interrupted, you say "No".

  • (cs)

    As i guess the comments in part 2 will somehow mysteriously disappear once the article gets published again, i copy this here (follow the archive - link if you haven't read part 2 so far).

    SPOILER WARNING! Contains the real WTF!

    TRWTF is that Aargle's sort-implementation was not faster than the implementation of the consultant.

    So they didn't fix the performance issue and Mack's initial estimation: "We think it may be in the sorting subsystem--" was wrong.

    No wonder Tye thought of them as rather clueless programmers who need to be explicitly told what to do.

  • jMerliN (unregistered) in reply to Paul Neumann
    Paul Neumann:
    jMerliN:
    Tye sounds like the webmaster at my old university. Before I left and headed to SF in search of actual green pastures, there was a web developer position open up in her department. followed by an ot 30,000 rant
    Oh my god. My ex wife found this site.

    I don't always tell stories, but when I do, they're enormous :).

    But if you need a tl;dr, perhaps you should try Summly. Oh wait.

  • jMerliN (unregistered) in reply to no laughing matter
    no laughing matter:
    As i guess the comments in part 2 will somehow mysteriously disappear once the article gets published again, i copy this here (follow the archive - link if you haven't read part 2 so far).

    SPOILER WARNING! Contains the real WTF!

    TRWTF is that Aargle's sort-implementation was not faster than the implementation of the consultant.

    So they didn't fix the performance issue and Mack's initial estimation: "We think it may be in the sorting subsystem--" was wrong.

    No wonder Tye thought of them as rather clueless programmers who need to be explicitly told what to do.

    I don't know that slaying 10 dragons worth of technical debt in a few hours is worthy of being fired. TRWTF is that no measurements were taken to find where the real performance problem was, especially after learning that the sorting wasn't the issue. Though we don't really know -- it feels like a lot of the story was left out.

  • ugh (unregistered) in reply to darkmage0707077

    Spoken like a true serf.

  • Kevin (unregistered) in reply to Kevin

    I forgot to mention that I follow the KISS principle. You can KISS MY ASS and DEFRAGMENT YOUR SERVER NOW! It's a simple solution!

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