The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

2012-08-22 Reply Admin

PiisAWheeL:
MrDaniil:
Days and it would be fast by tape days standards I suppose. People are spoiled these days. Twitter down for 20 mins and its like end of the world. Honestly, twitter can be down for days and in reality it doesn't actually matter.
Don't say that around anyone under 20. Twitter is like oxygen to them.

'scuze me? Perhaps there's been a recent influx of new and young Twitter users, but most Twitter users that I know are in their late 20s - early 30s. (35 myself and Twitter user for more than 5 years) The simple reason is that mobile internet is just too damn expensive.

2012-08-22 Reply Admin

Nagesh:
Friedrice the Great:
(or was that a fucking troll?)
Fucking trolls are too busy reproducing to post.
I'm afraid you're mistaken about the reproductive cycle of the TDWTF troll.
Trolls are not conceived, gestated and born -- they are made. And the way trolls make more trolls is by posting.

The victim is a reader who reads the trollish posts. The first one or two times, he is perhaps amused. Then he is indifferent -- seen that before. Then he is bored. Then annoyed. And then exasperated. Finally his exasperation demands an outlet. The victim conceives of a funny idea: Since I've seen those trolls so many times, I know their shtick forwards and backwards. Wouldn't it be amusing if I showed my fellow sufferers here -- other readers who have to wade through oceans of trollish crud -- how perfect an impression of a troll I can do after all of this observation? It will be ironically funny, and it will teach those trolls that what they do is nothing particular to be proud of. See, even I can do it!

Then the victim makes one little innocent wisecrack about a wooden table that has no file system, so FILE_NOT_FOUND, which is no laughing matter. Thus it starts.

And that, boys and girls, is how trolls are made.

Goodnight, and sleep tight.

The fact that this rant on trolls was posted under the Nagesh monicker ramps the irony up to 11. Well played, sir, well played.

2012-08-22 Reply Admin

C-Derb:
jay:
The last sentence doesn't follow from the rest of the story. If the company procedures result in inefficient use of resources, the people who most directly bear that cost are the shareholders. More than anyone, the shareholders want to see the company efficiently run. Employees may have conflicting interests: they want the company to make enough money to stay in business, but they also want high salaries, and they certainly don't want to lose their jobs even if that would be to the benefit of the company as a whole. But shareholders have no such conflict of interest.
People do not make poor resource allocation choices because they are greedy. The greedier they are, the more they should want to see the best allocation of resources. People make poor resource allocation choices because they are misinformed or foolish.
I think that you are assuming the shareholders were knowledgeable about the company beyond the financial statements. Shareholders didn't know/care that 2 years of development knowledge by 12 different contractors walked out the door the moment they decided to go back to India (one by one, not en masse). PHB's explained that shareholders would see the number of Full Time Employees and their salaries as committed long term costs, but contractor salaries were lumped into the OpEx budget and written off as one time expenses. So if an FTE left, they replaced that person with a contractor who had no vested interest in the company beyond the contract term.

He basically said, "We'd rather use contractors because it looks better on the financial statements." Which was a slap in the face to all the developers because it was implied that the results of our work was less important than what the financial reports would show.

Oh, I'm not disputing that there's a serious downside to using contractors, Indian or otherwise. (I've spent most of my career as a contractor, by the way. But yes, I see the downside.) I just don't think it follows that the source of the problem is the shareholders. I think it more likely that the source of the problem is upper management.

I see two, maybe three good reasons to use contractors:

If they don't work out, you can get rid of them quickly and easily. Just don't renew the contract. Yes, in principle you could lay off an employee almost as easily. (Assuming he's an "at will" employee, which for most software people in the U.S. would be true.) But in practice there's an expectation that full-time employees have a certain amount of job security. It's bad for morale and generally considered unethical to lay off full time employees too readily.
If you have a spike in your manpower requirements, you can bring on a team of contractors who have worked with each other in the past, and thus can be expected to work well together.
(Maybe) The contracting company provides some assurance of competence. (In theory, they will only provide you with workers who meet your requirements. In practice, I think they usually will hire any bum off the street who can spell "C".)

Reasons not to use contractors:

They cost way more than regular employees. You have to pay for the overhead and marketing of the contracting company, and you have to pay a premium for the ability to discharge them so easily.
As you mention, as contractors are normally short term, they have to learn your business when they arrive, and they take that knowledge with them when they leave.

2012-08-22 Reply Admin

Mick:
Howard:
Cbuttius:
Your least important client is the one who is about to leave your service but has to get through to the disconnections team first.
This happened to me with a certain satellite radio service whose proprietary receivers were crappy beyond belief. I tried several times to call customer service and unsubscribe. They made it nearly impossible.
As it happened, they were the only company automatically billing a certain credit card of mine. So I called the credit card company and had them change my card number. Figured the radioheads would go ahead and unsubscribe me once they realized there was no more money to grab.

Surprise! My credit card company told the assholes my new card number! Because we certainly want those robocharges to keep flowing no matter what, right?

I called my card company and told them in no uncertain terms that these charges were vehemently not authorized. Finally the bleeding stopped.

I still get emails from the satellite radio company, years later, begging me to come back. I don't care if they have the most entertaining jock in the world. I'll cut off my own foot before they get another penny of mine.
That's interesting - I've had a bank tell me that they can't stop such payments - even after I've insisted that they're not authorised. Apparently their view is that if you have set up a regular payment with a company, then you have authorsied the payment (which is kind of interesting if the bank has no access to any documentation that might suggest what term any agreement might be for). Of course, I've found that having a lawyer contact the charger (read document with fake lawyer letterhead) to advise the transaction is no longer authorised seems to stop the issue....

(FTR: Not in the US for those that will argue the US has laws saying the bank has to stop the transaction as requested - although TBH I was surprised that apparently we don't have equivalent laws)

Years ago I called my credit card company to tell them that I had not authorized a certain charge. They replied that I would have to contact the vendor and get the vendor to submit a credit. Their explicit company policy was that they would not stop or reverse a fraudulent charge unless the person committing the fraud confessed and voluntarily offerred to return the money. It almost made me want to sign up with them as a vendor and start sending bills to the president of the credit card company.

More recently, with a different credit card company, I reported a fraudulent charge, and they had a totally different response: They promptly reversed the charge, issued me a new card number and cancelled the old card, and then for any charges that came in on the old card number they sent me a list and asked me to verify which were valid (presumably submitted before they cancelled the card, or authorized recurring charges) and which were not valid before making payments.

I don't know if that was a difference in policy between the two companies or a change in attitude over time.

Coyne · 2012-08-22 Reply Admin

Nat:
Something is missing from the story. How did the "backup system" (automated or manual) distinguish important clients from the rest, in order to use procedure A on one group and procedure B (do nothing) on the other group? And moreover, how did such a distinction get created by accident?
Maybe it is as a previous post speculated... the tapes never got full for the smaller clients, so they never went offsite. OK, somewhat credible... but why leave it to the readers to guess? The story lacks.

To clarify a bit, using Linux style naming, backup tapes were named with names like:

tape.offsite.c123.something.backup

The tape management system was configured to select tapes with names like this to be sent to the offsite storage:

tape.offsite.c001.*

That only pulled tapes for the important client. It should have been configured to this:

tape.offsite.*

That's adapted a bit for obfuscation, but you get the idea.

2012-08-23 Reply Admin

Clicking on "Blavington Township" successively opens curious videos on the screen?! Have I missed something?

2012-08-23 Reply Admin

Cbuttius:
Finally when an engineer did come to install me a new hub, he was able to locate the problem very quickly to the local cabinet and went over and fixed it within minutes.

I believe I have the same ISP. They insisted on replacing my old modem with a new router, even though the problem turned out to be at the cabinet...

At least they couldn't claim there was a fault in my area, as their own fault log showed it as having just been fixed.

2012-09-02 Reply Admin

OK... can someone explain why clicking on "Blavington Township" causes image macros to appear?

(For the lazy code below)

Blavington Township."

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