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Admin
...killed.
post = String("If(user.getComment().indexOf("Söze")!=-1) user.Kill();");
alert(post.indexOf("Söze"));
30
That's why you need to do string += "<"+"/scr"+"ipt">;
Admin
I am Kyle Söze's wasted life
I am Kyle Söze inflamed sense of rejection
Admin
Stop being so special! You're an individual like everyone else.
Admin
I am Captain Chaos and this is my companion Kato. Say "Hello", Kato.
Admin
Admin
Names are important, dammit!
Admin
Admin
So, you think that Paris SHOULD be a celebrity?
You bastard!
Admin
This is a lesson in how not to be seen. This is Mr. Söze. Mr. Söze, would you stand up please? Mr. Söze has learned the first rule of not being seen: Not to stand up. However, he has picked a rather obvious hiding place...
Admin
Admin
Agreed! I worked for a small company that regularly crafted absurd artificial situations in order to get people to quit or come up with sufficient reason to fire them. Including management approved sabotage of one employee's workflow to "prove" he was not being thorough. I truly wish I was making this up.
Admin
Yes ... and ? So what ? Revenge is sweet .............
What you fail to see is that a lot of developer were stymied in their pursuit to enhance quality by Kyle's toadying up to management (in other words: Kyle's backstabbing). I for myself think it is great that they did not let this stand .... and their got their own back by humiliating and frustating Kyle every step same as he has had them humiliated.
On an unrelated issue think about this: Management must have had Kyle's measure in some way because Kyle did not make into management despite his long tenure at ISC.
Admin
I concur - especially if you are not tasked to solve the problem by your line or project management. Dangerous, that - even if you have direct immediate access to the source code of all applications accessing that table. Before you know it, the CEO's dashboard stops working .....
Admin
Good post, I enjoyed it.
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Admin
I don't wish to give the impression that I was inserting anything anywhere. What I'm merely saying is that reality is more complex than the few hundred words that we were presented here.
What's more, the words came from one side of the story and should be treated cautiously - so in a way I was going the other extreme by overexaggerating the other possible viewpoint.
Obviously this company had a process in place. But then this new meeting idea came up. How did this idea come up? Who proposed it and why? (Some "clever developer"?) I don't know. And this is something that I'm guessing at.
Maybe this is something that people talked about in the coffee room. People don't just talk in meetings. There are all sorts of opportunities around for people to have contact, to talk, to raise ideas.
Maybe some of the staff came up with the idea over lunch. Maybe the discussion went like this:
Or may the discussion went:
I notice that you use a lot of "perhaps", and I agree completely. There's just not enough hard data to make a judgement. It really could go anyway.
Maybe it went some other way. Most likely it went nothing like this. Who knows? I don't. And this is important in helping assess this story. Maybe there were choices availible that we can tell from this article. Maybe this was the only path available. Maybe anything.
I wasn't trying to tell you as it was (after all I wasn't there), but rather suggest that there was something missing. This missing information made it hard to judge this story.
Life's just too damn complex to make clear value judgements. And I thought writing software was hard.
Admin
This is his house, this is his neighbours house, this is the school he attended...
And now for something completely different
Admin
Could you be a little be more specific because I don't think you know what you are talking about! Using ASP.Net and just .Net in the same context is incorrect. .Net is a complete framework. As where ASP.Net is used in conjunction with the .Net framework for developing web applications. There is also VB".Net", C#".Net" and ADO".Net", along with afew other languages that emplement the .Net framework. Are you Kyle Söze?
Admin
...you need answers to the following:
Did management order Kyle to make a table in a way that would eventually grow to 12GB? You don't know how much time they gave hime to do it "right".
How many maintainance problems did Kyle's code generate? He has 20 years experience and a consistent style. The article doesn't give you a clear impression of why his code was a problem. Maybe it wasn't.
The article cites Kyle as being inflexible. But if it aint broke, why fix it. This site often condemns comedy "silver bullet" methodologies. In the time between adoption and distaster, maybe we all look like backward, inflexible Kyles.
What's Kyle's work rate relative to other developers? That this obvioulsy partisan story even admits Kyle's reputation as one who "makes things happen" suggests that the disparity could have been big enough to perhaps evoke envy in his colleagues?
How political is the organisation, and what's the trend? A team that lets people who "make things happen" get on with things in the way they are used to sounds less political than one that re-organises their process just to marginalise an unpopular team member.
How democratic was this democratic process? In any real election, if one party got zero votes apart from their own, people would suspect corruption. Democracy in a corporate setting is like virginity in a whorehouse.
Why is his way of leaving unreasonable? If the undermining was sufficiently obvious, then it amounts to constructive dismissal. Being ousted from something you've invested commitment into is a seriously nasty experience. Don't judge until you've been there.
Finally, the biggest question of all... how are things going now that this person is not around. He "made things happen". The reward for doing that has been made obvious to all, as has the punishment for not going with the contrived "democratic" consensus. The reader has not learned the end results of all this.
As you can probably guess, I've been in Kyle's position, sort of. I was a little absolutist about doing things the right way, but then so was most of the team. I wasn't really outdated except possibly in that I like up-front design. I also insisted on people pulling their weight which made me unpopular amoung those who count (who turned out to be the office politicians).
Since I left, the team's "be nice" norms, which they essentially used to justify forcing me out, mutated into a "do no work" norm and the team is presently in free-fall. What a bloody waste.
Admin
Anyway, I had a different job when this happened, but afik there was no plan like the story says. This was a new ambitious project to integrate most of our systems so a lot of people who didn’t usually work together were now forced to. That’s why they had the whole voting process. “Kyle Soze” quitting like that was never planed or hoped for. But their definitely were some people that were glad it happened.
Admin
(Edited to make the quote tags work properly)
Admin
Anyway, I say that if you simply give a man a chance to humiliate himself, it's not your fault if he seizes it.
Admin
Yes! I once had to work with a JD Edwards DB, but thankfully it was taking code OUT of another DB and putting it INTO the JDE DB... I don't envy the poor guy who gets to work on the next migration...
Admin
Theory disproved?
Nick's clarification is really a content-free smoke-screen. The last 2 sentances contradict each other! Nothing has been proved or disproved here, folks.
When we talk about shocking code, it's right there on the page. We can all see the code in its spectacular badness and usually agree in our judgements. But when it's about personalities, things are not always as they seem.
By the way, Cornered, your comment about humiliation sounds sociopathic to me. Healthy human beings are not going around deliberately giving others the opportunity to humiliate themselves. OTOH people with envy issues seem to do it a lot. Are you perhaps not the brightest grape in your workplace bunch?
Admin
It's entirely possible to be glad of something after the fact without having hoped for it in advance.
Admin
I once worked with a consultant like that. Fortunately during a design meeting she loudly complained that the manager in charge of the project was "just wasting everybody's time" because he was fielding input from people other than her, so her opportunity to cause damage was quite limited.
Admin
Only where new information comes to light after the event. What information? Take a step back for a moment: the entire story is a gratuitous celebration of this man's unceremonial oustage. The "update" about not planning or hoping he would leave is worded in the same terse and passive tone as a liability disclaimer on pyramid scheme spam.
Submitter was boasting about helping to constructively dismiss a co-worker. It was only after readers smelt a rat that a new position emerged. It is a change of position resulting from being "sussed" as we used to say at school. It is the absolute minimal change of position required to lend deniability to the charge of conspiring to constructively dismiss. The ass is covered, but the attitude remains the same.
Remember, you haven't even heard Kyle's side of the story. Why are you acting as apologist for the submitter?
IMO some readers on here are too conditioned to agree with the presented WTF to be able to identify cases where muliple perspectives need to be considered. If it's about people, then it's an allegation, the submitter is a party to the incident, and the story itself is as likely to be the WTF as its target.
Admin
Maybe the time-wasters in your team just can't take criticism? Just a thought.
Admin
As for my being "the brightest grape in [the] bunch", I don't know. You always have to leave room for the possibility that someone's brighter than you are. I'm a smart guy, though. Smart enough to recognize a tortured metaphor when I see one.
Admin
I simply said the comment was sociopathic sounding. And I still maintain that most of the peple I know, who are of sound mind and don't have "issues" are not trying to make others look bad. It isn't normal. Most people would say "why bother". It's the preserve of school bullies, nut jobs and those with an axe to grind. Saying that all you're doing is giving a person a chance to humiliate themselves sounds like the tortured logic of someone who can talk themselves into confusing right and wrong. Hence why sociopathy came to mind.
As for the metaphor, damn, yes I guess it isn't exactly poetry. Guess I humiliated myself there, right? You win. I lose. I know when I'm beat. Bet you can out-code me too. Cornered, you're the man. You are the man. You-da-man, Cornered. Oh yes. Remember that.
Admin
I completely agree. The system sucked, I get it. Kyle was a douche I get that too. But who the hell was this guy to go dropping columns in someone else's databases?
I'm surprised Kyle didn't have him fired on the spot. That's some serious toe stepping.
Admin
Admin
Yes that's right. I was over-compensating. Sure thing, whatever you say.
U-still-da-man, cornered.
Admin
Maybe because Kyle had left the company ages ago?
Admin
Furthermore, some sides of the story are not worth hearing. For example, a similarly stupid idea in economics, the gold standard, is often proposed but never enacted; why is this? Most people, and almost all economists, say that it is a terrible and exploitative idea, would cause grinding deflation (a trend destructive to the economy), and would only benefit those rich enough to invest in gold in the first place, oh, and it would deprive governments of key methods they use to halt and prevent depressions, which, as they should, are recognised as very bad things. As WJ Brian said, "Thou shalt not crucify the country on a cross of gold", and he had a point, not to say that the Bimetallic Standard, his alternative, would have been any better, or any sort or combination of commodities as Argentina found out the hard way when they (to use Paul Krugman's imagery from a NY Times op-ed column) crucified their country upon a cross of dollars. On the other hand, supporters argue that the Gold Standard is not adopted because of, depending on the proponent, anything from the dimness of politicians in believing that modern Keynesian economics is based on learning from the mistakes of Classical or "laissez-faire" economics (the Chicago School with a much saner half-Keynesian alternative known as Monetarism in which all macroeconomic tools are to be left alone if at all feasable except in severe economic crises the money supply), to a corrupt conspiracy to hide the "fact" that the government is bankrupt or not the government at all and/or the "fact" that money not backed by gold is inherently worthless and/or counterfeit (the Patriot Movement AKA the Militiamen (no relation to the actual Militia which is now known as the National Guard) commonly make all of these accusations and others), to "jew bankers" (many right wingnuts scapegoat a person or group perceived to be overinfluential to explain why their ideas are not accepted, particularly judaism for financial wingnuts), to people who want to destroy the economy by messing with the money supply and/or other tools of Keynesian intervention so that they can cause a communist/islamic takeover (just ask Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh about the principle of economic stimulus, but it was a common objection at the start that unscrupulous people at the Fed could destroy the economy by messing with the money supply). Fundamentally, in fact, the two situations are very similar: Just as in the article, proponents of commodity money go to the democratic process, expecting to get their way because they have some quality, in the article a reputation for "making things happen", that makes their colleagues realise the brilliance of their idea, in the article flat file databases, and when the votes are in, and if Kyle was one of twenty-five or so heads of the cooperating teams then it would still be far less lopsided a vote with him alone in favour of flat files as is a reasonable reading than many parties get in the vote on election night (including the ones that have the Gold Standard on their platform as a single party), and they realise that not everyone considers RDB/Fiat Money a stupid idea, they leave complaining about how corrupt or insane a democracy inherently is. The story is celebrating the fact that democracy works even in the real world, in somewhat of an Anti-Dilbert story ("How did you know, that he would take his flat files and go home?" "I didn't know he was such a nut in the first place") or a real world parable, in which we see why democracy is better than dictatorship.