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I dunno. I've heard a story from a classmate about a consultant brought in by her coop company. The dude basically did the same thing, worked for 6 months and said everything was coming along great. Then on the day of the deadline, it was discovered that all he had was a namespace and a function header. He cried during the meeting and was fired.
Admin
All women developers I've met are lousy developers. Some shouldn't even be called developers, why? Because they can't even write a Hello World app. I'm being serious here, there was a "colleague" who couldn't even write 1 line of code, whenever she received a programming task, she simply delegated the task to his boyfriend (lead developer).
There were 2 other women who used that same technique, and there were 2 other women who wrote mediocre and buggy code.
I'm not saying my code was perfect... but at least (back then) I at least knew how to use multi-threading & concurrency, basic OO principles, and properly use & read framework APIs.
Admin
This is so funny. Even though there were so many comments from people saying they have similar stories from incompetent male programmers, people still comment about how her gender is related to her incompetence:
Did you morons know that the first programmer ever was a woman? Our profession might not even exist if it wasn't for Ada Lovelace. Or Grace Hopper, who wrote the first compiler.
Just because there are some incompetent female programmers, doesn't mean all of us are. (relevant: http://xkcd.com/385/) The problem is that some of these incompetent women get hired just because of their gender, and create a bad reputation for all of us.
Admin
Blame where due. I'd say they got hired more due to the hiring manager's gender. I have worked with some real stars that were women, and some that were ho-hum. I think that this site proves it's not just women that get hired inappropriately, but as a minority, they are under a magnifying glass. Must be tough - props to the ladies!
Admin
I've worked with lousy programmers from all creeds. I've worked with female programmers who aren't too bad at it. Such females are exceptionally rare. Female programmers of any skill level at all are incredibly rare.
I don't blame this one. Have you ever worked with enterprise Java? You will spend more time reading than anything else. It takes years before you can actually do anything.
Admin
I know this is years after the original comment, but I just need to note in passing it's definitely NOT far-fetched.
When I was in college, one of our class projects required us to work in teams of 3 or 4. Two of us had signficant experience programming (I had programmed professionally two years before going to college) and we agreed to do the project design. The other two wanted more experience programming, so it looked like a good combination. We fed design specs to the other two who kept giving us positive feedback on how well it was going. Finally, 2 days before the semester project is due, they tell us not a line of code had been written. They didn't know where to begin and were too embarrassed to tell us.
At least it had a happy ending. I got alone with the other student and said "I'll program, you document." Despite it being finals week, we managed to grind the project out in a day. Best thing: when we turned in our project, we were allowed to anonymously write down the percent that we thought the others in the group contributed to the project. Win!
Admin
This reminds me another one: If idiots can fly, then I'm working in an airport.
Admin
the woman who has contributed the most to software development is Barbara Liskov after whom is named the "Liskov Subsitution Principle", which means that when using the "inheritance" pattern, you should be able to freely substitute the derived class with the base class at the point of calling, and not have to know what the underlying class actually is.
This was quoted in 1987 and had no specific programming language in mind as far as I am aware.
With regards to this particular WTF, the sad situation of a programmer is often being left alone for long periods to "get on with it". Pair-programming would never have let this happen. When you have a pair programming, you push each other to work, and don't waste time at work doing other stuff so much, like browsing TheDailyWTF.com.
The WTF though is that Paula could leave with this work experience on her CV/resume and the company could not give a bad reference. She could say, truthfully, that she spent so many months in this company working on such and such a project.
Of course had she been clever enough she would have either found some open-source that did what she wanted, or found a website somewhere to get the code (give me the codez..) possibly in return for a few nice "reputation points".
Oh well, I have work to do, can't spend too long on here...
Admin
And every year, we make a pilgrimage back to this clbuttic, the paragon of TDWTF.
Admin
Admin
And 2014 is here, thanks to today's t-shirt giveaway. Nice job on the artwork, Mark.
Admin
Oh hey, now that Discourse is gone we can comment on these old articles again.
Addendum 2016-03-25 19:59: Paula was pretty buggy on Discourse anyway.
Admin
Is this the best classic?
FILE_NOT_FOUND
(for the record, "Special Delivery" is the GOAT)
Admin
It's possible that "brillant" isn't misspelled - it might be French. I mean, she obviously needs all the benefit of the doubt we can give her, here.
Admin
Not worth the time/money. She has probably spent the money/lawyers might cost more, in the end, than they paid her.
Most likely explanation - nobody like to admit that they were stupid
Admin
Smart people who think they can program are even worse than stupid people. Stupid people at least only make stupid mistakes.
Admin
I once worked with a "programmer" who was asked create a database and forms in access, as a bug tracking system to track his work on other projects. Predictably, the access database he created was so buggy it was unusable. I've never seen anything so buggy.
Admin
The real WTF is the number of people who doubt this could be true. I've been in this industry for 40 years now. I've been coding in Java for about 20 years. I have a friend who was hired by a government agency as a Java programmer. He had no Java programming experience whatsoever. He was an HTML guy who read a book. He even told them that. They hired him anyway then complained about his lack of skill.
Admin
Thats why a daily status update, code review and JIRA helps in tackling with dodgy contractors.
Admin
Do not abandon logic and reason; one should not multiply externalities unnecessarily. Look for common factors. What individual worked at all those places? What policies did those places have that attracted that individual? And so forth.
Admin
I couldn't resist. In the meantime I learned some JavaScript and it was very easy to get hired again.
Admin
RFC: URBAN BUNKER:
You go to the worst part of town, and take a strategy of how the Allied forces in the global war on terror won Ramadi. Put one guy who does all his chores in jogging at 4:00 AM. Shift change says: "Hey! That could be rental property!"
RFC: URBAN LAUREATE:
You take the housing used in prison commissary kiosks. People can bring their own keyboard, or use some sort of touch screen gesture recognition. They hit a global backlog powered by Facebook Aroma to clear simple tickets, and received some crypto garbage redeemable from facial recognition which can "throttle" against fraud.
Admin
Best href="https://trending-nowz.blogspot.com/2022/01/car-insurance.html">Car Insurance</a for your vehicle.
Admin
Another possibility I haven't seen mentioned so far is that Ms Bean pushed that minimal "stake in the ground" to the main branch on her first morning on the job, and then diligently and thoroughly completed the whole of her assignment on a private branch, which the two reporters Heidi and Michael were unaware of, perhaps because she never mentioned it or pushed it to the shared repo, and after her final day her company laptop containing all the precious code was handed in and promptly wiped by an admin! It's a long shot though (chortle!)
Although I'm sure the reporters are familiar with source control and branching etc, you'd be amazed at the number of sites that don't use it, so their IT people are only dimly aware of it if at all. Twenty years ago I had a contract at quite a large and successful insurance company, and on my first day they showed me a 20,000 line perl script that was the web app used to run the questionaire for insurance applications, and had several bugs and obscurities it was my task to fix and clarify respectively. The tech lead then warned me "Be careful when you save the file, because this is running live". It's true, I swear on my honour!
Admin
She still wrote more code than I did in my entire career, despite my degree in Computer Science. My life is a tragedy.