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int? version = NULL;
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comment = ProcessThread.ToString();
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Ahh, so your typical TED speaker archetype. Nothing to see here.
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The first sign of trouble is when a .NET programmer accepts a position in a company doing a port from .NET to JAVA.
Speaking of Brillant, check out the neck tattoo in the photo of the 'wanted man arrested in abingdon va' on December 11. Must be some relative of Paula Beans?
Admin
If somebody scheduled a meeting with me and then presented some code that I had written and used it to explain how a
forloop works, the said meeting would not last an hour.Admin
In other news, Aaron has been seen doing a lecture on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
"You see, I'm Dunning, and all you guys down there are Krugers ..."
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... oh, and while I'm about it, I believe that the offshore company who wrote the code I'm wading through up to the knees in were actually Intelligenuity.
Of the order of 10 identical instances of data groups (called ...instance1, ...instance2, ...) each containing of the order of 10 identical copies of the same bunch of items (named question1, answer1, question2, answer2, ...), and the same construct duplicated: once for input, once for output. And commands which copy each element, one at a time, each implemented as a separate command, from input to output.
I quit.
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The real WTF is moving FROM .NET to Java.
And this Aaron guy sounds like your typical tool.
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It's sad that competent VPs can't find competent middle managers.
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I just love a happy ending.
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"Let me see if I can understand the purpose of this meeting: you're studying the code and want us to help you understand it, am I right? Because from what I can tell, help is one of the many things you clearly need."
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Bears repeating:
Right there's your WTF.
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Sadder yet is that upper management lacks the analytical capability to determine when middle management is useless and the position should be eliminated.
"So, what is it you'd say you do here?"
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Your value to upper management increases if you have 0.1% more knowledge than they do. I worked for a CIO who bedazzled the other C people with a slight bit of knowledge and used it to his advantage to get kickbacks by the truckload from vendors buying stuff we didn't use or need. Later on the CEO was replaced by someone sightly smarter than him and he was fired and perp walked out the door. A week later he had another job at another company as CIO...
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I'm hoping to hear more stories of kitchen staff incompetence from companies who decided to migrate from cars to horses.
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Sincerity mode: Can someone please explain the Java hatedom here?
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I quite like java, but I'll not recommend it any more because of Oracle's licensing changes. Yes, I know there are alternatives, but that's complication and .NET ends up being easier to work with.
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I feel the pain. From time to time I have to sit through presentations telling me that InfoSec is about protecting confidentiality, integrity and availability of information. You don't say. Also pirates, in the form of stock images of hood-covered shady young men on which an unseen projector is displaying 1s and 0s.
My worst time was when I had to do one of these presentations to a potential customer's security team, to the insistence of my boss. I told him they would, at best, sit through it in simmering anger, and at worst walk out of the room. They chose the latter.
Admin
Its got its fault, it has baggage, its often taught as an entry level language so there are lots of bad examples of code out there from 'coders' just like the Aaron here. Its also not always the best tool for everything but sometimes people forget that and use it to do so. This means many 'experienced' developers love to look down on it and cherry pick the (sadly many) bad examples of it in use. Its also slightly dated and went through some rocky patches so doesn't always have all the lovely shiny features or practices of <insert current bandwagon>.
In general however it is probably no better or worse than .NET or most other languages, and is certainly better than some when it is being used appropriately.
But lets be honest, rather than discussing relative merits it is far more fun to say ".NET sucks, Java Rules!"
Admin
TRWTF is the story has a happy ending. Also all the totally non technical middle management, but that's standard most places.
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YES! Incompetent coders who are good at brown nosing often move up in management, but the cream of the crop is the incompetent coder who powerpoints his way in an architecture-like role where he inevitably gets unmasked, only to move on to become a self-proclaimed expert. Using the very job title he lost and his aptitude to publish technobabble on medium.com, he makes his way in the tech conference circuit.
Those guys are annoying but they serve a purpose, when you know one you can follow him in LinkedIn and see which conferences hire incompetent speakers like him, saving yourself time and money.
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Man oh man, I would pay good money to attend that tech conference just to see Aaron. The entertainment value would be tremendous.
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Hi, I am the original poster. I wanted to mention that I agree that the whole ".NET to Java" idea was weird. The sales people had a lot of power over technical decisions so they believed they had technical knowledge. Since Java "runs anywhere" they concluded migrating to it would let them expand sales.
About Java...
I worked on both projects as needed (see previous story for the reasons). Overall, C# was easier and faster to write, and the .NET libraries are powerful. Java was fine but took longer to debug and figure out third party libraries. Anyway that is my observation after working on the same product implemented in both languages.
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It's not hating on Java so much as pointing out that it's silly to move from .NET to Java, because that's going in the wrong direction. .NET/C# was very specifically designed to be "a better Java," and it's actually managed to deliver on that promise. Things like structs/value types, async/await, and real generics (as opposed to type-erased ones) are just some of the many areas where .NET is objectively a better system.
Admin
Oy. I think a former employer of mine used the same presentation vendor. It eventually became a running joke on our team that the most significant distinguishing characteristic of malicious hackers is the wearing of hoodies. If anyone wore a hoodie to the office, we would razz them about how they're acting suspicious and are probably a hacker.
Admin
Yes! His presentations were terrible enough to be hilarious, especially when he got stuck and made up technical explanations on the spot. One example was him using the terms "constructor" and "copy constructor" interchangeably during a presentation, assuming they were the same thing. This led to questions, and his impromptu fictional explanation led to more questions. Which led to his increasingly fantastic descriptions about classes and objects.
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What's with all the comments held for moderation?
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I'm totally dealing with that right now. I just started a senior-level info sec position and need to find a company for security audits. I start every meeting with a potential vendor stating what my background is (which is very technical) in order to avoid the inevitable, "you know, information security starts with confidentiality, integrity, and availability" and pictures of guys in hoodies (HT: masonwheeler).
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It's not really hated. Java is a fine language; it had issues before but it's evolved over the years. It's mainly that .NET is seen as much more evolved than Java (even in its earliest days) so a company moving from .NET to Java raises a bit of a red flag.
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I am on the receiving and of this often. For some reason, everyone seems to think that saying "we value your information" is going to keep the data I provide to them out of the news. There are usually few answers to questions like "so, what controls do you have in place?". I never walk out, but I mentally subtract all promises and just look at the facts. Often what they say is 100% empty promises.
Admin
The WTF I had, with regards to .NET and Java, was that the desktop app (Windows only because it used an engine that was written in C/C++ and consisted of DLLs) was written in Java Swing (which I specialized in) and the backend services (SOAP/XML) were written in .NET/Basic.
This was bass ackwards IMO - the front end desktop app should have been written in .NET/C# and the backend should have been Java.
I am agnostic with regards to .NET and Java (mostly the latter, but enough of the former to be familiar with it) - I have done dev work in both and they each have their advantages and disadvantages.
Admin
I don't hate Java, it's perfectly cromulent for many things. But deciding to go from .NET to Java is a real WTF because there's little Java offers you that .NET doesn't and they're quite similar, with c# being a bit more evolved (I'm assuming by .NET they mean c# on .NET). It's like deciding to port from ruby to perl, or rust to c++. Plus there's Oracle having its filthy evil hands all over Java now.
So there must have been some very, very specific reason you needed to go from .NET to Java - maybe you're working with IBM and IBM wanted it, or you don' t know you can run .NET on linux and mac, or your .NET was all Visual Basic so Java really is an upgrade. Or maybe an Aaron had some drinks with a stupid exec and that was enough to start an initiative.
It's enough to raise flags at least.
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Fair enough!
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Decades ago, I witnessed an eerily similar chain of events, only in that instance it was the VP who was never seen again.
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Raj, your comment takes Aaron's behavior and translates it into forum comments. You've wasted my time making me read a comment that explains the main details of the story I had already read. I applaud you; this is trolling of the purest sort.
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Now, of course, with .Net Core it truly is cross platform as well. With Xamarin it is cross-platform GUI. With .Net 5 the Java library interop becomes fully integrated. I still wonder why people are building NEW Java projects at this point.
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Interesting point! Like I said it was not really a technology-based decision or even a good decision. It is good to know other cross-platform solutions that are feasible.
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Ugh, yeah, I briefly worked at a place that had a Grand Architect like that. You knew it was bad when the salesweasels were able to explain, in some detail, why the Grand Architects plan couldn't possibly work.
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The Peter principle at work: You get promoted until the point where you are unable to hide your incompetence.
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So Kiesha is now Keisha. Shining attention to detail there.
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If this is an "older" story, then the migration may have been driven by a desire to leave the Windows Platform. Of course with .NET Core, that is a moot point.