• (disco)

    I'm missing the bit where Steve walks out...

  • (disco)

    I'm missed the tout where Steve walked out ...

  • (disco) in reply to PleegWat

    I'm missing the bit Where Steve walked out in disgust over the koi pond

  • (disco)

    First, the haiku stuff was stupid. Keep to actual writing with minimal embellishment.

    Second, I've seen this mentality before only it was the opposite: The old reports were written by the moron and were pulling the wrong data, and when I found that out and showed the new data I got the same kind of "But these don't match the old reports!" kind of nonsense.

    Best thing to do is to leave in this case, the company is clearly clueless idiots if they hire this guy and then let him continue to f things up without noticing. He's probably a friend/relative of someone high up.

  • (disco)

    The story needs an ending; I've taken the liberty.

    “You see,” the BI director explained, “look at how many more rows are in Ty’s reports than yours. His shows more information. More information is always better!”

    “But,” Steve tried to explain, “the data is wrong. He’s doing cross-joins where he shouldn’t be!”

    “How can more data be wrong?” Ty challenged. The BI director nodded in agreement.

    "Then you can expect my letter of resignation," Steve stated. "I would rather find a new job than deliberately break reports that have worked, unchanged, for years."

    Seriously, if management is more interested in the quantity rather than the accuracy, it's time to up sticks and head to new pastures.

  • (disco)

    Ty :point_right: Tyler :arrow_right: Ty :mag_right: :wtf:

  • (disco) in reply to DocMonster
    DocMonster:
    First, the haiku stuff was stupid. Keep to actual writing with minimal embellishment.

    It looks like an allusion to an old fable illustrating the SNAFU principle. But a good ol' verse libre would be better.

  • (disco)

    My reports are better because they go to 11.

  • (disco)

    Should just cause the reports to dump the whole database in triplicate. Then tell the BI guy that Ty's reports are wrong because yours now have more information.

    Maybe dump Wikipedia there too.

  • (disco)

    Unfunny haikus Litter the page like bugs Coffee steam rises

  • (disco) in reply to DocMonster

    [quote="DocMonster, post:7, topic:48323, full:true"] First, the haiku stuff was stupid. Keep to actual writing with minimal embellishment. [quote] Let the writers have some fun. This wasn't that bad. And I know.

    [quote]Second, I've seen this mentality before only it was the opposite: The old reports were written by the moron and were pulling the wrong data, and when I found that out and showed the new data I got the same kind of "But these don't match the old reports!" kind of nonsense.[/quote] That's why I think it's either overembellished or an invention. A lead who can't get his head around tryParse(), but who can get reports to run with joins in the SQL and all? And no-one even checking which version is right?

  • (disco) in reply to William_Furr
    William_Furr:
    Unfunny haikus Litter the page like bugs Coffee steam rises

    This forum ought not to be fillable With haiku that's missing a syllable. It seems that your verse Though poignant and terse Requires some more time that is billable.

  • (disco)

    I hope this WTF was as annoying to write as it was to read.

  • (disco) in reply to RFoxmich

    My reports are better because they go to 11.

    But you skipped 4!

  • (disco) in reply to machtyn
    Hanzo:
    ...but who can get reports to run with joins in the SQL and all?

    Ummm...no. He couldn't get the reports to run with joins in the SQL. That's the problem.

    The TRWTF here is that management liked the reports because obviously they were $billing$ from the reports.

    machtyn:
    But you skipped 4!

    No he didn't. It's right there, repeated six times.

  • (disco) in reply to Kian

    Or, Steve could just change all representation to binary. Text, numbers and all. Now that is a lot of good solid information! Stuff that computers have to deal with every day.

  • (disco) in reply to DocMonster
    DocMonster:
    First, the haiku stuff was stupid. Keep to actual writing with minimal embellishment.

    There were Haikus? I didn't see any. Only a WTF author embarrassing himself by demonstrating his misconception that Haikus are just about number of syllables.

  • (disco) in reply to DocMonster
    DocMonster:
    First, the haiku stuff was stupid. Keep to actual writing with minimal embellishment.

    In case you can’t tell, this is a grown-up place. The fact that you insist on using your ridiculous haiku's clearly shows that you’re too young and too stupid to be writing front page articles.

    Get off my lawn!

  • (disco) in reply to JoeCool
    JoeCool:
    Get off my lawn **your mommy and daddy's modem**!

    BGTFY.

  • (disco) in reply to DocMonster

    Dealing with this now actually. Revamping a major client package report, and found that certain things were just twerked a little, and when we fixed it volcanos exploded about how we don't restate previous month's numbers (even though they're wrong), so we had to make a historical cut-off table to describe static (wrong) numbers if the report was viewing historical numbers, and the new logic would kick in for dates after the cutoff. :heart_eyes_cat:

  • (disco)

    Re: Clueless developer leads who can't write in one language but who might be able to jumble together a SQL query, not possible?

    How naive.

    BTDT a number of different places - more often than I care. I just took over from a lead and a year later we are still suffering the after effects of cleaning up his code and "design".

    When I was young, I worked in a factory where there was a lot of turnover on the production line due to poor pay and hard work. I had stayed there long enough (a whole 6 weeks!) where I was the most experienced person in that particular section of the production line and I was looking forward to a bump in pay up from minimum wage.

    Instead, I got a new lead with no experience who was a friend of a lead on a different section of the line. I was expected to train this new "lead". After half a day of playing along those lines I gave up and played dumb. I was quickly transferred out of that section and was informed that if I didn't "shape up" I was going to be fired.

    I took the next day off and found a job at a competitor that paid more than the lead position did at my old job. I then quit my old job without notice.

  • (disco) in reply to Hanzo
    Hanzo:
    A lead who can't get his head around tryParse(),
    I'm willing to be a little generous; I interpreted that comment (to the extent that I believe it as-written) as Ty not complaining that `tryParse` itself is complex, but just that there is so much stuff in the library that he thought it would be complex to learn even what kinds of things were available for him to do.
  • (disco) 
    select t.user,
1000000000 'billing_amount'
from reporting t

    After all, more = better.

  • (disco)

    So QA have not been brought on board to analyse the output from the new program and compare it against the library of test cases? That, it goes without saying, is TRWTF.

  • (disco) in reply to Matt_Westwood

    And don't we all just love it when the old reports are discovered to be wrong, but for some obscure business reason consistency trumps correctness. And so you have to make sure you have exactly the same bugs in the new code.

  • (disco)

    Besides syllables, Haiku should mention a season Like "oregano".

  • (disco)

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9y3baOVXpSE

  • (disco)

    Nobody trained me for this!

    An expert need not be further trained by anyone on the subject, they train the others. If they don't know something, they'll find out themselves. What kind of expert is he?

  • (disco) in reply to narbat

    The "business reason" may be the need to avoid going to the company's owners to say "we've been stuffing you around for years".

  • (disco) in reply to Developer_Dude
    Developer_Dude:
    Clueless developer leads who can't write in one language but who might be able to jumble together a SQL query, not possible?
    Hanzo:
    That's why I think it's either overembellished or an invention. A lead who can't get his head around tryParse(), but who can get reports to run with joins in the SQL and all? And no-one even checking which version is right?

    Access, the tool of sanity mass destruction. It allows you to build nonsensical queries from which you can view the "sql" and cut and paste...and people do it. Of course we don't invite them to our parties and we don't merge their code, but still they do it.

  • (disco) in reply to kupfernigk
    kupfernigk:
    Access, the tool of sanity mass destruction. It allows you to build nonsensical queries from which you can view the "sql" and cut and paste...and people do it. Of course we don't invite them to our parties and we don't merge their code, but still they do it.

    I avoid Access but you can do something similar with SQL Server Management Studio. Type "SELECT * FROM SomeTable", select the text and right-click and then choose "Design query in editor". Then add in the tables to join and if they have foreign keys defined, it generally gets the joins right. It's handy if you don't know your way around a database.

    I do that if I am really lost in somebody else's badly designed DB. Just start with one table and try joining to every table that looks like it might be tangentially related. Although the generated SQL should never be used as is, because it does some dumb things when it can't find relationships, like joining on unrelated ID fields instead.

  • (disco) in reply to da_Doctah

    Game Grumps episode, is linked, so I feel this joke is appropriate.

    da_Doctah:
    Besides syllables, Haiku should mention a season Like "oregano". **It's snowing on Mt. Fuji.**

    [size=10]now, this would normally just be unfunny meme-ing, but I also prefixed it with an actual haiku so that balances out the universe I think, plus at the point that I started to have second thoughts about repeating that joke the haiku would no longer have made any sense and I'd have to rewrite it - which I'm far too lazy to do.[/size]

  • (disco)

    Why not simply say "Our customers depend on this data to be correct (and in fact, we bill them on the basis of these reports). If I make the changes that you are telling me to make, I would be complicit in corporate fraud... you cannot compel me to break the law neither can you fire me for refusing to break the law."??

    I have actually been in almost this exact situation, except it was my NEW reports that were correct, and the old BI reporting system was demonstrably incorrect. I demonstrated it to be incorrect to management. Their response: "Can you put some fudging factor into your system to systematically adjust all the new reports to have the same error as the old, so none of our customers notice the billing discontinuity?"... "No, because that would be breach of contract, and fraudulent... you'll have to find someone ignorant of this issue, or someone willing to break the law for you.... in fact you should put me on a different project because there's no point on me doing any further work on a system which I now know is designed to break the law."

    They got someone else to do their dirty work.

  • (disco) in reply to eViLegion

    So what you're saying is that your username was a bad fit for you?

  • (disco) in reply to boomzilla

    Heh... yes basically. I'm far too nice. Although mainly it was arse-covering; I didn't want there to be any paper trail leading to me getting shafted. Got the fuck out of that company as soon as possible.

  • (disco)

    Anyone else not make it through the article because of the stupid, distracting attempt at "haikus"?

  • (disco) in reply to eViLegion
    eViLegion:
    They got someone else to do their dirty work.
    Wouldn't call it a win.
  • (disco) in reply to Jerome_Viveiros
    Jerome_Viveiros:
    because it does some dumb things when it can't find relationships, like joining on unrelated ID fields instead.

    This Access-like behaviour in SSMS is something that I think has no place in enterprise software.

  • (disco) in reply to kupfernigk
    kupfernigk:
    Access, the tool of sanity mass destruction. It allows you to build nonsensical queries from which you can view the "sql" and cut and paste...and people do it. Of course we don't invite them to our parties and we don't merge their code, but still they do it.
    Oh. That sounds plausible. Where plausible means: a likely ploy by a minor daemon from Hell, trying to work his way up.
  • eric bloedow (unregistered)

    reminds me of a story: after de-bugging a report program, a programmer was told, "put the bugs back in, the real numbers make us look bad."

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