The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Diseased

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-10-26

It wasn't Kyle's idea of a dream job, but when you have a PoliSci degree your options are either "unpaid slave labor in politics" or "parent's basement". So he leveraged the handful of CS classes he had taken as a backup, and managed to talk his way into a job. At the interview, he was shown some Java and VB code, which he was able to talk half-way intelligent about, and he discovered that he'd be working for Steve, his former Little League coach. A judicious application of communication skills and nepotism meant the interview ended with, "Can you start on Monday?"

When he arrived, he found a set of very large, very dusty binders sitting at his desk. A post-it informed him that these were some "training materials". Sharpied onto the front of the binders was a simple warning: MUMPS.

163 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-05

Push the Button

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-10-14

Much to his shame, Gary sends spam for a living. Not the spam that promises to enhance your sex organs, or let you view teenagers engaged in acts illegal in 43 states. He sends those newsletters and promotional notices that you delete unread on behalf of that company you bought something from once and have since forgotten about but can't be bothered to find the unsubscribe link at the bottom. So, not spam spam, but the content you couldn't care less about, nonetheless.

At one point, Gary was polishing up the data set underlying the company's largest campaign yet. Any campaign was complex, although this was an order of magnitude beyond that. Gary had to build an analytical model off of their address pool, isolating the target market segment, tacking on some demographic modifiers, and get that bundled up and handed off to their third-party bulk-emailing service. While he did that, swarms of graphic designers and copywriters actually built the promotional materials; they fought it out over the proper values for kerning in the banner and what color the footer should be. And again, all of that needed to be packaged up and handed off to the bulk-email service.

174 comments - Last comment @ 2012-03-05

Security Frist!

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2010-10-07

Dean's company's codebase was a thicket of Amazonian Jungle- dense, tangled, and steamy. This was largely because there were no real standards for development. In an attempt to tame that wilderness, they organized a "governance committee" to be their machete. The committee established checkpoints for architecture reviews, design reviews, and code reviews. They maintained a list of standards, and told developers that new code should meet those standards.

After a few years in the company, Dean found himself on the committee. He looked forward to participating; even with the committee in place, there was a lot of bad code sneaking through that he ended up getting stuck maintaining. He was hoping for an opportunity to slap on a pith helmet and drive undiscovered species of bad code into extinction.

81 comments - Last comment @ 2024-06-28