- Feature Articles
- CodeSOD
- Error'd
-
Forums
-
Other Articles
- Random Article
- Alex's Soapbox
- Announcements
- Best of…
- Best of Email
- Best of the Sidebar
- Bring Your Own Code
- Coded Smorgasbord
- Mandatory Fun Day
- Off Topic
- Representative Line
- News Roundup
- Editor's Soapbox
- Software on the Rocks
- Souvenir Potpourri
- Sponsor Post
- Tales from the Interview
- The Daily WTF: Live
- Virtudyne
Admin
Uhhh. I'm not the frist to cringe at W3 Schools, I'm sure.
Admin
Phase 2: the data is being lifted from the unsecured S3 bucket by unidentified third parties
Admin
At least they can get the data into their SQL database!
Admin
Not that the other stuff isn't WTFy, but sending someone to W3 Schools is TRWTF.
Admin
Why? I mean I get that W3 is an idealized view of everything not actually 100% relevant to any specific system or browser, but if you really can't debug a insert null into a non-nullable column, don't you have to start back at kindergarten?
Admin
Sadly, I've known the ugly cousin of this, where IT-y guys are put in charge of developing something that is more than a web-based information system.
Admin
That's one of the most frightening emails you can get: "I hear you're an expert in writing computer programs, can you just give us a quick hand with this problem we're having?" Say "yes" at your peril.
That was the straw that broke my camel's back at the company I recently left . The question made it pretty clear the asker really didn't know his way round the app. Hence followed a nightmare 6 months desperately trying to patch up an entire project of bodges, hacks and unwise design decisions, flying back and forward across the puddle, getting deeper and deeper into, oh never mind. I no longer work there.
Admin
Forget about W3Schools, it's not the problem here. If you put junior devs in lead of a project, it's not the dev team that needs to be fired.
Admin
@MaxArt2501: Yeah. Reassign the good workers back to their previous jobs they were good at and fire the boss and grandboss responsible for even starting down this imbecilic road.
Admin
Admin
Ugh. Anybody in the consulting field probably has stories like that. We had one where we spent a significant amount of time and money to prepare a proposal for a potential client to manage their major product (names are omitted here to protect the ignorant). After months and a few tens of thousands of dollars we presented them with a fairly comprehensive proposal. They loved it! And promptly said thanks, but no thanks, our in-house team will implement it. We cursed and waved good-bye to a $3M contract. But those of us who were familiar with their in-house team were patient and waited.
I maintained some contact with a couple of their people just because they were decent folk who weren't involved with the decisions made by the bean counters. About a year later, they had the grand rollout of the new product management system, a big enough event that most of the C-level was there as well as a few people who reported in trade mags on companies like this. And.It.Crashed.Spectacularly. In front of everyone.
After a sudden, abrupt shake-up of their staff, we were able to negotiate a contract to fix (i.e. tear completely down and replace) their system for a mere $4.5M.
Admin
I once worked in a travel company which, organised and sold its own tours. We also had resellers in other countries taking our tours "white label" and selling them under their own brand. Each arrangement was annoyingly fiddly and individual, with us sending over our own marketing and operational details and pricing matrices in whatever format they used whenever either end needed to update anything. Version control and change management were notoriously problematic.
One of the worst was a US agent who expected everything to be printed out, laid on a wooden table, photographed and faxed to them. Imagine my delight when message came down from on high that they'd hired a contract developer and wanted to do something "more automated". Looking forward to knocking up a bit of SOAP or something (it was that long ago) I got on board.
Nope, to advanced, I tried them on delimited files dumped in an FTP drive, that was "too hard", so XLS attached to emails it was. It all went quiet. Some higher in the two organisation a storm was brewing about their lack of progress which, of course, was put down to me giving them unusable data. I didn't immediately protest (could always be true) beyond saying "well no-one has told me, I sent it, it's exactly as agreed, they accepted it!".
The problem, which took about twenty emails to identify, was that the records were ordered as our catalogue displayed them and they now wanted the records sorted by title, alphabetically. Remember this is just an XLS, being read in Excel by the person at the other end. "Could I re-order the records and send them back so we can get this project moving, as we are long way behind!"
I handed the email over to my boss, He didn't actually take my word for it until I showed him.
Admin
My partner and I ran a software consulting company for ten years and saw this movie repeatedly. When the client would balk at our proposal and give the project to the CIO's sixteen year old son who was learning to program, we just waited them out, knowing they would eventually be coming back. And then we would make them come through the Supplicant's Door instead of the Applicant's Door.
Admin
That sounds worthy of being a front page story in its own right, not merely a comment.
Admin
Scientist guy here objects: most of us know enough to know that our company oughtta have an actual SQL jock available to do the query programming required. Don't blame the engineers here - looks more like Management said Hey it's just software anyone can do it.
OTOH, in my official Other Job Title "The Answerman," I usually give people 2 chances and if they still don't get it I tell them "read the Help file for that." That usually either fixes the problem or scares them enough never to ask me again.
Admin
"Apparently, the CompanyX project manager had been BCC'd on Bruce's entire email chain with Rick and Aaron."
This doesn't pan out well. Since a bcc doesn't show up in the headers for the next person to reply-all to, it means that every participant must have knowingly added the name deliberately.
Admin
Could be artistic license, but could also mean BCC once...on a message or set of messages including the entire reply chains.
Admin
Yeah, a single BCC at the end would do it since nobody ever trims their email chains any more.
Admin
Addendum 2020-07-22 14:27: Dagnabit there were supposed to be all sorts of indents there. fooey
Admin
How about "I can help you, but my daily rate is $1,000?"
Even, "I am not a lawyer, and I don't play one on TV, but I'm going to charge you as if I were one for consultancy. $50 per quarter hour over the phone."
Anything like this, really. We, as programmers, put up with this crap and then wonder why we're treated like disposable code monkeys.
Admin
OK, what's up with these WTFs as of late? They're having good endings? I know it's a pandemic and the good news is something sorely needed these days, but there seems to be too many that are ending where the manager is fired, the problematic team is reassigned or otherwise the disaster ends up fixing itself or is averted.
Admin
I'll second that! I came from a quite scientific corner of Engineering. Generally speaking the guys are educated and experienced enough to know there are countless specialities out there which need to be left to their own specialists, even if you are convinced they are dumbasses whose job you could learn in a weekend, it is just not worth it.
I did have one senior colleague who had this annoying habit of tinkering with SQL statements "to get what he needed", breaking them and then sending the garbage to me "to just fix so it works". I managed to successfully demonstrate it was far quicker for me to just make the change he needed and deliver it than identify the problem with his attempt and educate him.
To his credit he understood and acknowledged the point and changed his approach. My reward? he campaigned successfully to have me included on his overseas team on his future projects. In short, I should have just shut up and fixed his f***ing SQL as short term pain is better than long term torture up to your armpits in mud in Kerblickistan.
Admin
Oh, yeah. Or as it's known in the design world, Nephew Art.
(Oh, and btw: if I have to put on my reading glasses to solve the captcha, it's a broken one.)
Admin
Anything new in energy is often through a trade association. Very tight work environment. These companies do million dollar purchase orders a day without blinking an eye.
Ask for compliance to ISO 29119.
Admin
[Quote=Randal L. Schwartz]it means that every participant must have knowingly added the name deliberately.[/Quote] Actually, if just the last person in the chain BCC's the project manager, that person can read all the prior communications in the email chain.
Admin
Depends on the scientist. If they have a Ph.D., they let you know it and immediately assume you to be subordinate to them. Doesn't matter if they know jack squat - their degree makes them superior and heaven help you otherwise.
Goes for a lot of occupations - you might know what you're doing, but their hard won degree makes them superior to you in every way possible.
Admin
IMO, business strategy incompetence that costs a company a year and $1.5M and consequently the jobs of the decision makers is the story the capitalists should be sharing to pretend they're meritocratic.
Admin
Is this THAT wooden table, or did you just add this for colour?
Admin
Oh I couldn't remember exactly, but it did involve fax machines. Part of the office hilarity was the process sometimes would not need doing for 6 months, and (more than once) someone had "helpfully" retired the dusty old fax machine to a lonely cupboard in the meantime. That and giving junior employees the job of buying some fax paper, then explaining what a fax was, and seeing this uncertain look on their face as they thought it was (yet) another initiation prank, in the vein of buying glass hammers or going to supplies and asking for a "long weight".
Wooden table is a bit of a meme on here, but you already knew that ;)
Admin
To be fair with projects related to industrial software is not so rare fending electrical engineers that shifted to programming and some are decent at it... as long as they don't need a database.
For some reason they never know shit about SQL and there's a lot of chances the database will be based on Excel or xml files.