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Admin
*account=null;
Admin
This comment needs to go live frist thing after luchbreak.
Admin
A perfect example of a 100% professional attitude towards CYA with email. A joy to read, and (unusually) it even had a happy ending.
Admin
Pretty sure that Bradley has done that to be able to meet a deadline and was certain to be able to shift the blame onto Sarah team after the feces-motorized rotator encounter...
Admin
Oof, all that documentation and testing and you relied on one end user to catch a major bug?
Admin
Depends on where the poster lives :P For me the time of article posting is convenient for handing out a few Null-Pointers.
Admin
In my understanding, it was Bradley's job to confirm that his team had tested it, so they had to rely on him verifying that it had been tested and verified.. Also, if user A is requesting a certain function based on experience, i'd say it's hard for user B to verify that it's working like user A wants, especially considering Bradley's email skills..
Admin
What the fuck did you think would happen when you don't test the damn code? (My name is neither Sarah, nor Bradley, just sayin')
Admin
"because Bradley is "too busy" to provide any more information."
In my experience, "too busy" is often a synonym for "too incompetent and desperate to hide this fact".
Admin
Sometimes "too busy" also means that the business user is overwhelmed with IT bureaucracy. While the product manager's job is entirely focused on stuff like UAT templates and procedures, for the business user it's an extra layer of noise to deal with problems that, from his/her perspective, should be handled by the software provider.
If you ever found yourself trying to send constructive feedback to a big software company like Microsoft and ended up on a bug tracking form with 15 mandatory fields, you know the feeling and it's not great, especially if you were just trying to help.
Rather than blame the user, the optimal scenario here would be to find out how communication can be streamlined and how the IT group can deliver quality software products without expecting the business users to fill a bunch of templates and forms. It's called being a business enabler and is achieved daily in countless organizations.
Admin
I also agree that Sarah is a big part of the problem here. It's the product team's job to understand the problem and validate the fix with their testers. Sure, the reporter should be asked to confirm that their issue was fixed, but this isn't supposed to be a substitute for proper testing.
Admin
First time here?
Admin
The Daily WTF isn't supposed to have happy endings! I come here for the gallows humor!
Admin
While I would agree in general, it doesn't appear to apply to this case specifically. Their system seems to be email based, and IT is going out of their way to get more information that the user is choosing not to provide. I'm on board with the opinion that Brad doesn't actually know what the problem is - just that he clicks the button and it doesn't do the Expected Behavior.
Admin
TRWTF is VAT. Taxation in all of the western world and many parts of the rest of the world is horribly convoluted, costing the economy billions in compliance and bureaucracy etc. On top of it, countries with VAT have a horrible double taxation scheme affecting the poor and middle classes the most: your income is usually taxed, AND then your purchases are taxed. Solution: simplify tax code.
Admin
A "large international company" that does support based on users email? That's in the things that don't happen any more category.
Admin
The problem there is that the moment you simplify any aspect of the bureaucracy, you put people out of work whose job it is to be an expert in making sense of it. Not good for your political prospects if your change to the law is directly responsible for an increase in not only unemployment but also sob-stories in the populist press.
Admin
The reason for VAT is quite simple. If you are in a free trade area then your VAT gives a competitive advantage to local producers compared with foreign producers leading to automatic escalation of VAT until it matches. The reason for this is that the tax burden on a "product" is a combination of non-VAT taxes where the product is produced plus VAT collected where it is sold. VAT is a bad idea whilst you can handle the impact on imported goods by implementing tariffs instead this still doesn't help with exports. Hence, your stuck with it.
Admin
I totally understand that logic. Sales tax/VAT are better than income taxes because they collect on both domestic and imported goods, and residents and visitors alike. Also those rich people who channel more money for personal consumption are taxed on it, whereas reinvestment, which grows the pre, is not. Well let's abolish the income tax then? And a flat nationwide sales tax? Here in USA, states add their own state sales tax on top. Easy formula, simple Excel sheet, no need for Sara and Bradley. 51 rows, federal rate, 50 state rates, voila
Admin
You’re horribly over simplifying US sales tax. It’s not a single rate per state, it’s up to 8 rates per county added together, so there are different total rates across a single state in some cases, let alone 50 states. Plus Hawaii uses a gross reducing rate to calculate it. At least here in the UK VAT is the same rate all over the country.
Admin
The real WTF is that a major system update can be made through a random break/fix ticket.
Admin
Hawaii uses General Excise Tax, not a sales tax. GET applies to everything whenever it changes hands. It even applies to GET: When a business reports the GET it collected, the business pays GET on the GET it collected.
Silly.
Admin
This post sounds like a good case for firing the customer.
Admin
The VAT in Europe makes interesting scams possible, like MTIC, which can't be solved without the member countries cooperation. That's always a win for organized crime.
Admin
It is being said, somewhere toward the top, that Bradley is an internal customer, namely the accountant of the same firm where Sarah is working. So it seems perfectly normal to involve just any employee of the company in the betterment of the products sold by said company.
And if a customer ask for a custom fit change, it is also perfectly normal to expect that said customer will validate that the changes are what he expects, because you made the changes for him, so only him can tell if it is right at the end.
Admin
VAT is wrong mainly because it is unfair to poorest people: it is a flat rate that imposes as much on the poors as on the riches; opposed to income tax that is harder on higher salaries.
Admin
VAT isn't a flat rate tax, because it isn't on all purchases. It also isn't some kind of subsidy to domestic producers, that's just the nonsense mercantilists come up with while thrashing around trying to defend an idea we've known for (literally) centuries is just plain wrong.
Empirically, we know VAT is one of the better ways of raising tax revenue. Not as good as LVT, better than most other forms of tax.
Admin
:sideways_owl:
Admin
Business user or not, if the business user (Bradley) cannot explain his problem, in narrative form or in a slide presentation or some clear WRITTEN way, AND provide a repeatable scenario, then it's not ITs fault if they get it wrong. Period. Businesses hide behind the "it should just work", and IT management tries to placate them with "we'll make our IT people business enablers" -- ha. The 300lb heads in IT should do what they do best. If you need a "business enabler", hire one. But if the end user cannot describe their problem, then IT cannot be expected to fix it.
Admin
So you say that VAT is unfair because it is actually fair? Think about it - VAT is a payment to the government for the services provided. Everyone is entitled for the same service as any other citizen (same police, same roads, same city lights, public cleaning, etc). Why do you consider FAIR for richer people to pay more (and actually they pay more even with fixed rate because tax is in percents - meaning if you have rate of let's say 20% and you spend 100$, you pay 20$ to "government" - if you spend 1000$, you pay 200$ to "government" yet you still get exactly same police as somebody who payed 1/10th of what you payed)? The only argument is that rich people can afford it, but that is fairness argument - this is in fact social/humanity/kindness argument...
If we are strictly speaking about being fair (without thinking of being social/understanding/...) then the same service should cost everyone the same amount of money - meaning tax should be flat - e.g. 200$ monthly - no matter whether you make millions or a few dollars. (This has a few exceptions like height of pensions being dependent on how much tax you payed). Otherwise this would mean that it is fair to ask more money for e.g. same bread from rich person as from poorer one, because fair???? Makes no sense...
Admin
I hope no one ever applies this philosophy to veterinary medicine.
Admin
Currently working on just such a scenario. "Table sorting not working as expected."
That's all I got. I've tried it out and the few examples I've tried seem to do what they're supposed to. All I need now is for someone to explain what they expect and what they see, so ...
(crickets)
Admin
Well of cause you should be able to know what they expect, IT serfs are always expected to know if you ask users like that. The seem to think that just because Google can guess where you want to go on holiday (they never stop to think that this is because Google knows your search history etc and uses this for their profit not yours), you should know what they want to see in their table view as they have always formatted it 'just so' manually.....
Yes, I have had the same kind of users...
Admin
I don't get people saying stuff like that. The code might work verifiably correct and I'm willing to assume that has been tested. The logic however, when to apply certain special cases, would be something the requester would need to check off on.
Admin
But IT is expected to fix it anyway. Which is why this was a nice article to read. Sarah went through the proper channels, documented everything and the buck stopped at the right place because of it.
Admin
Did she? If Sarah understood Brad's request, documented it and tested it, but Brad said he tested it but didn't... then the product ended up being wrong... either Sarah didn't actually understand what Brad wanted or Sarah was 100% relying on Brad to test it. No dev team should ever expect the end user to be a competent tester.
Admin
I would say that while your logic holds for a lot of services, it doesn't for some. Yes roads should cost the same for rich and poor. However personal protection is always more expensive for a rich person because more people want to rob him. Applies to police and army
Admin
Why does she take Bradley serious? Educate him - either report something useful, or it will immediately be discarded.