• JC (unregistered)

    me reason I am reminded of Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

    getPaula() ... FOR ME TO POOP ON!!!  

  • JC (unregistered) in reply to JC

    Awesome... I got the first one in... now I can laugh at the idiots who proclaim proudly, "FIRST!" when they're the 3rd or 4th post. :)

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:
    Being the end of the year and all, I thought it'd be appropriate to name the "Post of the Year." But, since that would involve trudging through a year's worth of posts, I decided instead to revisit the classic Brillant Paula Bean ...


    Gah!  Just when I though that "Brillant" (French for "brilliant", not that anyone cares) was finally on the way out.

    And I missed first today (and eleventh yesterday), too.

    Sincerely,

    Gene Wirchenko

  • (cs) in reply to JC

    My eyes! The goggles they once again do Nothing!  ROFL it's even funnier the second time.

  • (cs)

    That's horrible.  You should always start class names with an upper case letter.

  • (cs)

    yikes... I shudder to think what she billed for those months of doing absolutely nothing

  • (cs) in reply to bugmenot

    and no constructor... tisk tisk

  • Evets (unregistered) in reply to JC
    Anonymous:
    Awesome... I got the first one in... now I can laugh at the idiots who proclaim proudly, "FIRST!" when they're the 3rd or 4th post. :)


    FIRST!

    ah damn.

    I actually enjoyed reading the Paula Bean story when I first saw it.  Sometimes I wonder how these people get hired.
  • (cs) in reply to Evets
    Anonymous:


    FIRST!

    ah damn.

    I actually enjoyed reading the Paula Bean story when I first saw it.  Sometimes I wonder how these people get hired.

    Well developed BS skills. Everyone technical needs to learn to hone their BS skills, because no matter how awesome (or inferior) your techie skill, most managers will always pick the one that BSes them the farthest.
  • (cs) in reply to foxyshadis

    Here testing code is umm... brilliant!

  • (cs) in reply to JC

    Anonymous:
    Awesome... I got the first one in... now I can laugh at the idiots who proclaim proudly, "FIRST!" when they're the 3rd or 4th post. :)
    HA!  You weren't first.  Now go and laugh at yourself.

  • MighMoS (unregistered)

    Yeah, but take a look at how many bugs are in the code.  Quality over quantity.

  • anon (unregistered) in reply to travisowens

    You may want to check the authors on the first and second posts, guy.  

  • (cs) in reply to travisowens
    travisowens:

    Anonymous:
    Awesome... I got the first one in... now I can laugh at the idiots who proclaim proudly, "FIRST!" when they're the 3rd or 4th post. :)
    HA!  You weren't first.  Now go and laugh at yourself.



    He actually did have the first post. It was his second post that pointed out this fact. I almost sent the same reply, but caught myself.
  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Reminds me of an incident early in my career - a new "experienced" fortran programmer was given the assignment of changing some code to copy one large COMMON block (remember those?) to another.  The next day his boss asked if he was done yet -- He wasn't!  Two days later, still not done!  At the end of the week the boss looked at the new employee's code (still incomplete) and found 5000 lines of:

    blockB[1] = blockA[1]
    blockB[2] = blockA[2]
    blockB[3] = blockA[3]
    ...

    The "experienced" programmer didn't think of using a loop...


  • (cs) in reply to dshiznit

    A number of years ago a friend told me about her friend who made a good living as a Java programmer in Manhattan without being able to speak a word of English, only Russian.

    His business model was to find 5 to 7 people who could successfully get jobs as programmers without being actually able to code. They would email him their assignments and he would email back the code.

    Maybe Paula misplaced his email address. :)


  • Daruku (unregistered)

    What no unit tests?  Paula should be fired!!!!!!

  • (cs)

    This reminds me of a guy at my workplace who spends all day browsing the Internet and he's got a project due by the end of the year and he's not nearly done...doh!  Oh shit, I guess I best get back to work. 

  • (cs) in reply to flobi

    this was awesome!  haha.  I love this site.  It keeps me sane.

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

      

    <FONT color=#000099>package</FONT> test;

    <FONT color=#000099>public class</FONT> paulaBean {
    

    <FONT color=#000099>private String</FONT> paula = <FONT color=#009900>"Brillant"</FONT>;
    

    <FONT color=#000099>public String</FONT> getPaula() {
<FONT color=#000099>return</FONT> paula;
}
}

    Two things: 

    1) Is the statement "return paula" the result of the getPaula() function, or is it what the company wish they could have done sooner?

    2) Has anybody thought about the fact that Paula could potentially declare a variable String bean?

     

     

  • (cs) in reply to BiggBru

    Oh, and Happy New Year to all!

    [<:o)]

  • (cs)

    The real WTF for me is how anyone can hire a completely unknown person, and have her work for months without actually checking her work.

    Even if I'd never have suspected her of being this bad, I'd still want to ensure that she didn't code like a leprous gazelle.

  • Dave L (unregistered)

    That was actually version 2.0 of Paula's program.  Version 1.0 looked like this:

    <font>package</font> test;

    <font>public class</font> helloBean {

      <font>private String</font> hello = <font>"Hello World!"</font>;

      <font>public String</font> getHello() {
        <font>return</font> hello;
      }
    }

    It took extensive refactoring for her to update the code, I'm sure.

  • Eric the .5b (unregistered) in reply to Rick
    Rick:
    A number of years ago a friend told me about her friend who made a good living as a Java programmer in Manhattan without being able to speak a word of English, only Russian.

    His business model was to find 5 to 7 people who could successfully get jobs as programmers without being actually able to code. They would email him their assignments and he would email back the code.


    If you can't make a good living as 5-to-7 Java programmers, you need to move somewhere with a lower cost of living...
  • No one special (unregistered)

    Hm, as this is my third post to the site over the last few months, maybe I should finally think about registering...

    Anyway, I worked at a company once where I was tasked (along with two others who made up our team) to hire 5 to 10 people very quickly for a Java project.  This was during the dot-com days, obviously, where money was no object.  My boss actually said to me that we needed the team as quickly as possible, and not to worry too much about the quality... we could always fire some people and hire replacements if needed over the next few months.

    Ugh.  We didn't like it at the time, but mainly because I thought it was unkind.  Today I look back on it and see it with new horror on all sorts of levels.

    Anyway, we had our team in about two or three weeks or so.  We did actually do interviews, but none of us were too experienced on how you properly do interviews.  We looked at resumes, relevant experience, personalities (to see if the team would work together well), etc, but never did any technical questions beyond asking people to describe their prior work.  Miraculously, most of the team actually wound up being pretty good.  I think we hired around 7 people.  Maybe 6.  2 of them were fresh out of college.

    Amazingly, only one guy was a total bust.  He had absolutely no real world knowledge of programming that I could detect.  He was one of our two kids recently out of school, to be sure, but his degree was in Computer Science!  I mean, I expected him to at least be able to do simple projects, but the questions he asked of myself and the other two "senior" team members were ludicrous.  Questions about simple case statements, the difference between passing by reference and passing by value, and so on, just basic stuff.  He was fired a week after he started.  But to this day, I wonder about his interview.  We asked him about specific Java technologies (not to quiz him, but to just ask if he had any experience with them) and he claimed he had all sorts of hobbyist experience along with his classwork in specifically what we were asking for.  What did he think he was going to do on the job?  How would he think he'd be able to get away with not really knowing anything?

    Seeing a post like this, I now understand.  He must have thought we wouldn't review his work or even check up on him, possibly for years!  (But then why ask us the questions he did?)

    Even more strange, I wonder how he graduated.

  • No one special (unregistered) in reply to No one special

    Oh, almost forgot.  He was surprised at being fired.

  • Masklinn (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Reminds me of an incident early in my career - a new "experienced" fortran programmer was given the assignment of changing some code to copy one large COMMON block (remember those?) to another.  The next day his boss asked if he was done yet -- He wasn't!  Two days later, still not done!  At the end of the week the boss looked at the new employee's code (still incomplete) and found 5000 lines of:

    blockB[1] = blockA[1]
    blockB[2] = blockA[2]
    blockB[3] = blockA[3]
    ...

    The "experienced" programmer didn't think of using a loop...


    A Real Programmer doesn't use loops, loops are for quiche-eaters. A Real Programmer uses GOTO, which is how God meant programs to be written.

  • (cs) in reply to travisowens
    travisowens:

    Anonymous:
    Awesome... I got the first one in... now I can laugh at the idiots who proclaim proudly, "FIRST!" when they're the 3rd or 4th post. :)
    HA!  You weren't first.  Now go and laugh at yourself.



    Bonus! You can laugh at travisowens also!  I certainly did.
  • Pain (unregistered) in reply to No one special

    I had similar experience myself with my first ever hiree. Nice Chinese lad with a good degree in Math/Comp-Sci, claimed to know C++ and a few bits of webby technologies. Bit on the quiet side during the interview but I put that down to nerves. Anyways, put him to work the first week with a relatively simple task (some simple HTML parsing if I recall) and kept checking up on him..asking him if he was OK, if he needed any help or pointers etc. (I even more or less did the code for him at one point on paper). On the 4th day though, with him STILL not having approached me with any work, I thought Id sit in with him and see how he was doing....in 4 days he'd managed to write 'cout << "<html> some html</html>";'. 1 line in 4 days. Needless to say we let him go on the 5th day.

    In my defense for having hired him, we'd had only 3 candidates because the job was paying peanuts and although I didnt want to hire any of them my PHB had told me "Just f***** hire one of them, how hard can it be?". However I wish Id gone for the 50+ year old alcoholic with 5 teeth instead......


  • (cs) in reply to Masklinn
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Reminds me of an incident early in my career - a new "experienced" fortran programmer was given the assignment of changing some code to copy one large COMMON block (remember those?) to another.  The next day his boss asked if he was done yet -- He wasn't!  Two days later, still not done!  At the end of the week the boss looked at the new employee's code (still incomplete) and found 5000 lines of:

    blockB[1] = blockA[1]
    blockB[2] = blockA[2]
    blockB[3] = blockA[3]
    ...

    The "experienced" programmer didn't think of using a loop...


    A Real Programmer doesn't use loops, loops are for quiche-eaters. A Real Programmer uses GOTO, which is how God meant programs to be written.




    This is true.  One only has to read the story of mel to know. 

    http://www.pbm.com/~lindahl/mel.html




  • (cs)

    I vote we save Alex the trouble and call this the post of the year anyway.

    But why does this forum software edit in Times New Roman, and display in Arial?

  • Kiss me, I'm Polish (unregistered) in reply to Pain

    I remember interviewing a bunch of unemployed girls for a "keyboard punching" post. All we needed was som basic computer knowledge, and ability to fill an Access form. We didn't actually need a girl, but no boys applied for the post.
    One of the interviewees had an amazing resume, which claimed that she knew not only some common applications (like, say, MS Office), but there was also "Lotus".
    We asked her what that Lotus thing was about (could be Notes, Domino, 1-2-3 or whatever) just out of curiosity. After some vague "you know, it does uh stuff like uh it works", the girl cracked and explained that she was supposed to learn it
    in class, but she wasn't there that day.
    We hired another girl, and that was a disaster too.

  • Bob Balaban (unregistered)

    Funny! I hope people will not confuse with Paula Dean (http://www.ladyandsons.com/), fabulous cook and star of her own Food TV show. Paula Dean would kick PaulaBean's butt.

  • (cs)

    I seriously think I'm depressed now for having read this. Truly a WTF, and though I've only been here a few months, I also vote this WTF of 05.

  • Zlodo (unregistered) in reply to Albatross
    Albatross:

    I vote we save Alex the trouble and call this the post of the year anyway.

    But why does this forum software edit in Times New Roman, and display in Arial?



    This forum software is an endless source of puzzlement. I think that by now its quirkiness can be considered part of the charm of this website :)
  • Whatever. (unregistered) in reply to No one special
    Anonymous:

    Even more strange, I wonder how he graduated.



    Ah...I remember graduating with my CS degree back more than 10 years ago (damn...I'm getting old)   Some of my classmates who also graduated with a CS degree I would never hire in a million years.  Some of them actually could program, but would get stumped on how to copy a file from one floppy to another.   Jeez...you just spent four years pretty much saying "this is what I want my life to be about" (yes...CS is more about algorithims, and computers are just the tools to implement them, but in the real world over here, they were all wanting to get jobs as programmers, not thinkers of Big O).

    In our assembly class, I did two versions of my code.  One I would turn in, and one I would be nice and share on the mainframe.  This way if someone did copy it, I didn't get busted.  I usually left the last couple steps as an exercise for the user as well.    That's how these people get out there.

    Reminds me also of someone we interviewed for a job once - all the questions we asked about DNS, Perl, Unix, etc... (it was a Unix job) were answered with either "I have a friend that does that" or "I have a book on it".    I was told it'd be rude to ask if he had the friends number with him :)
  • I Agree (unregistered) in reply to Whatever.

    < I was told it'd be rude to ask if he had the friends number with him>

    I'd rather hire 10 guys that know who to ask for the answer than 1 of the "experts" we've seen here repeatedly.

    Thanks.

  • (cs) in reply to I Agree

    I don't understand how something like this can happen. How can months go by without anything tangible? How can an employer hire someone who obviously doesn't have a clue? Hiring someone mediocre might happen, but THIS?

  • (cs) in reply to Whatever.
    Anonymous:
    Some of my classmates who also graduated with a CS degree I would never hire in a million years.


    Yes, unfortunately I have to agree. I've had some people that later graduated with a Bachelor of Science as partners who didn't know anything. Quickly I found out that it would actually be less work for me if I told them I'd do the assignment myself (they wouldn't have to do anything) than to explain everything I do. Mea culpa. That's how they get through.
  • cg (unregistered) in reply to htowninsomniac

    I agree.

    It took her a couple of months to get that code out?

    Damn, as an inexperienced recent c.s. grad it would only take me, like, a week to do that...

    And I can't find a job.

    rolls eyes

    See, I don't use emoticons...

  • (cs)

    I'm sure she was just following good software engineering practices. She had been gathering and analyzing requirements, assessing risks, doing research on the algorithms involved, doing user interface design and testing with paper prototypes, constructing detailed UML models, estimating the performance of the finished software and making detailed unit, integration, system and acceptance test plans. She was juuust about ready to start the implementation phase.

  • Guest (unregistered) in reply to Whatever.
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    Even more strange, I wonder how he graduated.


    In our assembly class, I did two versions of my code.  One I would turn in, and one I would be nice and share on the mainframe.
    ...  
    That's how these people get out there.

    The real WTF here is why?
  • Wodin (unregistered) in reply to Masklinn
    A Real Programmer doesn't use loops, loops are for quiche-eaters. A Real Programmer uses GOTO, which is how God meant programs to be written.

    What are you talking about?  GOTO is only one way to implement a loop!
  • Yowza (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:


    blockB[1] = blockA[1]
    blockB[2] = blockA[2]
    blockB[3] = blockA[3]
    ...


    I have actually written code that looks quite like that:

    blockB1 = blockA1
    blockB2 = blockA2
    etc...

    The trick was that those variables were differently aligned bit fields. The compiler does good job at combining the writes as much as possible. A loop could have been possible but certainly less maintenable and probably at least equally slow.
  • Lon Varscsak (unregistered) in reply to Yowza

    Has no one realized that Paula spelled brilliant wrong?

  • (cs) in reply to Lon Varscsak

    Lon Varscsak:
    Has no one realized that Paula spelled brilliant wrong?

    Congratulations Lon, you were the FIRST person to notice that.  It wasn't one of the main things that made the original post hilarious.  It didn't give the original WTF a complete element of irony.  AND out of the over 150 comments spread out over more than 3 pages, YOU were the first to catch it.

  • (cs) in reply to Lon Varscsak

    Anonymous:
    Has no one realized that Paula spelled brilliant wrong?

    Wow, It is indeed a good thing that we have Lon Varscsak around here to point these things out to us poor ignorant plebes.  He must be brillant!

  • Another Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Guest
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:

    Even more strange, I wonder how he graduated.


    In our assembly class, I did two versions of my code.  One I would turn in, and one I would be nice and share on the mainframe.
    ...  
    That's how these people get out there.

    The real WTF here is why?


    I did a similar thing in some of my CS classes.  I did the assignment and printed a single copy and gave it to a group of struggling people.  I would then go and redo the assignment differently for myself.

    The reason I did this was that I would be pestered in all hours of the night for help on homework.  I got so many questions like, "What is a variable and why should I use one?" "How do I do this assignment?" "How do I make something happen sometimes?"  "Where's the command that generates this program?"

    It was never ending.  I got so fed up with it.  The only way I could get sleep was if I just gave them the answer.  I figure it's their problem, when they don't know how to do anything on the test.  It's the professors fault they passed.  If you fail all the tests and ace all the homeworks, obviously something is wrong.  Also, the professors seemed to have a problem giving anything worse than a B if you showed up.
  • (cs) in reply to Whatever.
    Anonymous:

    In our assembly class, I did two versions of my code.  One I would turn in, and one I would be nice and share on the mainframe.  This way if someone did copy it, I didn't get busted.  I usually left the last couple steps as an exercise for the user as well.    That's how these people get out there.

    So you mean it's your fault. Bad. (I've done this too, so I suppose I can't complain too much...)

    And yes, it's amazing how far people can get in quite decent CS degrees without actually being any good.

  • (cs) in reply to Whatever.
    Anonymous:
    all the questions we asked about DNS, Perl, Unix, etc... (it was a Unix job) were answered with either "I have a friend that does that" or "I have a book on it". 

    This is one of the common misconceptions of interviewing - the aim is not to find out what the person knows but how well a person can find out information and use it.

    For example, I was once asked about a switch for the 'ls' command in an interview. My answer was "Who cares? I can do a 'man ls' and find out" - that's the distinction - not that I know every tiny bit of easily found information about something, that I know where to look and how to use those resources...

    I'm always called an evil interviewer as I follow the above principle ;-)

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