• Dhamp (unregistered)

    So trwtf is...

    The guys who transferred over were left with no support from the previous consultants working on the project?

  • RandomGuy (unregistered)

    Definitely a fictional story. A system with meaningful/helpful documentation? When was the last time that happened?

  • (cs)

    Is there any chance of posting the unedited story to see whether the way it sets up the scenario makes any sense? The first 9 paragraphs of this article seem to be deliberately written to make it hard to figure out what's going on.

  • Peter (unregistered)

    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

  • enxorizo (unregistered) in reply to pjt33
    pjt33:
    Is there any chance of posting the unedited story to see whether the way it sets up the scenario makes any sense? The first 9 paragraphs of this article seem to be deliberately written to make it hard to figure out what's going on.

    yep, the style provides a deliberately garbled up intertwined structure with the apparent goal of provoking increased interest in the unfolding of subsequent consequences.

    short, it's a mess. i feel conned and insulted.

  • Foo (unregistered) in reply to enxorizo
    enxorizo:
    pjt33:
    Is there any chance of posting the unedited story to see whether the way it sets up the scenario makes any sense? The first 9 paragraphs of this article seem to be deliberately written to make it hard to figure out what's going on.

    yep, the style provides a deliberately garbled up intertwined structure with the apparent goal of provoking increased interest in the unfolding of subsequent consequences.

    short, it's a mess. i feel conned and insulted.

    It's clever, isn't it - rather than just telling you, it makes you FEEL how Peter felt.

  • Anom nom nom (unregistered)

    Consultants with proper documentation? Is TDWTF allowing science fiction now?

  • EvilSnack (unregistered)

    The Daily Dogbert. Another tale of overpaid consultants who are not held to the same standard as underpaid employees, due to the bad business sense of pointy-haired bosses.

    Captcha tation: "tation, n. A portion of potatoes. (From a portmanteau of 'tater' and 'ration'.)"

  • (cs) in reply to RandomGuy
    RandomGuy:
    Definitely a fictional story. A system with meaningful/helpful documentation? When was the last time that happened?
    If you never actually tried to read the docs, why would you know if there was something useful written in them?
  • Wody (unregistered)

    Of course Peter was then fired for interfering in a process at a location he shouldn't be, and causing extra consultant-costs and -fines due to not following proper described procedures that he himself then only executed after those unneeded consultants where brought in, according to said consultants?

  • I forget (unregistered)

    The real WTF, as usual, is freaking SharePoint. BAAARRF.

  • DonaldK (unregistered)

    ShareBarf, Windoze, Micro$wat.

    That about sums it up dunnit?

  • DonaldK (unregistered) in reply to DonaldK
    DonaldK:
    ShareBarf, Windoze, Micro$wat.

    That about sums it up dunnit?

    Actually my pet name for SharePoint is SharePointless. Not that anybody cares.

  • (cs) in reply to RandomGuy
    RandomGuy:
    Definitely a fictional story. A system with meaningful/helpful documentation? When was the last time that happened?

    We always provide documentation, but customer engineer refuses to read it.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to Anom nom nom
    Anom nom nom:
    Consultants with proper documentation? Is TDWTF allowing science fiction now?
    But they didn't read it, so all is still right with the world.
  • anonymous (unregistered) in reply to RandomGuy
    RandomGuy:
    Definitely a fictional story. A system with meaningful/helpful documentation? When was the last time that happened?
    When you're required to write 8 metres of documentation, some of it's bound to be meaningful.
  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to DonaldK
    DonaldK:
    Actually my pet name for SharePoint is SharePointless. Not that anybody cares.
    When I had to use it, I called it Sh!tPoint. As in, have you ever tried to sharpen a turd?

    I was looking for feature the Sh!tPoint wiki didn't have (categorisation, trasnclusion, soft links to uploads, etc) and found an article like this: https://www.nothingbutsharepoint.com/sites/eusp/pages/wiki-in-the-box-is-sharepoint-wiki-really-that-bad.aspx This is from a Sh!tPoint developer, and basically opens "No-one chooses Sh!tPoint because it's the best (because it isn't); they use it because it's already in their company because their IT department trusts Microsoft. Suck it up." Not encouraging.

  • (cs) in reply to Peter
    Peter:
    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

    Both those words mean exactly the same thing in both British and American English.

  • (cs) in reply to DonaldK
    DonaldK:
    ShareBarf, Windoze, Micro$wat.

    That about sums it up dunnit?

    Name calling is an interesting cognitive bias, don't you think?

    Interesting, in that it is generally used by people who want to weigh in on a topic when they know very little about it. They deploy name-calling as an attempt to fool a weaker minded audience into agreeing with an argument that lacks any form of substance.

  • Spudley (unregistered) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    Peter:
    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

    Both those words mean exactly the same thing in both British and American English.

    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that 'acclimated' is an Americanism. It isn't in common use over here.

  • Smouch (unregistered) in reply to eViLegion

    Perhaps, but in this case the fact remains, SharePoint really does suck.

  • Anomaly (unregistered) in reply to Spudley
    Spudley:
    eViLegion:
    Peter:
    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

    Both those words mean exactly the same thing in both British and American English.

    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that 'acclimated' is an Americanism. It isn't in common use over here.

    He didn't say it was common use just that they have the same meaning in both languages.

  • (cs) in reply to Spudley
    Spudley:
    eViLegion:
    Peter:
    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

    Both those words mean exactly the same thing in both British and American English.

    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that 'acclimated' is an Americanism. It isn't in common use over here.

    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that it might well be an Americanism, but that is totally irrelevant. It IS in use in Britain, by British English speakers.

    Also, the word antejentacular isn't in common use anywhere. It's still British English.

  • (cs) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    Also, the word antejentacular isn't in common use anywhere. It's still British English.
    Of course. It's perfectly cromulent.
  • RakerF1 (unregistered) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    eViLegion:
    Also, the word antejentacular isn't in common use anywhere. It's still British English.
    Of course. It's perfectly cromulent.
    Both are copacetic, man.
  • (cs) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    Spudley:
    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that 'acclimated' is an Americanism. It isn't in common use over here.
    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that it might well be an Americanism, but that is totally irrelevant. It IS in use in Britain, by British English speakers.
    The British National Corpus contains 103 instances of the verb acclimatise/acclimatize and 0 (zero) instances of acclimate.

    COCA, on the other hand, has 70 acclimatize to 358 acclimate.

  • Jeremy (unregistered) in reply to RandomGuy
    RandomGuy:
    Definitely a fictional story. A system with meaningful/helpful documentation? When was the last time that happened?

    I like it when the only documentation is a diagram of what systems are talking to what other things behind the wall of their black box.

    You make a request, it gets sent to our load balancer, that picks a database and that information gets sent to a response system, and that sends the response back to you! Also there's a cloud somewhere.

    Um, ok. And how do I actually make a request....

  • ANON (unregistered) in reply to RandomGuy

    Documentation is most of the time meaningful AND helpful (AND outdated, but that's a different story...)

  • JAPH (unregistered) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    Peter:
    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

    Both those words mean exactly the same thing in both British and American English.

    I admittedly grew up in Hawaii where we speak Pidgin instead of (American) English, but I thought the American spelling was acclimatize.

    Peter, beware of Muphry's Law; Acclimated is an adjective, while acclimatise is a verb.

  • Etherow (unregistered) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    Spudley:
    eViLegion:
    Peter:
    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

    Both those words mean exactly the same thing in both British and American English.

    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that 'acclimated' is an Americanism. It isn't in common use over here.

    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that it might well be an Americanism, but that is totally irrelevant. It IS in use in Britain, by British English speakers.

    Also, the word antejentacular isn't in common use anywhere. It's still British English.

    If 'acclimated' is in use anywhere in Britain by British English speakers, I've yet to hear it in my over half a century lifetime; certainly not used by anyone in the software business. I supposed it might by used by someone explaining how eccentric the 'English' spoken in that far away country about which we know little, the USA, can be.

  • T.R. (unregistered)

    "empty bottles of Evian" ? perhaps a left-over of the original story, indicating it happened in France... or perhaps Evian is commonly found in whatever country it happened in.

  • Harrow (unregistered)

    Peter peered over Bob’s shoulder, at the error message on his laptop. “It could be that the security log’s full. Have you checked the application’s internal registry?”

    Definitely the wrong thing to say. The proper observation to make would have been, “Hire me as an ad-hoc consultant and I'll fix this in five minutes. It'll cost you two grand but it'll be worth it: you guys can take the credit and look like geniuses.”

    Peter is evidently doomed to a life of abject honesty.

    -Harrow.

  • (cs) in reply to pjt33
    pjt33:
    eViLegion:
    Spudley:
    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that 'acclimated' is an Americanism. It isn't in common use over here.
    Hmm, no. As a British English speaker, I can tell you that it might well be an Americanism, but that is totally irrelevant. It IS in use in Britain, by British English speakers.
    The British National Corpus contains 103 instances of the verb acclimatise/acclimatize and 0 (zero) instances of acclimate.

    COCA, on the other hand, has 70 acclimatize to 358 acclimate.

    So, you've come out with some statistics about two sets of arbitrary text data.

    Consider the number of words spoken, per hour, in both of these countries. That number will be higher than the total number of words in the respective corpora.

    So, if it only takes an hour to out-do a corpus, how can it possibly be representative of anything, and how relevant can it possibly be to this discussion?

    I'm British. I use the word 'acclimate'. I use it in the course of speaking British English. The people to whom I speak understand what I am talking about, therefore my use of British English has been successful. Now, you might want to erroneously deploy a "no true Englishman" argument, but the fact is, I only need one counter-example, me, to be correct on this issue.

  • (cs) in reply to Harrow
    Harrow:
    Peter peered over Bob’s shoulder, at the error message on his laptop. “It could be that the security log’s full. Have you checked the application’s internal registry?”

    Definitely the wrong thing to say. The proper observation to make would have been, “Hire me as an ad-hoc consultant and I'll fix this in five minutes. It'll cost you two grand but it'll be worth it: you guys can take the credit and look like geniuses.”

    Peter is evidently doomed to a life of abject honesty.

    -Harrow.

    How is this going to work in real life? Peter could get arrested for holding information critical to company.

  • Morry (unregistered)

    I damned well hope Peter put that in his PMP. And told his boss. He needs to brag that up big time. There are times to help people, and there are times to let people do the job they're being paid for.

  • Calli Arcale (unregistered) in reply to Peter
    Peter:
    For English readers - 'acclimated' = 'Acclimatise' ...

    About the only grammatical nitpick remaining is that if you're going to do a translation, at least use the same part of speech. Those don't mean the same thing, since the first one is an adjective. "Acclimated = acclimitised."

    Of course, then we can get into single versus double quotes if anyone wants another totally pointless row....

  • (cs)

    This might beg the question, but WHY didn't Peter solve the problem BEFORE the highly paid consultants arrived back at the scene of the crime?

  • (cs) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    pjt33:
    The British National Corpus contains 103 instances of the verb acclimatise/acclimatize and 0 (zero) instances of acclimate.

    COCA, on the other hand, has 70 acclimatize to 358 acclimate.

    So, you've come out with some statistics about two sets of arbitrary text data.

    Consider the number of words spoken, per hour, in both of these countries. That number will be higher than the total number of words in the respective corpora.

    So, if it only takes an hour to out-do a corpus, how can it possibly be representative of anything, and how relevant can it possibly be to this discussion?

    I'm British. I use the word 'acclimate'. I use it in the course of speaking British English. The people to whom I speak understand what I am talking about, therefore my use of British English has been successful. Now, you might want to erroneously deploy a "no true Englishman" argument, but the fact is, I only need one counter-example, me, to be correct on this issue.

    They're not "arbitrary text data": they're both carefully curated to be representative, i.e. typical.

    "British English" doesn't mean "the superset of all idiolects of people who claim to speak British English". If the word "ket" is used only in Yorkshire then that makes it Yorkshire English, not British English. You form a sample of one, so you're probably not a statistically representative sample of all British English speakers.

  • Bob (unregistered) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    Name calling... is generally used by people who want to weigh in on a topic when they know very little about it.
    All the Ad Hominem in the world won't make the Sh!tPoint wiki feature complete. It lacks templates/transclusion, managed links to uploads, redirects, categorisation, the list goes on.
  • (cs) in reply to pjt33

    The Oxford English Dictionary defines British English to be English "as spoken or written in the British Isles; esp. the forms of English usual in Great Britain".

    So, while your definition of British English gets a special inclusion, mine is clearly included within that definition.

    What is more, the OED includes acclimate, and cites it in British English usage circa 1792.

    If you'd like to disagree with the OED about this, you're more than welcome. Just fuck off while you're doing it.

  • Rich (unregistered)

    So. Peter gets to play high and mighty for 5 minutes, and he's still paid nothing compared to Bob. Poor Bob will need to drive his Porsche home that's twice as big as Peter's and think about what he's done.

  • Sannois (unregistered) in reply to RandomGuy

    Many companies have successfully embraced the whiteboard-and-post-it documentation paradigm!

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to ANON
    ANON:
    Documentation is most of the time meaningful AND helpful (AND outdated, but that's a different story...)
    Documentation either is readable, is helpful, or exists. Pick 2^H1.
  • Anon (unregistered)

    Letting the consultants take the credit for fixing it is why OP is not a highly paid consultant.

  • jay (unregistered)

    Hmm, the whole build-up of this story, about the consulting company and the contractual arrangement and all that, really had just about nothing to do with the punch-line. "You don't remember what you yourself wrote?" could be just as applicable to an in-house developer as a consultant. Well, I guess without the big build-up the story would have been too short.

    And frankly, the idea that someone might forget one tiny detail amidst all the thousands of details that go into a large system isn't particularly startling. I'm sure I've forgotten lots of things that I've written down at one point or another. That's why we write them down: so we have something to look back at when we forget. But finding the key fact among all the irrelevant facts is the challenge.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    DonaldK:
    ShareBarf, Windoze, Micro$wat.

    That about sums it up dunnit?

    Name calling is an interesting cognitive bias, don't you think?

    Interesting, in that it is generally used by people who want to weigh in on a topic when they know very little about it. They deploy name-calling as an attempt to fool a weaker minded audience into agreeing with an argument that lacks any form of substance.

    Yeah, that's just the sort of thing we expect one of you communist racist Nazis to say.

  • (cs)

    Also... As you have mentioned, those corpora have curators deciding what goes in and what doesn't, curators who are acting as the arbiters of the many inclusional/exclusional decisions. I think you'll find that is pretty much the definition of arbitrary data.

  • ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL (unregistered) in reply to dkf
    dkf:
    eViLegion:
    Also, the word antejentacular isn't in common use anywhere. It's still British English.
    Of course. It's perfectly cromulent.
    If it was British, wouldn't it be perfectly Cromwellent?
  • Evan (unregistered) in reply to ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    dkf:
    eViLegion:
    Also, the word antejentacular isn't in common use anywhere. It's still British English.
    Of course. It's perfectly cromulent.
    If it was British, wouldn't it be perfectly Cromwellent?
    "The most interesting thing about Oliver Cromwell was he was 5 foot 6 inches tall at the start of his reign, but only 4 foot 8 inches tall at the end of it."
  • (cs) in reply to ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL
    ¯\(°_o)/¯ I DUNNO LOL:
    dkf:
    eViLegion:
    Also, the word antejentacular isn't in common use anywhere. It's still British English.
    Of course. It's perfectly cromulent.
    If it was British, wouldn't it be perfectly Cromwellent?

    Don't try to embiggen the word.

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