• Jax (unregistered) in reply to EvanED

    It works the other way too. I've been a software developer for 16 years and it's becoming more common that I will leave a workplace because of incompetency of either the team or management. It doesn't look great on my work record I know, but after this length of time I'm not interested in doing or being part of a half-assed job for anyone.

    I don't possess the gift of the gab and it irritates me like hell when people like Paula are placed ahead of me.

  • Peregrine Falcon (unregistered) in reply to Another Anonymous

    Ahhh, the advantages of earning my CS degree over the Internet. ;)
    The most annoying part is that I am paying over US $30,000 and spending two years for a piece of paper and something I could have learned in about 2 months... I already know how to program, damnit, so don't give me three classes that have nearly identical textbooks that all tell me about loops, variables, switches, etc. Grrrrrr....

  • psychobabble (unregistered) in reply to Jax

    you can make fun of Paula all you want, but she knew what she was doing. "Brillant" is actually propper spelling... in French!

    (no, this is not yet another case of France-bashing... even though it sounds like one 6 )

  • (cs) in reply to psychobabble
    Anonymous:
    you can make fun of Paula all you want, but she knew what she was doing.

    Or she thought she knew what she was doing; too incompetent to realise her own inportetence.

    But, admittedly, she DID write something useful:

    return paula;

  • (cs) in reply to nobody

    <font size="1" style="font-family: verdana;">

    nobody:
    But, admittedly, she DID write something useful:

    return paula;



    <font size="2">Hope they kept the receipt...

    </font>    </font>

  • Noim Porta (unregistered) in reply to cconroy

    Come on people!

    This wasn't Paula's WTF...
    This was the WTF of the company where she was doing the project.. Paula seems to be a smart gal after all :)...
    She was prolly earning thousands of dollars a month sitting on her ass and doing nothing.
    And SHAME on the company AND Paula's boss (AND possibly all the idiots that were interviewing her).
    All of'em must be fired immediately...

    Dang.. there should be a managerial WTF board.....
    F**king pathetic.... in this example Paula was the smart one.....

  • (cs) in reply to No one special
    Anonymous:
    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.



    I did a senior project with 3 other guys, a roommate of mine who was also a CS major, and two "Smart" guys who we interviewed. Well the two smart guys were in another class that I was in, and they spent the last three days before our first project was due, working on code for that class. (It was in C). So me and my roomie finished 4 out of 5, and they finished 1 out of 5, plus the code for the other class, which I then copied. (Yea yea, I know, wait for the punchline).

    So I took their code home, and couldn't get it to work. Sonovabitch. Worked on it for a day, then said screw it, and slept for 48 hours, got up, did the second project from scratch, and turned it in 2 days late. Now every day late was -20% to your grade, so I could get at most a 60. I got a 58, which bummed me out until the "smart" guy asked me how the hell I got a 58 when he only got a 5 (!!!). We only got 4/5 on the other project as well. We ditched those bastards in a second. what a joke. But I'll never forget it. This was a SENIOR PROJECT, and they did NOTHING.

    They ended up glomming onto some other group, and one of them even finished with a better grade in the class...I was taking way too many classes, and my roomie was a terrible test-taker, though an excellent programmer.
  • (cs) in reply to Satanicpuppy

    I had one professor that required the group members to agree on how to split points. And he did not allow even splits without proof that everyone really did equal amounts of works.

    The member who we gave the lowest grade didn't agree with our ratings, so we turned in our recommendations, and he turned in his. I don't know what happened, but I I got a good grade, and the TA was well aware that this guy never helped us - and he was taking the class as a grad student while the rest of us were undergrads.

    The downside is I let one BSer who didn't do much work get more points than he deserved. But he did deserve credit for doing some work. (The class was on user interfaces not programing, so lack of programming ability shouldn't have cost him much in that class, though I don't know how he got through the hardcore prerequisites that did demand programming)

  • (cs) in reply to hank miller
    hank miller:
    I had one professor that required the group members to agree on how to split points. And he did not allow even splits without proof that everyone really did equal amounts of works.

    The member who we gave the lowest grade didn't agree with our ratings, so we turned in our recommendations, and he turned in his. I don't know what happened, but I I got a good grade, and the TA was well aware that this guy never helped us - and he was taking the class as a grad student while the rest of us were undergrads.

    The downside is I let one BSer who didn't do much work get more points than he deserved. But he did deserve credit for doing some work. (The class was on user interfaces not programing, so lack of programming ability shouldn't have cost him much in that class, though I don't know how he got through the hardcore prerequisites that did demand programming)



    Heh. I got called in for cheating once, because some guy snagged a copy of my source off a printer where I'd made a copy of it. I hadn't, at the time, imagined that this would be a problem, so I hadn't rushed up to make sure no one stole it. It was a CS111 class, so I figured, who couldn't do this code? The programming project had been to write a "Tammagotchi" simulation...You feed the little guy, and they prosper, etc.

    Well the guy who copied me clearly didn't know what the hell he was doing. He copied ALL of my code, and changed the variable names. He even copied the "Duel to the Death" simulation I'd put in, without apparently realizing that it was NOT part of the assignment to have your virtual pets enter into a virtual pet "There can be only one" highlander style fight to the death.

    Moral of the story? Don't copy code from the guy who's just taking the class to fill out a requirement.

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to Another Anonymous

    In my school days we used 80x24 terminals and printed reams of Pascal source code.  So my friend Bruce is busy debugging his assignment, and some other kid comes up to him and asks if he'd take a look at his assignment.  A second pair of eyes, and all that.

    So Bruce starts pouring over the five or six pages of code, and it slowly dawns on him that he's looking at an older version of his own code that the other kid had just pulled out of the recycling bin.

  • Pops (unregistered) in reply to EvanED

    I took an operating systems class from Alan Ashton (WordPerfect founder, for those old enough to recall). The final in the class? An oral exam in which you demonstrated your working OS and answered any questions he had about the code. I guess you could still cheat, but you'd have to be a good liar, too.

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:


    Heh. I got called in for cheating once, because some guy snagged a copy of my source off a printer where I'd made a copy of it. I hadn't, at the time, imagined that this would be a problem, so I hadn't rushed up to make sure no one stole it. It was a CS111 class, so I figured, who couldn't do this code? The programming project had been to write a "Tammagotchi" simulation...You feed the little guy, and they prosper, etc.

    Well the guy who copied me clearly didn't know what the hell he was doing. He copied ALL of my code, and changed the variable names. He even copied the "Duel to the Death" simulation I'd put in, without apparently realizing that it was NOT part of the assignment to have your virtual pets enter into a virtual pet "There can be only one" highlander style fight to the death.

    Moral of the story? Don't copy code from the guy who's just taking the class to fill out a requirement.


    I once had two nearly identical assembly assignments handed in.  Since they also had to hand in their executable, and since the cheater was too dumb to re-compile to match the new "Student Name: " in the source, it was pretty easy to see which student was the cheat.
  • (cs) in reply to Rich
    Anonymous:
    Satanicpuppy:


    Heh. I got called in for cheating once, because some guy snagged a copy of my source off a printer where I'd made a copy of it. I hadn't, at the time, imagined that this would be a problem, so I hadn't rushed up to make sure no one stole it. It was a CS111 class, so I figured, who couldn't do this code? The programming project had been to write a "Tammagotchi" simulation...You feed the little guy, and they prosper, etc.

    Well the guy who copied me clearly didn't know what the hell he was doing. He copied ALL of my code, and changed the variable names. He even copied the "Duel to the Death" simulation I'd put in, without apparently realizing that it was NOT part of the assignment to have your virtual pets enter into a virtual pet "There can be only one" highlander style fight to the death.

    Moral of the story? Don't copy code from the guy who's just taking the class to fill out a requirement.


    I once had two nearly identical assembly assignments handed in.  Since they also had to hand in their executable, and since the cheater was too dumb to re-compile to match the new "Student Name: " in the source, it was pretty easy to see which student was the cheat.


    Gotta be careful with that though, because if you can show that Person A gave Person B their code, Person A is (both actually and ethically) hardly any less of a cheater.
  • (cs) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    Well the guy who copied me clearly didn't know what the hell he was doing. He copied ALL of my code, and changed the variable names. He even copied the "Duel to the Death" simulation I'd put in, without apparently realizing that it was NOT part of the assignment to have your virtual pets enter into a virtual pet "There can be only one" highlander style fight to the death.

    Moral of the story? Don't copy code from the guy who's just taking the class to fill out a requirement.


    Man, our assignments were never even that fun. Ours are a lot more dry, and don't leave a ton of room for creativeness like that.
  • Mac Java girl (unregistered)

    Back when Java was just starting, and Sun was still trying to do their own Mac JVM, they hired a kid I called "Puppy" a week before they hired me. The closest they had to a Mac expert on the interview team was my former manager - and all he knew about Macs was what he'd picked up from sharing an office with me for 3 years while I wrote the Mac Smalltalk VM.

    The first sign of trouble happened during my first week there. Puppy asked if Java caused any INIT conflicts. Now, I had no idea whether Java even had an INIT (it didn't) so I asked if he'd tried the least-likely test (assuming he'd tried all the likely ones). Then the next least-likely. Then the next. Finally I asked if he'd at least rebooted with extensions off (if your Mac lore is as rusty as mine now - you hold the shift key down during the reboot).

    He didn't know how to do that.

    I went to my friend and asked how they'd hired this idiot - I knew he was supposed to do Mac I18N, so I assumed he was an I18N expert with a bit of Mac experience, but no, he was he supposed to be a Mac expert with some I18N skills. As nobody else on the interview team had so much as used a Mac, Puppy had BSed everyone except my friend - and he'd only been there a few weeks, so nobody listened.

    Now, since there was no Mac JVM on which to write Mac I18N stuff, they put Puppy on the I18N team and told him to write test cases. A year later, when he left, they went looking for his tests.

    He'd never written anything.

  • dhromed is a moron (unregistered) in reply to EvanED

    Anonymous:
    dhromed:
    Anonymous:
    Anonymous:
    Isn't one of the first posts (by Gene Wirchenko) saying that already?
    Oh the "reply" does not sort the post into a thread but appends it instead. I intended this sentence to be a reply to the assuption, of Ytram at the end of page 1, that Lon Varscsak is the first to realize that brillant is written wrong.


    Multi-thread threads, such as on slashdot, should be destroyed because they're an unwieldy and unbrowsable labyrinth of posts.

    The sane thing is to append so that a thread is indeed that: a thread. All decent online forums do that.

    The insane thing is to include a 'reply' button on EACH AND EVERY post.

    When in doubt, click 'Quote'.


    The other insane thing this place does (or one of them anyway) is load the separate pages with post messages instead of get. A consequence of this is that if you make a post, it sends you back to the first page in the thread.

    (As an aside, the different threading models are good in different situations. Many /. discussions are big enough that an approach like this would be, in my opinion, completely unworkable. I think this site is about the limit of popularity for this model.)

    You really are correct, the threaded model on /. works nicely, the format here is pretty primitive and additionally dhromed is generally acknowledged to be a complete moron.

  • rjstanford (unregistered) in reply to Pope

    Poor Paula Bean had to live my nightmares.  I hope that she had underwear on, at least.

    Although if she didn't, it might explain why she kept the job so long...

  • Robert (unregistered) in reply to rjstanford

    It's amazing to see how you believe these stories made up by the The Daily WTF crew.

  • jroch (unregistered) in reply to Robert

    My best "cheating" exercise in CS:

    We were supposed to write a fairly medium-level program as an assignment, which really wouldn't have been a problem, but the language that we were using at the time was Ada.  I'm sure there may be some who love Ada, but I think it sucks dog balls.  Anyhow, after procrastinating for quite some time I finally sat down to write it.

    Lo and behold I just couldn't get my mind into Ada's weirdness... so I tossed aside the book and did the whole assignment in C instead.  However, I wrote exception handlers that would catch the normal errors and return Ada-style errors instead of the normal C errors.  So, now I had an executable to submit that was functioning perfectly.

    Then I sat down and faked up Ada source code.  It was a monstrous, uncompilable, unreadable conglomeration.  And I got an A.  ;)

    For the team-based final project one of the team members got code from a friend that had taken the class a couple years prior.  I took that code, reverse-engineered it and found it to be extremely bad coding.  So I did it myself, from scratch, and gave everyon else credit as if they'd done their part.

    Of course, now I'm an Enterprise Admin and don't code at all for my job.  I think I got the job that all of the slackers wanted to do rather than program... me, I'm thinking about going back to programming.

  • Woody (unregistered) in reply to Chucara

    Chucara:
    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.

    It happens more often than you'd think.

    I once worked for a company that made custom telephone switches. Real-time, multi-processor, shared memory, all of that nasty stuff. We were on a tight deadline so we hired a top guy from the competition who had "five years' intensive experience" and great references.

    We gave him the database to write--the most critical component--together with a detailed design of how to do it. Almost a year (!) later, when we were to start integrating the various bits and start system alpha testing, he went on vacation. We integrated and tested, and found that the only thing in the database that actually worked was a lookup by primary key. None of the other functions worked. That's when we looked at his code.

    Rather than following the spec, he had gone his own way. The resulting code was utterly unusable crap, and we had lost almost a man-year of our schedule. The head designer, who had come up with the original design, ended up rewriting the whole mess himself. Our highly experienced scoop from the competition was shunted onto a maintenance project and then fired a few months later.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to neek

    It got posted to another day's WTF under 'your_mom_naked'.

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to neek
    Anonymous:
    <font size="2">Send Paula picture! =)</font>


    It got posted to the 'Imaging In Line' WTF under 'your_mom_naked'.

    Satanicpuppy:
    Anonymous:
    I should note that I once worked with an PHP-based OSS photo album that worked in a similar manner. Every image in the album was one PHP script that loaded the image from disk and echo'd it to the browser with a faked MIME type. The justification for this was security -- the author wanted a simple way to enforce privacy levels for different images within the same directory. It worked, but prevented browser caches from operating properly and was terribly slow, all for a feature that very few people used. It was one of the first things I ripped out of the script.


    The problem with that, for this, is that the "program" will serve whatever picture is passed to it in the $_GET['image'] field, which, as it's a get, can be hacked from the browser a la "http://www.stupidprogrammer.com/image.php?image=your_mom_naked.gif"

    Completely insecure.

  • (cs) in reply to njkayaker

    > -Unless- you are getting -tangible- benefits (eg sex or money), >-never- do other people's work for them

     

    I couldn't agree more. 

    On my postgrad course we had a Korean lad with a first class honours degree whose faultfinding abilities were a little less sophisticated than identifying where the smoke came from.

    His final report was full of nothing but buzzphrases - and pidgin buzzphrases at that - so a group of us rewrote it for him.

     

    Stupidity is its own reward: he now writes code to control nuclear reactors...

  • bob (unregistered) in reply to dhromed
    dhromed:
    Multi-thread threads, such as on slashdot, should be destroyed because they're an unwieldy and unbrowsable labyrinth of posts.

    The sane thing is to append so that a thread is indeed that: a thread. All decent online forums do that.

    The insane thing is to include a 'reply' button on EACH AND EVERY post.

    When in doubt, click 'Quote'.

    That's obvious, especially since slashdot has had NO success and no one ever uses it. I'm amazed they get any visitors at all with their unwiedly format. Much easier to have to read through a thread of 1000 posts to find the replies you want.

  • bob (unregistered) in reply to PirateKing
    PirateKing:

    > -Unless- you are getting -tangible- benefits (eg sex or money), >-never- do other people's work for them

     

    I couldn't agree more. 

    On my postgrad course we had a Korean lad with a first class honours degree whose faultfinding abilities were a little less sophisticated than identifying where the smoke came from.

    His final report was full of nothing but buzzphrases - and pidgin buzzphrases at that - so a group of us rewrote it for him.

     

    Stupidity is its own reward: he now writes code to control nuclear reactors...

    Hopefully they are in Korea

  • ravi kumar (unregistered) in reply to Gene Wirchenko

    if one application is written in j2me using cdma technology it is compatible to all cdma phones

     

  • Some Middle-aged Guy (unregistered) in reply to ravi kumar

    Brillant insight, Ravi!

  • Merlin (unregistered) in reply to Noim Porta
    Anonymous:

    This wasn't Paula's WTF...
    This was the WTF of the company where she was doing the project.. Paula seems to be a smart gal after all :)...
    She was prolly earning thousands of dollars a month sitting on her ass and doing nothing.
    And SHAME on the company AND Paula's boss (AND possibly all the idiots that were interviewing her).
    All of'em must be fired immediately...


    I agree with that one, having seen this far too often in various companies.
    Of course, managers are responsible for the quality of the persons they hire.

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