• martijntje (unregistered)

    The coworker also left the job a little later and was then hired to work on Discourse.

  • ApoY2k (unregistered)

    Am I missing something? Is the WTF that he returns URLs instead of data? Or that he uses Arrays for what should be key/value? Not quite getting this one...

  • Richard (unregistered)

    "They didn't understand any of these terms: object graph, business intelligence services, concurrency, message pump, domain model, and well-defined."

    Jargon is a wonderful thing; but I wouldn't hold it against anyone not knowing what a particular term means. I knew what a singleton was for years before somebody told me that there was a name for it. Then I found out about design patterns, and that there were names for several concepts which I already knew. The issue should be whether they understand the concepts; which in this case it would appear that they probably didn't.

    I also went to an interview once, where they asked "What do you understand by <a particular technical term>?". I said that I didn't know, and wasn't familiar with the phrase. Bizarrely, their response was "Oh come on, you must have some idea"...(ponder on that for a second). If only they had read Joel's Guerilla Guide to interviewing... http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/GuerrillaInterviewing3.html

  • Richard (unregistered)

    Agh it screwed up my post. It should say... "What do you understand by [a technical term]?"

  • Il Baffo (unregistered)

    "As developers, we often find ourselves working in stupid ways because the folks who were hired above/before us think that what they set up is ideal, but we are so awesome and perfect that our designs will work flawlessy and always up-to-date forever in time."

  • Bert (unregistered)

    I know or can infer the meaning of the other phrases by deconstruction, but speaking as a regular old keyboard monkey, what exactly are "business intelligence services"?

  • Not Joel (unregistered) in reply to Richard

    You should have read Joel's Guerilla Guide to Posting on The Daily WTF's Comments Page

  • PWolff (unregistered) in reply to Richard

    Let me guess... you put that term between angle brackets (aka less-than sign and greater-than sign)?

    That would explain why the following text gets underlined and changes its color on mouse-over.

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    gsf ssfshre reeyred gdgsdfg vsdv ertyreyt dfhfdh ereryhg?

    Those are technical terms that I have completely made up.....how well can one communicate in this case???

    A common lexicon is CRITICAL.

  • Been there, done that... (unregistered) in reply to Bert

    Business Intelligence: Analyzing the data in the database so that it makes some sort of sense to the business. Business Intelligence Services: Usually an add-on or part of the database server that makes it easier to analyze the data stored in the database to spot trends.

    tl;dnr: Data summarization tool (example: Pivot Tables)

  • Steve Downey (google)

    Business Intelligence Services: We can charge extra for this. But not as much as for Enterprise Intelligence Services.

  • KP (unregistered) in reply to ApoY2k

    It's probably that those urls look static, so returning them doesn't do much. He was probably tasked with communicating the -actual status- back, not an unchanging pointer to the location where the status can be found.

    If you were checking the weather channel every day, and every day it just said "weather information is available at weather.com", then using the channel would seem a bit unnecessary, yeah?

  • Anon (unregistered) in reply to KP

    But what if weather.com was prone to changing it's domain name periodically, and the weather channel always had the most timely updates regarding that new URL? If you depend on weather.com for the most accurate weather information, then using the weather channel would be a necessity.

    So maybe returning URLs is reasonable. And you can't tell from this story whether the URLs are static. They may change depending when or how you call the service.

  • KP (unregistered) in reply to Anon

    Right, that could absolutely be a problem that someone, somewhere has, and, in that case, what you said would address that and be super enterprisey.

    I'm inferring the WTF-ness, but I really doubt that's what happened here.

  • Bryan T's former colleague (maybe) (unregistered)

    Oh wow... Where I work, we used to have a contractor named Bryan T... And aside from one or two of the more outrageous details, this sounds suspiciously like my job.

    Insert squinting Futurama Fry meme here: not sure if my job, slightly anonymized, or an identical work place somewhere else.

    Either way, I feel like a WTF star by proxy.

  • ex contractor (unregistered)

    "some meltdown for which they want you to take the blame.". :-). Love to here that. Taking the blame for failed projects used to be a steady source of work for us. As the project approached failure, all the rats would desert the sinking ship, an we would be called in take over. Nobody calls in contractors to take the credit for a successful project.

  • Bryan T (unregistered) in reply to Bryan T's former colleague (maybe)

    To "Bryan T's former colleague (maybe)", this was submitted about a year ago in Chicago... The authors take some artistic liberties here and there, but it was pretty spot on.

  • Tinkerghost (unregistered) in reply to Il Baffo

    I had a job where the initial dev thought joins slowed down the db queries. Hard rule, no joins in the sql.

  • jay (unregistered) in reply to ApoY2k

    RE what's the problem with returning the list of URLs? Yes. Without knowing what the requirement was, I have no way of knowing if this was a good solution or not. It's all well and good to make fun of bad coding, but you have to give us a hint what the person was trying to accomplish. You might as well have said, "Ha ha ha, this stupid person told me that the answer to the question was 'Afghanistan'! What a moron!" Without telling us what the question was, we have no way of knowing if this was the sort of mistake a reasonable person might make, a totally absurd answer, or if indeed it might not be the correct answer and it is you who are confused.

  • pif (unregistered)

    Their head DBA explained that the difference between a uniqueness constraint and a primary key was semantics,

    Why, isn't it? How can a DBMS efficiently check uniqueness without creating an index? And what is a primary key other than unique index? (Modulo NULL-ness, depending on implementation).

  • pif (unregistered)

    There were no planned releases

    Not too bad, considering you can read it as "No release could ever be late, by definition!".

  • Zenith (unregistered)

    I will not endorse a recommendation of coding "standards." They're almost always pushed/controlled by the least knowledgeable and least consistent member(s) of the team. So all they ever do is stifle any kind of progress, turning mediocrity into some lofty, and ever-unachievable, goal and the workplace into an endless well of misery for anybody who actually knows what they're doing or has to put up with the product that results.

  • Old Fogy (unregistered) in reply to pif

    I do hope you're being facetious. Maybe you should start here: http://www.datanamic.com/support/kb-dez004.html

  • F-Lambda (unregistered)

    I see the spam bots have arrived.

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