The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Intern's Internet Disorder

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2010-10-21

It was the start of summer and Stephen was almost as excited about college junior Nathan's internship as Nathan was. Stephen’s company had a history of selecting new employees from their small group of fresh interns that started each summer and Nathan seemed like the right guy for the position.

To get his feet wet, Nathan would be first assigned to the SEO group where Stephen would be overseeing Nathan’s work. Though the SEO team was small when compared to the rest of the web development group, Nathan was in a position to make a big impact on driving traffic to the sites that Stephen’s company maintained and add a nice set of bulleted items to his resume or, if things worked out, a full time job after graduating from college.

130 comments - Last comment @ 2010-10-30

Working Around, Over, and Through the Process

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2010-10-12

When Kevin landed a job at Townbank in the late 1980s, he came face-to-face with the same thing that thousands of newly minted developers had encountered before and since – there is more to being a corporate programmer than just writing code – there’s the process.

Second only, perhaps, to the strict rules commanded by the world’s religions, the process keeps the code consistent. Glory to the process – praised be the process - the process is good, the process should always be followed, and above all, the process is good for you!

92 comments - Last comment @ 2010-12-17

Tweaking the Code

by Mark Bowytz in CodeSOD on 2010-10-04

It wasn’t that Jim minded initiating interns into the world of web development, in fact, he viewed the challenge as a very satisfying experience. However, when the newest intern, Stefan, declared on his first day “I don’t want to be labeled as programmer for the rest of my life. Programming sounds too nerdy. I solve problems.” and that despite his ColdFusion experience, he had previously hosted raves and dance parties in his younger days (to further distance him from any chance of being considered a nerd). In short, Jim knew that he had a special case on his hands.

Rather than bruise Stefan’s apparently sensitive ego and give him an assignment that might involve invoicing or user security auditing, Jim handed Stefan a technical, yet practical, task - write a program to get the daily weather reports from a government website and store them locally so that users could see a cached copy rather than pulling it off the weather website each time.

171 comments - Last comment @ 2010-10-20