• Matt (unregistered) in reply to gl
    Anonymous:

    check the upper nibble of the high-order bit

     I thought only bytes had nibbles.

    (well - and hot girls, but I don't get to see those so often)
     

  • MarkT (unregistered)

    My favorite all time Joeism is from a EE I worked with right out of college:

    What's the difference between a hard drive and memory?

    followed closely by (same guy):

    Is a C compiler hard to write?

     

  • jose (unregistered)

    new project manager hired from *almost big 6* consulting company:

    developers: documentuum cannot accept file streams as an argument so it has to accept the file name and path so it can retrieve it from the file system

    project manager: "What's a file system?"

  • Not Troy (unregistered) in reply to Licky Lindsay

    during my first week as a php developer at my current job i wrote a function to go through an array removing any duplicated data

     when i added it to the library of our user defined functions and told my coworkers, they asked "why didn't you just use array_unique?!?"

     

     so now before i write a function to do something, i search to make sure it doesn't already exist.
     

  • John Cowan (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird

    That's called a "fork bomb" or a "wabbit".  You can write an even more concise version as a shell script:  "$0 & $0 &".  The exponential explosion will ruin your computer faster than you can react.  Reboot time....

  • Annonymous (unregistered)

    This is hilarious. I had no idea someone of that intelligence was even capable of getting a job.

  • Licky Lindsay (unregistered) in reply to jub

    Anonymous:
    SO, your objections against delimited files are exactly what?

     
    Nothing against delimited files per se. The problems with CSV in particular are:

    1. Comma was a poor choice for the delimiter, since it is highly likely to occur in ordinary text. More likely than, for example, literal greater-than or less-than is in an HTML document.
    2. The solution for escaping commas, which is to surround the entire call with quotes, is harder to parse than if the comma was escaped with (for example) a backslash.
    3. Esacping of literal quotes is accomplished by doubling them. In other words, two different ways to escape things in one file format. This further complicates the parsing.
    It is obvious that the format was originally designed by someone who just didn't think about things like "what happens if somebody wants to use a literal comma?". Then later someone did, and they had to hack in the quoting. Etc. The CSV format is a WTF all to itself.
  • (cs)

    Okay, this one isn't completely fair since it involves someone who doesn't even claim to know anything about computers and doesn't work with them in his job, but his name WAS Joe. My wife told me the story of her first husband calling her up at her job (she was a tech writer) and pretending to be from the help desk and told her that he needed to repair her computer because it was reported that it was leaking ink.

  • (cs)

    "Files on a server will deteriorate over time and need to be refreshed" -- director of computing and networking at a relatively popular travel booking agency.

    "CVS can't handle images, so don't use CVS if you want to checkin images; it will corrupt them." -- HTML 'coder' person at same travel booking agency.

    7 classes (out of ~6500) were all named the same yet resided in different packages.  When I asked another "developer" why that was, he responded:

    Him: Well, they all have a subset of the data.
    Me: Um, but none of them inherit from each other.
    Him: Why would we want to do that?  They have different pieces of the data.

    Oh, and this same travel booking agency also instantiated factory classes.  No no no, not a singleton method to get ahold of an instance of the class, they outright instantiated the class.  eg "Factory myFactory = new Factory();".   

  • AD (unregistered) in reply to Licky Lindsay

    Dear Lord, I've implemented code to parse CSV, and it's horrifying.  It seems simple: rows are seperated with \r\n, columns are seperated by commas.  What could be easier?  Then the special cases arrive.  Need a comma or a new lines?  Wrap the field in double quotes.  Need quotes in your quotes?  Duplicate them.  Fiddly and annoying.  The real fun starts when you start coping with real data found in the field.  A database dump I was responsible for parsing (I believe from Access, but I don't know) wouldn't put a string in quotes if there were no commas or new lines.  That's all well and good, but is a problem if the string itself begins with a double quote.  So when the code encountered a field starting with a double quote, it had to continue scanning as though it might be a naked string (scan until comma, no de-escaping) or a quoted string (scan until double quote followed by a copy, do de-escape.  My original routine was quite simple, but it eventually bloated coping with these stupid exceptions, then optimizations to avoid scanning character-by-character while maintaining the exceptions. The end result, 80 lines of Perl.  (I'm famliar with the various CPAN modules for CSV parsing.  At the time none handled the "string begins with a double quote, but doesn't end with one" case correctly.  Indeed, if I recall correctly, none were willing to handle newlines in the data either.  Perhaps the situation has since improved.)

    CAPTCHA: zork.  A maze of twisty little passages indeed. 

  • (cs)

    This was in an internship so normally I'd give the guy some slack.


    I was trying to explain to him the basics of object oriented programming and it seemed to be going well, until I got to private versus public methods and variables. I finished explaining it, in what I thought were pretty clear terms. Apparently not...

    "Ohhhhh I get it, so if it's private other people can't change your code unless they get permission from [our boss]"

  • Bob (unregistered)

    I'm on the phone with a guy from another office trying my best to explain why his (brute force linear) search algorithm was causing major performance problems.  That since the data did not depend on any specific ordering, and since it was searched through millions of times, and since the dataset was tens of thousands of items long - that sorting once and using a binary search would provide a substantial performance improvement with just a few lines of code.

    His response was "We already thought of that, but we can't use a binary search because we're storing strings, not binary data."

     

  • Greg (unregistered)

    A guy at my company sent an email to a discussion group (that encompassed more than half the company) asking if anyone had the cracked version of winzip.

  • daf (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird
    Anonymous:

    Three weeks into my new job after graduating with a Master's in computer engineering, I accidentally wrote a routine that, when distilled, was essentially:

     while (1)
       fork();

    I should mention that we use xterm sessions into shared servers for all of our development.  Probably 100 other developers ranging from junior to senior leads were logged in on the same machine that I was.  When I ran my program, I had about 5 seconds before the system became unresponsive.  I tried my darndest to do a "killall" but I was too late...

    10 minutes after the system rebooted I got a knock on my cubicle from an agry IT guy, and I got quite a few comments later in the lunch room...

     a shared system and no one set up process limits properly?  gg IT..
     

  • FrostCat (unregistered) in reply to savar
    savar:

    This guy must have been a PITA when there was actual work to do, but as dude to hang out with he's probably hilarious.

     Well, yeah, if you don't mind getting into barfights on a regular basis...

     

    Captcha: Foxtrot

  • Licky Lindsay (unregistered) in reply to AD
    Anonymous:

    A database dump I was responsible for parsing (I believe from Access, but I don't know) wouldn't put a string in quotes if there were no commas or new lines.  That's all well and good, but is a problem if the string itself begins with a double quote.

     RFC 4180 says:

    If fields are not enclosed with double quotes, then double quotes may not appear inside the fields.

     Of course I'm joking that anyone would expect Access to abide by any RFC.

  • Tim (unregistered) in reply to Licky Lindsay
    Anonymous:

    Anonymous:
    At my previous job, I was in a meeting where the guru guy was explaining how the data available on the screen could be downloaded as a CSV by the users so they could import to MS Excel.  My newly hired boss (who claimed to have been a programmer for 20 years) asked the question, "What's CSV?".  Guru guy looks at her in amazement, "It's a comma separated value file".  To which she replies, "OH, I have never heard of that before".... WTF?!?!

    CSV is a PC-ism. I would not be shocked if a programmer with 20 years in the Unix or mainframe worlds had never heard of it. Also, CSV sucks, so I wouldn't hold it against the guy..

    CAPTCHA: pizza
     

     

    Yeah, in the mainframe world they call a csv file a "database". Joking... sort of.

  • Anon (unregistered)

    I was hired to do QA at a place where the DBA didn't believe in enforcing referential integrity in the DB.  He also didn't believe in documenting the system.  So not only did no one else know how things were supposed to be related, they couldn't even derive it from the constraints.

     After giving up on ever getting him to document anything, I just asked him point-blank, "If I don't know what the DB is supposed to be doing, how am I supposed to test it?"

    "I write it, it works.  That's how you test it."

  • Bobby (unregistered)

    During my tenure at a publishing company (one of the largest in the world), we had to let go of a "Senior J2EE Engineer" after about 3 weeks due to his lack of ability to produce even a single line of usable code, despite his extensive overtime. While firing him, we sited lack of acceptable progress, to which he responded, with a sales pitch-like tone in his voice, "Would it change anything if I told you I was able to successfully connect to the database?" No Barry. It wouldn't.

  • (cs) in reply to me

    fork() is fucked on this box, sometimes it returns 1 and sometimes 0

    Good anonymous, you look kinda cool. What the heck were you writing, a replacement for /sbin/init?

  • (cs) in reply to maber

    One morning, at an old job, there was a note on my desk when I came in:

     [themagni], there's a fly buzzing around the office. Don't hurt it. Catch it, and let it outside.

     

  • me (unregistered)

    Ok. This one came from my high school programming class. We were asked (pre the days of the interweb) to write some code to display an information site about a local business. We were doing this in pascal. The code was then to be graded by a statewide education board. The problem was that the previous year the education board decided to merge the programming course with the 'Information Processing & Management' course (aka, Secretarial Studies). So, while the board was composed of 50% programmers, the other 50% were glorified typists, and knew just enough to be dangerous.

     

    At the time, I was regularly involved in the demo scene and was pretty adept at x86 ASM. So, for my graphics routines, I wrote everything in ASM. My pascal code was pretty clean, lots of comments and decent style - typical suck-up code written by someone trying to impress.

     
    My assignment came back with a B- (I was truly expecting an A+). The comments said that I had not used useful variable names - "Why is cx sometimes for loops and ax is for Y coordinates, when bx is for X coordinates - USE MEANINGFUL NAMES".

     

     

  • (cs) in reply to me
    Anonymous:

    Code is breaking in bad an unpredictable ways. I do code review of threaded codebase:

     

    me: what are all these sleep()'s for?

    him: oh, i use them to reduce the chance of locking problems

    me: do you use locks?

    him: they are too difficult to use properly, so I use sleep() 

     

     

    captcha: 37signals 

    This is the coding counterpart of "hiding by closing your eyes". 

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to John Cowan

    Anonymous:
    That's called a "fork bomb" or a "wabbit".  You can write an even more concise version as a shell script:  "$0 & $0 &".  The exponential explosion will ruin your computer faster than you can react.  Reboot time....

     > ulimit -u 32

    > $0 & $0 &

    > fork: killed

     

    or something like that
     

  • (cs) in reply to Scott
    Anonymous:

     Among other things, we had to teach him about this new thing in programming called "Classes".  To which he responded, "CLASSES ARE COOL!!!"

    He should've took one or two of them.
     

  • (cs) in reply to Not Troy
    Anonymous:

    during my first week as a php developer at my current job i wrote a function to go through an array removing any duplicated data

    when i added it to the library of our user defined functions and told my coworkers, they asked "why didn't you just use array_unique?!?"

    so now before i write a function to do something, i search to make sure it doesn't already exist.

    Boy, that reminds me of my very early days in VBS.  I re-invented Split().

    Sure, now I can laugh about it...

  • Rev Matt Y (unregistered)

    Context:  a very very smart but pretty unstable developer has been increasingly absent and scattered.  Finally comes in but is constantly going out in the hall to take cell calls.  We figure he's interviewing.  I come out of the bathroom to hear:

     

    No! Look!  I am NOT going to jail over this again!

     

     

  • Anonymouse (unregistered) in reply to hk0

    In the early 90's I worked for a major computer manufacturer (based in South Dakota, large black and white boxes). Anyway, had a coworker who had done everything or knew everything, i.e. his father wrote OS/2 in the backseat of the station wagon, and was sueing IBM for royalties... We had programmable keyboards back then, you could program a series of keystrokes into a single key, usually used on the F-keys. This individual worked in tech support. We remapped his Enter keys to Ctrl-Alt-Del. In the days of DOS and Windows 3.1, this was a quick reboot. He'd actually called IT for a new keyboard before someone fessed up. Another time, a female coworker was talking about having a cyst on an ovary. Mister Done-That immediately pipes up, "Oh yeah, I had one of those a couple years ago!"

     

    Captcha = clueless (How appropriate)

  • Mike (unregistered) in reply to Scott

    I assume you're talking about Visual Studio. 

    Give the guy a break.  I've been programming for almost 30 years and been using Java IDE's for years, but using VS about a month.  I'm always asking questions like this. VS just doesn't make sense -- completely unlike anything I've ever seen.  BTW, as long as I have your attention - WTF is this AssemblyInfo.vb file good for?

     

  • Rev Matt Y (unregistered) in reply to Jay

    In many other cases, contractors are brought in by the consulting company who doesn't really care how crappy they are as long as they are billable.

  • Mike (unregistered)

    I worked at an aerospace company with a lot of old Joe's.  Overheard from the cube next to mine:

    Joe1: What this number 4096 I see everywhere? Why not use 4000 or something?

    Joe2: It's two to the sixteenth.

    And these guys were designing an IFF device for the air force.

     captcha: paula (ha!)

     

  • Mixu Lauronen (unregistered) in reply to el jaybird

    I actually did that at school while studying computer programming, just to see how long the server would last.

    It took ten seconds to put the school server completely out of order. Funnily enough, the teachers actually thanked me for the experimentation. 

  • Rich (unregistered) in reply to jub
    Anonymous:

    SO, your objections against delimited files are exactly what?

     

    My objection is that they're not standard, usually not documented and frequently badly implemented.

     You often have to generate CSV files just to see what format you're supposed to import. How does the output engine handle commas? Quotes them? Fine, how does it handle quotes? Double quoting, escape characters? Maybe it doesn't do anything with commas or quotes and then you're in for fun...

    There's also no typing. So you get fun like Excel turning extension numbers (032) into numbers (32) even if you quote the things.

     
    Don't get me wrong, I like and use delimited files but there are some issues there.

     

    Rich
     

  • It's Atomic! (unregistered)

    As a contractor, I had just finished explaining "how we're doing things" on the current project to the walrus er I mean new contractor hired by our grand leader. The description went something along the lines of:

    Me: Classic OO ASP sucks the data out of our MS SQL server database, generating XML that is then rendered to the web page as HTML via an XSLT file we use, based on the current user's login. Some simple DHTML here and there livens things up a bit, but otherwise it's mostly simple web programming.

     Walrus: *nods*

    Me: So, Walrus, what sort of technologies are you comfortable with?

    Walrus: Well,  I just bought this digital set top box at home, it records TV to a hard drive, yeah that's pretty cool.

    Me: .....

     

    He was (apparently) the spitting image of our grand leader's *husband* and well, dumb as dog sh!t. He came in with no domain or technological knowledge and was made project manager. In one meeting, he was trying to convince us that the project we had to do (around 8 man weeks of work) could be done in two weeks, as long as we didn't try to "do it properly". I finally cracked it and asked:

    Me: have you ever developed an online database application?

    Walrus: I single-handedly developed the intranet for <INSERT PRESTIGIOUS COMPANY NAME HERE>

    Me: and which database did you use there?

    Walrus: it had 3000 html pages

    The full-timers said I was far too abrupt / brusqe with him - calling him on his BS and generally not backing down on my desire to "code it properly". He seemed adamant that we could just throw it together then we would have time later to "go back and do it properly, later". Our meetings were basically hammer fests of him saying XYZ and me saying "uh, no, you can't say that and we aren't going to do it like that".

    After one such meeting, we dispersed, and one of the non-developer types sitting a cubicle away stood up and fvcking applauded me, saying they agreed with my attitude of "do it right the first time". That was something I had not seen before.

    Our grand leader used to hang sh!t on the IT manager behind his back, call him ugly, slow, stupid, a whole host of things. The Walrus was in a meeting with Grand Leader, IT manager and a couple of other managers, and essentially regurgitated EVERYTHING that had been said, but to the IT manager's face. I missed that meeting but a week or two later was there when some very important (lawyer) types came and escorted the contractor from the building.

    I left not long after, and the other full-time developers were all gone  inside  2-3 months.

    Captcha: tango - as in, the complex dance of a contractor's life with PHBs and all that political BS.

  • grizzly (unregistered)

    An email arrives from HR outlining the policy about inappropriate content on company computers.

    Developer> So, are you going to change your background and screen saver?

    New Guy> You think they mean stuff like this? [gestures to topless woman not really wearing some frilly
    lingerie on his screen]

     

    New Guy on Phone to Girlfriend> Look just deposit my paycheck into your account... No, I can't put it in my account. That bitch garnished it for child support payments...Trust me, the cops will never find out you were involved. 

     

  • (cs) in reply to Burninator

    Anonymous:
    I had a co-worker ask me:

    How do you tell if a number is negative?

    Ask it whether the glass is half empty or half full.

  • leeg (unregistered) in reply to Licky Lindsay
    Anonymous:

    Anonymous:
    SO, your objections against delimited files are exactly what?

     
    Nothing against delimited files per se. The problems with CSV in particular are:

    1. Comma was a poor choice for the delimiter, since it is highly likely to occur in ordinary text. More likely than, for example, literal greater-than or less-than is in an HTML document.
     
    Actually, considering that HTML was designed for marking up Particle Physics papers I think inequalities should be considered fairly common (as in, the budget for this accelerator is greater than the GDP of these countries...).
  • Annoy Mouse (unregistered) in reply to EvanED
    EvanED:
    Anonymous:
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    Oh crap, I really screwed up this time.
    Err, did you break the test database again?
    No, no. I asked this girl I've been seeing for three weeks to move in with me.
    Aren't you married?
    Yeah ...

    I didn't know it was possible for anyone to be that stupid.

     Yeah.

     It's actually very impressive in a way. Some sick, sick, way.

     

    Normally, I don't mention anything I read on the daily WTF in group meetings, mostly to avoid the possibility that someone may be offended because they think I'm talking about something they've done (again--thank goodness for layoffs).  Let's face it, TDWTF is often too close to reality to be funny to a group of developers and their managers, or too specific to IT or development domains that we aren't involved in.  Some members of our group actually don't know how to write a SQL INSERT statement, but we're all OK with that because that's not what we hired them for.

    But not today.  Today we can all lose a few minutes of productivity to those five lines.  :-)

  • (cs) in reply to Scott
    Anonymous:

    We had one like that at our office.  Here is a chatlog between us when he came into work over the weekend and couldn't get his solution to compile.

     

    [09:58] Fred: morning Frank.  Did you have any problems compiling this morning?  I got the latest  and am getting 13 errors

    [09:58] Frank: please add all the files that aren't in your solution to your solution and try again

    [09:58] Fred: like stuff missing from FlashWebHelper, GlobalConfig files and stuff

    [09:59] Fred: I did add all the files that were not in local solution.  I went through each folder manually as well to see if any needed 'included'

    [10:02] Frank: I have latest and I can compile

    [10:02] Frank: You must be missing some files in your solutions

    [10:03] Fred: alright - I just did a get latest on 'everything' rather then peck through each directory

    [10:03] Fred: I am at 15 errors

    [10:04] Frank: Make sure that you have added all the new files to your solution

    [10:04] Fred: I am trying - I have been through each directory in the explorer and refreshed to see if any files need included

    [10:05] Fred: like I am missing a dataset it seems

    [10:05] Frank: if I have to come over there and add files I swear to god

    [10:10] Fred: Thanks Frank

    [10:10] Frank: np, just add the files to your solution next time

    [10:10] Fred: ok

     Among other things, we had to teach him about this new thing in programming called "Classes".  To which he responded, "CLASSES ARE COOL!!!"

    Why don't you put the solution in source control? Adding manually to the solution every file that someone happens to have added to source control sounds silly.

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to Rev Matt Y

    Context:  a very very smart but pretty unstable developer has been increasingly absent and scattered.  Finally comes in but is constantly going out in the hall to take cell calls.  We figure he's interviewing.  I come out of the bathroom to hear:

    No! Look!  I am NOT going to jail over this again!

     

     

    I think I know this guy, was it in NYC?

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Mixu Lauronen
    Anonymous:

    I actually did that at school while studying computer programming, just to see how long the server would last.

    It took ten seconds to put the school server completely out of order. Funnily enough, the teachers actually thanked me for the experimentation. 

    Did they also thank you not to do it again?

  • (cs)

    A cornered 'Joe':

    "I didn't change anything! I just modified it a little."

  • Anais Nonym (unregistered)

    "I don't know about 'html tags', but there's a less-than sign, a B then an R, then a greater-than sign"

    -CEO who prides himself on tech savvy 

  • AB (unregistered) in reply to leeg

    One going against the grain of anti-consultant posts here ...

    I was once consulting with a few colleagues. A team of internal staff had produced a document that was supposed to be the design for some comms software, but was basically complete gibberish. Summoning up all of his reserves of diplomacy (after all, he was external and they were permanent staff) my colleague asked how they thought that programmers would be able to use the document.

    One of the authors brightly: "Oh, we don't know. We're designers, not programmers."

  • Val (unregistered)

    I guess I should learn not to reply when I first encounter a reply-worthy post, but instead read thru all the rest of the comments to see if someone beat me to the punch (in this case, several times).

    So, given the number of people here who understand what a WTF CSV is, do we have the critical mass necessary to Just Say No and eliminate this monstrosity? 

     

  • (cs) in reply to Trinian
    Anonymous:

    This guy has a wife and a girlfriend?  Man, utter brainlessness must be quite the aphrodisiac.

     

    I'm quite sure BOTH of them are winners too. 

  • Ian (unregistered) in reply to jub
    Anonymous:

    > Also, CSV sucks, so I wouldn't hold it against the guy..

    As much as CSV files may suck, clearly they have some advantages over certain alternatives:

    - Over binary files: because CSV is a human-readable, non-proprietary format

    - Over fixed-length record files: Because nobody wants to draw vertical lines on a sheet of paper with a ruler and count columns just to be able to import a bloody file. And what if the field size changes? The field length and number of fields in CSV files are relatively simple to alter.

    - Over XML: because you don't *always* want to be bothered with a full-fledged hierarchical parser library, and the speed penalty of XML over CSV can be significant.

    Finally (although technically the files wouldn't be CSV anymore) it another separator is used (tabs are popular and easy to filter/replace by spaces), they are insanely easy to parse.

    SO, your objections against delimited files are exactly what?

     

    Delimiters in the strings. (Use quotes, of course)

    Quotes in the strings.  (Escape them of course!)

    Escape characters in the strings.  (Escape them of course!)

    You argue against your self, "I loves CSV" and "Tabs are better than commas" 

     

     

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    Go ahead and add your "Joeism" to the comments; don't worry, we won't run out of whiteboard space here. Here, I'll even get things started with one of my own ...


    OK, he wasn't a contractor, but a drummer I dealt with once said, "Don't tell me shit - I'll do it!"
  • (cs) in reply to Val
    Anonymous:

    I guess I should learn not to reply when I first encounter a reply-worthy post, but instead read thru all the rest of the comments to see if someone beat me to the punch (in this case, several times).

    So, given the number of people here who understand what a WTF CSV is, do we have the critical mass necessary to Just Say No and eliminate this monstrosity? 

     

    Not as long as I have specs that require I export data in CSV for import into Excel. I could write the export as a more acceptable DSV, but that would make it too hard for the unwashed masses to import into Excel (custom seperated file), and since they pay the bills....

  • The Joe Board (unregistered) in reply to jones

    Anonymous:
    my personal rule is that when a company brings in enough contractors to call them a herd it's time to get out........

    I thought the collective noun for consultants was a "wallet"...

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