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Admin
TRWTF is of course companies in America whose profitability depends upon the misfortune of others.
In this case, the misfortune of becoming ill.
Admin
What a ride!
Admin
Hey! That's my IP address. How did you get hold of that?
Admin
Your IP address? It's the combination of my luggage
Admin
I actually am a robot, but I bypassed the captcha. Mwahahaha!
Admin
And this is exactly why sales people shouldn't be communicating directly with individual techs/coders, but with an IT manager that can better communicate what is and isn't feasible or possible for their department to perform.
Admin
Finally a use case for client TLS certificates!
Admin
My favorite quote from a salesperson at a consulting firm where I was a programmer was, "My job is to lie to customers, and your job is to make me look good."
Admin
I guess, all these comments held for moderation are going to stay that way forever because the staff of TDWTF are on holiday and tomorrow there will be a new article.
Admin
But I am a robot
Admin
How the f is a VPN inherently insecure, but "IP authentication" isn't
Admin
Because humans are basically ignorant.
Admin
Clearly, this wasn't impossible after all.
What's their problem with VPNs?
What's the forgery issue with X-Forwarded-For? It should be easy to assert that clients don't send this header to the proxy, and the application server only accepts this header from the proxy, so its value could be trusted.
Admin
Apparently you missed the part where the management didn't want to turn down the sale. They simply threw the coder under the bus.
Admin
Stupid? Probably. Expensive? Definitely. Impossible? Actually not, as it turned out ...
Just saying. If sales people discover this story, they can now use it as "evidence" that when we say something's impossible, it actually isn't and we only need to try harder. Gerald wasn't very helpful to us here.
Admin
As long as the client paid for it I don't see a WTF here. The company gets a new feature that they can sell, the client gets the feature they wanted, the company got paid so they're not out of pocket. Could be an actual win-win.
Admin
You are TRWTF if you don't think that it's a WTF that the salesman and the customer contact decided what the technical solution should be.
Admin
Until you get an IT Manager who will agree to anything sales says, regardless, because they don't want to be the guy who says "no".
Admin
"I have people skills! I am good at dealing with people!"
Admin
The problem here is the sales guy didn't communicate with anyone technical until after making promises to the client
Admin
Sure, that shouldn't be how it worked, but that was largely driven by the client's lack of guidance too. And the salesman selling a thing they don't have. I kinda skipped past those, they're so common.
Admin
And he was right. Really there is no WTF in this whole situation. To me is frankly both normal and perfectly fine.
Sales did their thing and got a customer. Management did their thing by showing confidence in its workers to do their job, be that bring in customers or create miracles. And development did their thing by getting angry, frustrated, annoyed and than having a brilliant idea that resulted in a miracle being done.
Sale was made, everyone was paid, everyone won.
Admin
This being "normal" is the WTF.
Admin
Did Gerald get terminated for falsely claiming it was impossible?
Admin
I am curious what alternative you would suggest that works better than:
So what if the requirements are strange and the solution unorthodox? That's the fun part that makes this job worth doing.
Admin
Except for whoever was the entity actually paying big bucks to spare some manager to remember one more password.
Admin
LZ79 obvious troll is obvious
Admin
Probably just a secretary. The actual managers have no time for that sort of thing.
Admin
The cost-benefit analysis at the hospital sure fell through some sort of cracks. Tens of thousands of dollars over several months so one person could avoid remembering a password. May I recommend some quality password managers? At least she wasn't writing them down in a book somewhere.
Admin
The sales rep got a bonus, the poor sod who did all the work just got his normal salary.
Admin
She was totally writing her few passwords down in a book, I'd wager.
Admin
The customer got what they wanted. The company god paid. The developer has a job. That's the way the world works.
It's not our job to tell them the customer that what they want is stupid. Especially not when it is. Do that and all they'll do is shop around until they find someone actually smart to give them what they want.
Admin
I just assumed it's somebody with a great pull in the hospital. Maybe the director or somebody on a similiar level. Those people can easily spend thousands of dollars to remove a minor issue for themselves.
Admin
Having someone else's network VPN into yours IS a security issue.
Admin
A manager with license to kill and a big shotgun to end any discussions.
Admin
What occurs to me is that one person for which tens of thousands of dollars were spent, in order to not inconvenience them, was just signaled that they are WORTH that much money. If they were not in that position by heredity or marriage, that would be a hint that they ought to be a lot more aggressive when their next salary negotiation comes around.
Admin
But what the customer wanted was possible. . . and they would have lost out on this sale if they'd listened to those pesky engineers about what was possible at the start.
Admin
Except is that's not actually what happened. The engineer worked with the customer to better define requirements and come up with an acceptable solution.