• King (unregistered)

    Happy endings in a row? Now that is a frist WTF

  • bvs23bkv33 (unregistered)

    NO WAY people will hire someone who dipped them in their own faults

  • (nodebb) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    Someone who understands that a simple mistake is not the same as a personal fault, and who appreciates workers who improve their product rather than hiding behind misrepresenting statistics might.

  • (nodebb) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    It's a bit confusing but I read it as the product architects were the ones who got him fired (basically he embarrassed them)but he was then rehired by the team that his diligent investigating had identified as causing the problem. It looks like that team had the attitude that finding mistakes and correcting them was more productive than shooting the messenger.

  • Kattman (unregistered)

    I been there. didn't get fired by tendered my resignation over an issue similar. When the company president came back ask for me to return I had three non-negotiable terms, the first of which was to fire the guy that tried to walk all over me, the other two terms aren't important. I'll just say, the president didn't hesitate in his response and I was back with the company a short time later. So sometimes things do work out for the best, I may have to write up that story for an article here eventually; non-competes and such are now expored even though I still do contract work for that company once in a while. Merry Christmas.

  • DQ (unregistered) in reply to Sulis

    Such a person would never make it to management level.

  • (nodebb)

    I once had the wrong trip counter activated in my car. I thought it was average MPG but in fact it was miles driven. So when I looked at it at first, it showed 20, which was city average for that car. I was on the highway; a few minutes later, it showed 25, which made sense - it was moving closer to highway average. At 30, I was jubilant. At 35, I started being suspicious. At 45, I realized what was going on.

  • EasilyDistracted (unregistered) in reply to Jeremy Pereira

    Exactly! And, that is NOT what I come here for.

  • JK (unregistered)

    May we all be fired and rehired like that...

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. TA

    Jeez, was this your model T?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Mr. TA

    I once had the wrong trip counter activated in my car. I thought it was average MPG but in fact it was miles driven. So when I looked at it at first, it showed 20, which was city average for that car. I was on the highway; a few minutes later, it showed 25, which made sense - it was moving closer to highway average. At 30, I was jubilant. At 35, I started being suspicious. At 45, I realized what was going on.

    Of the thousands of people who were laid off from the plant where your car was made, how many were rehired when it was determined your dashboard worked "as designed"?

  • sizer99 (google) in reply to Jeremy Pereira

    And they probably hated the Project Architects too, so re-hiring 'Russell' would be a nice thumb in their eye.

  • (nodebb)

    I'm trying to figure out the other team's original reasoning.

    • Okay, we need to do X 1% of the time, but that slows us down.
    • So instead we're gonna (a) do X async, and (b) do X 100% of the time, and that's gonna make us faster?
    • Maybe the time-consuming part was figuring out up front whether we're in that 1% zone of relevance.
    • Or maybe we're offloading "hey you need to also do X" to the client and thus cutting it out of our metrics, which would further fit today's theme.
  • (nodebb) in reply to Sulis

    Nissan Altima V6. Not sure what you mean by Model T?

  • (nodebb) in reply to Bananafish

    The point wasn't the car's poor design, but rather my initial erroneous misunderstanding of a readout which seemed to indicate that things are way better than they have always been.

  • dpm (unregistered) in reply to sizer99

    re-hiring 'Russell' would be a nice thumb in their eye

    That is by far the most realistic reason for a TDWTF happy ending I've ever seen.

  • tlhonmey (unregistered) in reply to emurphy

    They need to do it 1% of the time. When they get to the point where they need to do it, they have to wait the 100ms necessary to get the response from the server before continuing. This slows things down.

    Since they have all the parameters for the request at the very beginning of the process and there aren't any bad side-effects (on their end) from sending the request early they just fire it off immediately in the background and then, if they require the data later, it's already been retrieved and they can move on with no delay.

    Not an unreasonable strategy actually if it weren't for the fact that hammering the webserver with that many requests was causing performance degradation.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    More importantly: What kind of webserver takes 10 milliseconds to answer a 404? oO

  • (nodebb)

    On a related note, I remember one talk from last year titled “Profilers are lying hobbitses (and we hate them!)”. Had to chuckle at that one!

  • (nodebb) in reply to tlhonmey

    Was your nickname supposed to be “nostrils” in Klingon, or is it just a weird coincidence?

  • superluser (unregistered) in reply to bvs23bkv33

    I have been on both the sending & receiving end of favorable hiring decisions where either I recommended promoting someone because they pointed out where I was wrong or someone recommended promoting me because I pointed out where they were wrong.

    It really shows you the skills of the other person, & where the skillset for your own team can stand to be improved. Also, the thought that you'd much rather get criticized by a team member than an outsider DOES go through your head, but I've (thankfully) avoided situations where we promote people just because they're good at complaining.

  • superluser (unregistered) in reply to DQ

    "Such a person would never make it to management level."

    I think I've THOROUGHLY ruined my chances of ever becoming management at my job through a combination of saying "I never want to be in management; I think I would be terrible at it," & also dumping on new management objectives when they're clearly counterproductive.

    At least, I hope.

    When I was younger, I always wondered when James Bond would get a promotion into a cushy job in middle management at MI6. Some people just have a different path.

  • Russell (unregistered)

    This is "Russell", the original poster. I'd forgotten I posted this and hadn't checked back to WTF for nearly a year.

    An update to this. Earlier this year, a couple of years after the events in my post, I got laid off again because some upper management types decided to disband the team and "eliminated the positions", but since I kept my seniority from the first round, my severance package included my previous eight years of service as well as the two additional years. So I effectively double dipped my severance.

    Then other upper management types decided laying us off was a bad idea and tried to hire us all back again.

    I'm curious to see how much I can milk this for, so I accepted another 25% raise to come back. The company is WTF'ed but I'm not far off retirement. The additional income is paying for both my kids' college. My paid vacation was only one month this time. At the next round of layoffs I'll probably just take early retirement.

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