• Spartacus (unregistered)

    I AM SPARTACUS!

  • Kyle Söze's Agent (unregistered) in reply to Spartacus
    Spartacus:
    I AM SPARTACUS!
    Kyle Söze is Spartacus.
  • Kyle Söze (unregistered) in reply to Kyle Söze

    Would the real Kyle Söze please stand up?

  • Darkwing Duck (unregistered)

    And I am the terror that flaps in the night!

  • (cs)

    WTF? They were programming by democracy?

  • Andrew (unregistered)

    On first reading I had a good cheer at the end of the story - the evil monster was slain! However, on thinking about it a bit I'm now of the opinion that this shows how complex human interactions can be hard to understand. My first reaction was to treat Kyle as a stereotype moron - but this is always a dangerous approach. So I thought some more about this series of events.

    Let's step back and look at this again. A group of people covertly came up with a plan. This plan entailed the public humilation of a man and his ideas. They were to take a man of many years experience and completely destroy that. Instead of finding a less insulting approach they took an approach that was to undermine a man and his reputation.

    Democratic approach? No. I bet that all the non-Kyle people were meeting amongst themselves before all the meetings and pre-deciding the decisions. And I bet that they weren't picking decisions that were the best technical solutions, but were decisions that would contradict Kyle's and serve only to isolate the man.

    Mockery. Ridicule. Humilation. Isolation. Of course Kyle's going to get upset and leave the company after experiening that. I know that I'm not perfect and that I make mistakes. I'm reasonably tough-skined enough to handle criticism. But even I'd find it hard to accept the treatment that Kyle got.

    I find myself rather conflicted on this story. Sure. Bad software decisions were made by Kyle but the solution has a nasty taste to it that just doesn't sit well with me. It just doesn't seem like some that considerate and well-mannered people would do. Regardless of his qualities as a programmer this wasn't a nice way to solve the problem.

    The real WTF here is that if these sorts of Machevellian tactics are being used in this work place, then it's amazing that this company is still working.

  • Franz Kafka (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    Let's step back and look at this again. A group of people covertly came up with a plan. This plan entailed the public humilation of a man and his ideas. They were to take a man of many years experience and completely destroy that. Instead of finding a less insulting approach they took an approach that was to undermine a man and his reputation.

    Democratic approach? No. I bet that all the non-Kyle people were meeting amongst themselves before all the meetings and pre-deciding the decisions. And I bet that they weren't picking decisions that were the best technical solutions, but were decisions that would contradict Kyle's and serve only to isolate the man.

    Not really. He has one good idea that he insists on (no natural keys). He takes the attitude of 'my way or the highway'. He eschews foreign keys, long and descriptive table names, and defends his design with appeals to his authority by way of slinging a lot of code.

    He isolated himself long before the final meeting; if he can't convince others to follow him, then it doesn't matter if he's got good ideas - who would know?

  • (cs) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    Mockery. Ridicule. Humilation.
    Where? I didn't see any of that. Unless, that is, you mean the humiliation of having people suggest there's a way other than yours.
  • Izzy (unregistered) in reply to Kyle Söze
    Kyle Sze:
    Kyle Sze:
    Kyle Sze :
    I'm Kyle Sze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Sze!
    I'm Kyle Sze
    I'm Kyle Sze and I work for Homeland Security. I've just tapped your phone, your keg and your wife.
  • Kyle Söze's Agent (unregistered) in reply to Izzy
    Izzy:
    Kyle Sze:
    Kyle Sze:
    Kyle Sze :
    I'm Kyle Sze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Sze!
    I'm Kyle Sze
    I'm Kyle Sze and I work for Homeland Security. I've just tapped your phone, your keg and your wife.
    Your signature says you're not Kyle Söze. You are Izzy. Impersonating a federal agent is a crime punishable by mockery, ridicule, and humiliation.
  • (cs)

    At least he was consistent, that's better than most.

  • Chris (unregistered)

    I used to work on a forum-based website. It had about 25 staff managing around 100,000 members across 300 or so forums (all of them necessary) and upto 3,000 new posts a day.

    The boss was having an affair with an older women who he then bought onto staff. She was like Kyle only in terms of opinion, worse.

    She firstly insisted that the site needed "150-200 staff" despite getting along perfectly well with 25. She demanded that this was the only good way to run a site. Of course, it was insanity, for one thing it'd take ages to learn all their names.

    Throughout her first day we were talking about issues on the site and she had an answer for absolutely everything, even stuff she knew nothing about, even non-issues got a full blown oversized "solution". If anyone disagreed with her answer she's blanketly say "you're wrong" over and over. Any arguments we tried to make were simply dismissed with "you're wrong". It would have been funny if it wasn't so damn irritating.

    Just a few hours after starting she quit saying "you're all incompetent!". We all breathed a sigh of relief, even the boss.

    Just as an extra laff, she was back in the chat area the next day demanding to be promoted back to staff saying "I quit voluntarily so I'm entitled to demand to come back". Surprisingly, anyone that disagreed with that sentiment was greeted with "you're wrong".

    Unsurprisingly, we continued running the site on just 25 staff and making the decisions we made, and nothing blew up.

  • sol (unregistered) in reply to SomeCoder
    SomeCoder:
    an anonymous ex-game programmer:
    sol:
    I find it hard to believe a guy who had been in the business that long would just have a fit and quit though.

    Why not? I'm dealing with one of those now. We're basically just retiring the whole platform to get away from the 5000+ line functions, with 5 new bugs introduced for every one fixed.

    He's quit a couple of times already, and now just waiting for the final death rattle so I can get back to doing my job.

    While I can understand this attitude, I cannot understand throwing a tantrum.

    We're in the process of retiring a platform that I designed and implemented here at my work. The platform needs to be either retired or seriously upgraded. So we're going with the retire and replace approach.

    The problem is, the new version is much, much worse in a lot of areas. I can understand feeling frustrated with having a code base retired when the replacement is obviously much worse. Therefore, I can understand the feelings of these individuals, Kyle Söze included.

    That doesn't mean I think they are right though :) Kyle Söze's code and fight to keep his standards around are still a giant WTF.

    How large and broad of a scope is the application? What are you upgrading from <-> too? you should really use smurf.

    One of the first legacy projects I worked on was an AS/400, DB2, SQL Server, COBOL, ARGO data, teller, manager, CDBM tool, asp/ARGO, desktop, client server, web app, and complete with <blink></blink>. Having a CDBM/CDM/Central Database Manager fat client is pretty nice.

    It used what I would call DataTables or nested arrays on application start to create a string cache... the fhone system was great as was doing half of everything in Dos

    prompt ET-FHONE-$BHOME$B-$F

    CRFSTU01(smurf) - Customer referral system transaction update 01. Ok upgrade the naming standard -> Customer.Referral.Update(Transaction tran, IParamater[] param)

    The entire 5000 line or 1000 or whatever it is in ctree sucked. I'm sure the COBOL is still there and running too. Flat files are awesome.

    Asp and php are the wtf if you ask me. Asp.net is nice if you can learn to accept that it isn't a scripting language and that it has strong types... smurf?

  • Kyle Söze (unregistered) in reply to Spartacus
    Spartacus:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!
    I'm Kyle Söze
    I'm Spartacus!

    Oh wait, wrong argument. Sorry about that.

    I'm Kyle Söze and so is my wife!

  • an (unregistered) in reply to Kyle Söze
    Kyle Söze:
    Spartacus:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!
    I'm Kyle Söze
    I'm Spartacus!

    Oh wait, wrong argument. Sorry about that.

    I'm Kyle Söze and so is my wife!

    Infinite Kyle Söze quote project?

  • (cs) in reply to sol
    sol:
    Asp.net is nice if you can learn to accept that it isn't a scripting language and that it has strong types
    Uh... huh? I mean, WTF? Do you know somebody who's having a problem accepting that?
  • Sven (unregistered)

    Since nobody ever seems to have actually met Kyle Söze, I wonder if he's like the Alan Smithee of developers at the ISC. As in, whenever somebody writes code they're not particularly proud of in retrospect, they'll disassociate themselves from it and say Kyle wrote it. :P

  • (cs) in reply to SomeCoder
    SomeCoder:
    One question, however, remained: WTF was with that table?

    So wait, doesn't WTF mean "Worse Than Failure" now? ...

    </sarcasm>

    Sometimes, as when one abbreviates the name of the site, yes. Other times it means "What Troublesome Folly", as in the context of the OP.

  • Ferd (unregistered)

    I love happy endings.

  • Dave (unregistered) in reply to Erzengel
    alex:
    Since the table wasn’t actually being used

    Umm.. what was writing to it then?

  • Martin (unregistered)

    I don't get it.

    For example, MySQL is very known free database. It's behind millions of successfull web applications. It's very popular. But it's not long since there were no foreign keys, no views, no stored procedures etc. There is even very enterprisy storage engine ndbcluster for cluster, and these features are still not there. Many people got used to checking referential integrity in GUI and they are continuing it from now on.

    And gues what happens? Applications crashing? Applications not working? Billions lost? NOT! It works somehow. Event for critical bussiness applications...

    So - who cares? If it worked, why to touch it? If the backup media was not big enough for the backup storage, just replace it with larger disk and forget about it.

  • (cs)

    The real WTF is that, on his first day, Nick went in and dropped columns and generally fcuked about with the database. That'd normally be a pretty good way of getting fired very quickly...

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    Bravissimo!

    Beautifully written & with a happy ending. This made my morning..

  • Fuddy (unregistered)

    We had a similar type coder here at the university where I work. He had a "new ultimate" style of writing code. Basically consisted of one subroutine that is in a loop and calls other subroutines based on the value of a numeric field.

    Subroutines were called Routine001 Routine002 etc etc etc. Each subroutine did something, set the value of the numeric field to a new value, and then transfered controll back to the main routine, which duly looped again, checked the value and called then next routine.

    Note that the value of the numeric had little correspondence with the routine being called (i.e. value 1 calles Routine027).

    Apparently each program was supplied with some kind of diagram detailing the layout, but naturally these diagrams were nowhere to be found. Adding functionality to a program or even just fixing bugs proved to be "challenging".

    I tried once, gave up, got the specs and re-wrote the damn things from scratch. Two days of coding vs 2 weeks of trying to make sense of where to include Routine342 and how to get the correct sequence for the numeric values to get there at the right time?

    I suspect if he ever came back I'd make a lot of money selling tickets to the developers for who gets to beat him up first....

  • An elderly woman (unregistered) in reply to Chris
    Chris:
    I used to work on a forum-based website. It had about 25 staff managing around 100,000 members across 300 or so forums (all of them necessary) and upto 3,000 new posts a day.

    The boss was having an affair with an older women who he then bought onto staff. She was like Kyle only in terms of opinion, worse.

    She firstly insisted that the site needed "150-200 staff" despite getting along perfectly well with 25. She demanded that this was the only good way to run a site. Of course, it was insanity, for one thing it'd take ages to learn all their names.

    Throughout her first day we were talking about issues on the site and she had an answer for absolutely everything, even stuff she knew nothing about, even non-issues got a full blown oversized "solution". If anyone disagreed with her answer she's blanketly say "you're wrong" over and over. Any arguments we tried to make were simply dismissed with "you're wrong". It would have been funny if it wasn't so damn irritating.

    Just a few hours after starting she quit saying "you're all incompetent!". We all breathed a sigh of relief, even the boss.

    Just as an extra laff, she was back in the chat area the next day demanding to be promoted back to staff saying "I quit voluntarily so I'm entitled to demand to come back". Surprisingly, anyone that disagreed with that sentiment was greeted with "you're wrong".

    Unsurprisingly, we continued running the site on just 25 staff and making the decisions we made, and nothing blew up.

    But you're still wrong

  • DOA (unregistered) in reply to an
    an:
    Kyle Söze:
    Spartacus:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!
    I'm Kyle Söze
    I'm Spartacus!

    Oh wait, wrong argument. Sorry about that.

    I'm Kyle Söze and so is my wife!

    Infinite Kyle Söze quote project?

    If(user.getComment().indexOf("Söze")!=-1) user.Kill();

  • LKM (unregistered)

    Oh my god, it all makes perfect sense now! THE NARRATOR MUST BE KYLE!!!

  • ... (unregistered)

    Muhahaha (captcha), sounds so familiar! Every workplace has at least one Kyle Söze. :)

  • Kyle Soze (unregistered) in reply to sburch
    sburch:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze :
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!
    I'm Kyle Söze

    No I'm Kyle Söze and so's my wife.

    No, I'm Spartacus.

    Sorry, wrong thread...

  • /dev/null (unregistered) in reply to sir_flexalot

    Yeah, worst case for me was starting @ a large telecoms company. 30 minutes while checking out their clearcase repo and attempting to build in WASD all 80+ project were broken since cfg files were hard coded to peoples individual paths. Spent 2 weeks sorting that out just for my local checkout.

  • Andy (unregistered)

    Compared to JD Edwards table and column names, I'd say that's a treat. It has table names like f55ap01 (a table containing a set of customers) and columns like ld55hbmcus - that being the customer name.

    Yeah, it sucks big.

  • (cs) in reply to Kyle Söze
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze :
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!

    I'm Kyle Söze, and so's my wife!

    Edit: Bah, too late.

  • s (unregistered) in reply to Andrew
    Andrew:
    Let's step back and look at this again. A group of people covertly came up with a plan. This plan entailed the public humilation of a man and his ideas. They were to take a man of many years experience and completely destroy that. Instead of finding a less insulting approach they took an approach that was to undermine a man and his reputation.

    There was that nice WTF where a group of developers wanted to meet with senior managers and their manager, to explain how a system introduced by the manager was destroying any productivity. They anounced it, they prepared a presentation. The manager informed the senior managers "the meeting was cancelled", then lauhged off and fired all the "non-team-players".

  • dkf (unregistered) in reply to Andy
    Andy:
    columns like ld55hbmcus - that being the customer name.
    Is that "ld" (emphasis mine) as in Lethal Dose?
  • David (unregistered) in reply to Kyle Söze

    There is no Kyle Söze!

  • DOA (unregistered) in reply to s
    s:
    Andrew:
    Let's step back and look at this again. A group of people covertly came up with a plan. This plan entailed the public humilation of a man and his ideas. They were to take a man of many years experience and completely destroy that. Instead of finding a less insulting approach they took an approach that was to undermine a man and his reputation.

    There was that nice WTF where a group of developers wanted to meet with senior managers and their manager, to explain how a system introduced by the manager was destroying any productivity. They anounced it, they prepared a presentation. The manager informed the senior managers "the meeting was cancelled", then lauhged off and fired all the "non-team-players".

    Indeed. When the enemy has the bean-counting management's ear, an underhanded strike with no risk ("it was a democratic process, not our fault he was the minority") can be a good idea.

  • Pizza Boy (unregistered) in reply to sol

    What on earth is this man talking about.

    Smurf

  • Pizza Boy (unregistered) in reply to Pizza Boy
    Pizza Boy:
    What on earth is this man talking about.

    Smurf

    Should have quoted this:

    How large and broad of a scope is the application? What are you upgrading from <-> too? you should really use smurf.

    One of the first legacy projects I worked on was an AS/400, DB2, SQL Server, COBOL, ARGO data, teller, manager, CDBM tool, asp/ARGO, desktop, client server, web app, and complete with <blink></blink>. Having a CDBM/CDM/Central Database Manager fat client is pretty nice.

    It used what I would call DataTables or nested arrays on application start to create a string cache... the fhone system was great as was doing half of everything in Dos

    prompt ET-FHONE-$BHOME$B-$F

    CRFSTU01(smurf) - Customer referral system transaction update 01. Ok upgrade the naming standard -> Customer.Referral.Update(Transaction tran, IParamater[] param)

    The entire 5000 line or 1000 or whatever it is in ctree sucked. I'm sure the COBOL is still there and running too. Flat files are awesome.

    Asp and php are the wtf if you ask me. Asp.net is nice if you can learn to accept that it isn't a scripting language and that it has strong types... smurf?

  • Will (unregistered) in reply to jokeyxero

    Agreed, while, from the article, he does have some outdated rules they are consistent and not really that far out. Most of his rules would not cause problems as you enter new code and changes, bringup thoses sections to modern standards.

    I would gladly walk into that place vs some place still using Leszynski/Reddick and using stored procedures for all thier CRUD access.

  • Kyle SC6ze (unregistered) in reply to DOA
    DOA:
    an:
    Kyle Söze:
    Spartacus:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!
    I'm Kyle Söze
    I'm Spartacus!

    Oh wait, wrong argument. Sorry about that.

    I'm Kyle Söze and so is my wife!

    Infinite Kyle Söze quote project?

    If(user.getComment().indexOf("Söze")!=-1) user.Kill();

    else createQuote();

  • someguy (unregistered)

    The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he could program.

  • BlueKnot (unregistered)
    Ross Presser:
    According to Google, "Verbal and his wife, Selina Kyle Soze, live in the Mountain Brook area of Birmingham." (Second Google hit on "Kyle Söze").
    Even better, the next line goes on: "Their daughter, Barbara Gordon Soze, lives and works in Boston."

    Shouldn't that be "Gotham"?

    LOL... what's odd is that other than the names the article seems serious? (I know nothing of farm implements, I can't tell if they're joking...)

    Though there is this bit in "Kyser"s bio: "In addition to the many technical papers and articles he has written concerning landing gear repair engineering, maintenance, and submerged arc welding, he also wrote Kyser Soze's Hungarian Family Cookbook, published by Reader's Digest in May 2003."

  • Cheatz (unregistered)

    Give me the foreign keys, you fking cks*cker.

  • Kyle Söze (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know

    I'm Kyle Söze and so's my mum.

  • dv (unregistered) in reply to sburch
    sburch:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze :
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!
    I'm Kyle Söze

    No I'm Kyle Söze and so's my wife.

    this certainly begs a question: your left-handed or right-handed one? ;-)

    dubya... making the world better for all of us neo-con KKK bros.

  • AdT (unregistered)

    You fools better listen to Kyle the Great! He's got twenty years of inexperience in database design.

  • Kyle (unregistered) in reply to Someone You Know
    Someone You Know:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze:
    Kyle Söze :
    I'm Kyle Söze and I am now a consultant and earning 3 times what I did when I worked at that company.
    No, I'm Kyle Söze!
    I'm Kyle Söze

    I'm not Kyle Söze!

    Kyle Söze did ya mamma!

  • sol (unregistered) in reply to Pizza Boy
    Pizza Boy:
    Pizza Boy:
    What on earth is this man talking about.

    Smurf

    Should have quoted this:

    How large and broad of a scope is the application? What are you upgrading from <-> too? you should really use smurf.

    One of the first legacy projects I worked on was an AS/400, DB2, SQL Server, COBOL, ARGO data, teller, manager, CDBM tool, asp/ARGO, desktop, client server, web app, and complete with <blink></blink>. Having a CDBM/CDM/Central Database Manager fat client is pretty nice.

    It used what I would call DataTables or nested arrays on application start to create a string cache... the fhone system was great as was doing half of everything in Dos

    prompt ET-FHONE-$BHOME$B-$F

    CRFSTU01(smurf) - Customer referral system transaction update 01. Ok upgrade the naming standard -> Customer.Referral.Update(Transaction tran, IParamater[] param)

    The entire 5000 line or 1000 or whatever it is in ctree sucked. I'm sure the COBOL is still there and running too. Flat files are awesome.

    Asp and php are the wtf if you ask me. Asp.net is nice if you can learn to accept that it isn't a scripting language and that it has strong types... smurf?

    I do not know maybe he was drunk. But, here is an axample of smurf. You may need a brain to figure out what I am making fun of though.

    smurf sql = "SELECT * FROM HEAP;"; smurf data = smurf.fetch(sql);

    smurf["cache"] = data;

    if(smurf != smurf["cache"]) { smurf(smurf i = 0; i < smurf["cache"].numSmurfs; smurf.add(i,1)) { smurf.comment("go smurf yourself"); smurf.print("go smurf yourself"); smurf.cout("go smurf yourself"); smurf.write("go smurf yourself"); smurf.smurf("go smurf yourself", smurf.context.output); } }

    smurfy?

    And, yes I know people who have problems knowing what asp.net is for instance the people at Microsoft can't seem to deciede what they think it is or how .net should work from one day to the next....

  • Err... (unregistered) in reply to Kyle Söze
    Kyle Söze:
    Would the real Kyle Söze please stand up?
    Damn, you beat me to it!
  • (cs) in reply to FredSaw
    FredSaw:
    APH:
    I'll be adding "The Usual Suspects" to my Netflix queue.
    It'll be worth it to watch all the way through, even if seeing the last five spoiled it for you. It's one of those you have to watch three or four times to pick up every little subtlety.

    Agreed 100%. Great movie, very subtle plot. An absolute must see.

    I've seen the whole at least three times and am still missing out on some of the misteries/shadowy parts of the story.

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