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Admin
[quote user="Design Pattern"][quote user="JamesQMurphy"] ... (of course you can do it in MS SQL if you use a cursor) [/quote]
TRWTF is using Cursors.
And if Richard didn't, he was missing out a trick.
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Ouch ouch ouch ouch ouch my eyeballs
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Simple. Microsoft wants your soul. Why would they allow you to damn your soul to Hell? For all eternity? When you can instead damn your soul to EULA for all eternity?
That would be bad business!
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Still, it's this part that got me:
The article's a little vague about it, so I'll admit I'm only assuming this means they gave actual ownership of the code to Stuart. But I'm also assuming that you can charge a lot more if you are selling ownership of the code in addition to the work itself. Obfuscate the code enough, and you can practically guarantee continued business with that client.Admin
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Oh. You mean actual consultants. Sorry, I thought... Oh, silly me. Never mind.
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declare @tableList varchar(500)
select @tableList = coalesce(@tableList + '; ', '') + 'selct * from ' + name from sys.tables
select @tablelist
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If you really want to annoy them, call them "contractors"; I'm not sure why, but that always seems to eat away at them, or at least in my experience. I was lectured many times after using the terms interchangeably. "Consultants aren't contractors!" That's what I was always told.
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Pretentious? Moi?
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There's too many bold names, I can't tell who the good guy's supposed to be!
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Yay for Paul
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Remind me, what are the two industries that refer to their customers as "Users"?
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If both columns are foreign keys, then that's what fourth normal form basically means ya?
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McDonald's refers to their customers as users. Those who visit 3 time or more a week are "Super Heavy Users" and those who go once or twice are "Heavy Users"
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I think I'm working on a "Richard" project right now!
It has all these elements. Aspx pages, a few classic pages and a bunch of PHP, MySQL and SQL-Server. And everything from code design to database design is the mess you'd expect. Mine doesn't have any Java, although I do have an Access database as well.
But do people really do this on purpose? I guess so.
In my case I am about the 6th different contractor hired for the site during it's lifetime, each of whom seemed to have very different ideas but the main problems I think are due to the (poor) attempt to merge two different sites into one (company merger) coupled with the last two years where it was off-shored to a company who apparently got paid by the line. Incompetence surely but not really malicious. This story sounds more just evil for evil sake.
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[quote user="TheThing"]At the very least, you can't say TRWTF is (php/apache/IIS/java/.Net).
No, but you could say TRWTF isd (php+apache+IIS+java+.Net)
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[quote user="Dave"][quote user="TheThing"]At the very least, you can't say TRWTF is (php/apache/IIS/java/.Net).
No, but you could say TRWTF isd (php+apache+IIS+java+.Net)[/quote]
Yeah, with the first one you get a divide-by-zero.
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Think that hurts? first saw this at Red Gate but can only find it here:
http://www.sqlservercentral.com/blogs/philfactor/archive/2009/08/14/evil-code.aspx
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It's a Major Award. 'tis the season
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That's how the term popped into my head, and I felt the humour was in the fact that it conjures up the obvious meaning without, well, being obvious about it. And it can be said in (reasonably) polite company.
Like a few months ago we were looking at quotes for some simple concrete foundation work. For the exact same work, Company A quoted $8,000, company B quoted $10,000, Company C quoted $27,000. Company C clearly wasn't actually interested in doing it.
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I weep for the future.
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As it turns out, after word got out, a bunch of other people wanted the feature too, and now it's being sold as a real addon for the current version that only costs a small fortune (we sell to government organizations and giant megacompanies; we don't do "cheap"), and was reimplemented so that it wasn't hacked together in a few days.
But yeah, it does seem like the real wtf was that he only charged 250, to fix something that horrific, without checking how much the alternative would have been. Sounds like he could have requested a few thousand, and they would have been just as ecstatic about the price.
Admin
No one knows any relational algebra anymore, what a shame.
It wouldn't be a union, it'd be a cartesian product, of every row of every table. Obviously the way you'd actually use it would be:
The optimizer can throw out the unused tables, and it's effectively a shortcut for FROM a, b, c.
It's not in any SQL standard, and it's not in any vendor implementation I've heard of.
Admin
Cut the guy some slack; at least he didn't write the word out with those cursed asterisks like some people do, those rotten bastards.
Admin
If he was really concerned about it, the real WTF was delivering the fix before determining the price. If they'd balked at his $250, was he then going to go back and break it? Sounds like he was just being reasonable, though: he saw the solution, it was easy to implement, so he did it. Perhaps being reasonable is the real WTF? No - he's now a kid fresh out of school with a client who's going to talk about how he just went in and looked at this mess and got the job done in an afternoon, ie, he's a genius, and he's a reasonable person, too. I don't think he was thinking ahead that far, but I think his reflex was a good one.
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Oh, gee, is that the time? I gotta go... :)
Caught me, boog. I'm hoist, fair and square. Although in my defense, I never thought much about the username, I just typed in the three characters that came to mind. I'd never actually pronounce the name of the site as "wtf" - for one thing, at three syllables, there's not a lot of words that "w" is actually short for, in speech. (the name was extended when someone else posted under it. it seemed the right way to preserve the brand. :) ) Back in Oregon, I used to hear traffic reports referring to highway "99 double-yoo" instead of "99 West", it always made me wince a little.
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Still, even if the actual work is minimal, they'll stretch it out (and call it "being thorough") to use up all of the time they budgeted and get the most they can out of you. Some particularly unethical consultants will even bill you for the over-budgeted time that they are on-site while they are secretly doing remote work for other clients (and billing them simultaneously).
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Chances are Paul had no idea whatsoever that the consultant would chage fees in that range; and being fresh thought that $250 was a reasonable fee. Certainly, what the consultant was going to charge is obsene, so no wonder Paul didn't think to add a zero to his fee.
Admin
Doubly moot since judging from the article, it doesn't look like he changed the source code at all, he just added some entries to a database table.
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Of course one of the things in this world that is even more pathetic is a grown man who is unable to express himself without resorting to vulgarity. It's never been exactly clear to me how the ability to use words related to sexuality and/or excrement in totally inappropriate contexts marks someone as a "real man". I've met plenty of people who could save a lot of time if they just said at the beginning of a conversation, "Please assume that every noun that I use for the remainder of this discussion is modified by the adjective <insert your choice vulgarity here>". Then they could leave it out and cut the total number of words they have to say by at least 25%.
Admin
So we have two options:
Cannot really decide which is more WTF-worthy but both are evil-expert-WTFery!
Admin
Now that's a kettle of fish of a different color. Yes, I'd rather talk to someone who can speak without recourse to bodily functions usually performed in private, of course. But the abbreviation is the worst of both worlds. To use the abbreviation is to say "I realize this word is offensive to many people, but, on second thought, I'm going to use it anyway".
Admin
Not to mention the fact that one of the most critical aspects to these kinds of projects is getting the requirements nailed down precisely. And if it's one thing I wish Comp Sci courses would add to their curriculum, it's requirements gathering. But then, most professors would rather play with their Pumping Lemmas and Context Free Grammars.
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I do that with my company. There are certain customers that aren't worth the hassle so I quote them an inflated price. If they don't pay, then my sanity and time is saved. If they pay, then at least the job is worth it.
Same goes for certain product configurations. There are some that are a real PITA and not symbiotic with my core business. So I say "fuck it" and put a huge price on them. Once in a while someone bites and it's worth it then. The ones that don't bite keep my sanity in check.
Admin
Example: I once dated a mormon girl, and she was appalled by my use of the phrase "Oh my god". Yeah, really. So I said "Oh my gosh" from that point on, which she was totally fine with. I didn't understand then, and still don't now. The syntax is different, but the meaning of the two phrases is exactly the same.
Admin
McDonald's considers themselves to be "pushers" and the food to be the "drugs."
I know they have trained me to buy their $1 any size sugar laden drinks. I just read an article 10 minutes ago that says rats prefer sugar water to intravenous cocaine.
Squeak!
Admin
I actually had to take a course that the university called "Software Engineering" as part of the cirriculum. It was about requirements gathering, work planning, and UML modeling. Maybe it did some good, but I'm not really sure. The most definite thing I learned is that the time it takes to gather requirements grows exponentially with the number of people involved. And it will still be under-specified when coding starts anyway.
Admin
It seems like the only way most developers know how to gather requirements is to just ask the customer what the requirements are. Of course you're going to end up with incomplete and erroneous "requirements"; that's because it's not a list of requirements, it's a wish list.
Techniques for requirement elicitation are a topic I wish there was way more discussion about in academia and online (not here though, unless Alex does a soapbox article on it someday).
Admin
^ past.
Learn to English - you no English so good.
Admin
Here we have a freelance coder, fresh out of college with no work experience, complaining that a working system is too complicated. Any good reason to believe him? Because usually when this happens, TRWTF is the kid who has never seen a real system in his life.
As to why the system is supposedly horrible, we have some handwaving about what Richard supposedly does on other apps (though not this one specifically), and then a single SQL statement which is obviously not valid SQL and therefore probably wasn't in the application. And a database with only 8 tables, where the developer supposedly added a table for each property, and that's where most of the data is? Is there one huge table and no normalization, or what exactly?? This description doesn't make much sense.
In fact, this story makes no sense. It may have started with the idea of a consultant who wrote complex systems for job security, which might have provided some real WTF moements, but it's obviously been filled out into an article by somebody who has never written any code in their life.
Admin
Sadly, I've seen it in real life as well (and way too often.) The software industry is plagued by both incompetence and lack of ethics.
Admin
My soft.eng. undergraduate course was supposed to be about requirements gathering, planning and process. But in the end it was just a capstone project with PowerBuilder - nothing wrong with a capstone project, but it cannot be a substitute for an actual software engineering course.
It wasn't until I took a grad-level soft. engineering course that we actually saw proper coverage of software engineering topics. Lucky that I took it; otherwise, I would have had to learn those concepts cold-turkey on the job.
CompSci schools that do not properly cover soft.engineering in favor of a capstone project (as opposed to say, provide both!), they do a great disservice to students. Obviously, one really starts to learn when we work for real, but there are some things that, in hindsight, are very fundamental and that should be covered more appropriately in school.
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“Look Paul, you’re a life saver. This is great! I thought nobody would be able to deal with it. How much do we owe you?” Stuart responded.
Now this is the real WTF, if it's not just the story being spiced up. Any company that doesn't agree on the rates up front is insane - even if the work is no cure, no pay you still agree on what the pay is. Same with the coder, though if you don't actually have to give anything before they pay even that is saner.
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