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Ever since the first Free Sticker Week ended back in February '07, I've been sending out WTF Stickers to anyone that mailed me a SASE or a small souvenir. More recently, I've been sending out the coveted TDWTF Mugs for truly awesome souvenirs. Nothing specific; per the instructions page, "anything will do." Well, here goes anything, yet again! (previous: Surprise!).
Problematic Problem (from Ben)
Way back when, I was responsible for doing on-site support for a fairly complex ERP solution that our company sold. My support radius was 100 miles, which meant I was on the road a lot and traveled to places I wasn't all that familiar with. My trusty navigation aide was a compass and a Rand McNally map book. Fancy, online mapping services weren't around yet, let alone super-fancy GPS units.
One day, I was assigned to visit a customer on the far end of my region (99.9999999 miles), first thing in the morning. It meant that, not only would I need to battle rush-hour traffic through the city, but then drive another 60 miles once that cleared. I was not a fan of early mornings, and getting that client on that wintry day meant a 5:30A departure with a 2.5 hour commute.
"The mastermind behind our system is the Senior Developer," wrote Daniel, "he's naturally an expert at all things code, but he especially excelled at back-end systems. After all, true geniuses always value function over form."
"The Senior Developer liked to do things a little differently, but we got over his quirks. Take, for example, this handy dandy function to ease the pains of those complicated cast operations we all hate."
"When my company, a large financial corporation, decided to outsource overseas," Ned wrote, "they went for the best: CMMI Level 5. Not Level 3 or Level 4, but Level 5. 'Heck,' the CTO told us half-jokingly, 'the offshore team will make us look bad!'"
"It's hard to describe the 'high quality' code that gets checked-in to our repositories. 'Bloat' just isn't quite strong enough, nor is 'incredibly horrible mess that makes me want to smash everything in sight'. There were a lot of issues with the code, but this one is my best short examples: isValidNumber()."
"At my previous job," John S writes, "we had a good amount of formality in the development process. Business 'customers' would define requirements (or bugs), business analysts would write requirements to implement those, and we would write code against the requirements."
"When I took a new job at a small company, I knew the processes wouldn't be a little more 'casual', but I never quite expected this. Even the code is written casually, avoiding unnecessary formalities like arrays and loops."
The Fearless Leader at Randy's company had heard wonderful things about Service-Oriented Architecture, and knew that's exactly what their in-house applications needed in order for the company to remain competitive. Obviously, in-house developers couldn't possibly have the skill or knowledge to develop such things, so the Fearless Leader brought in consultants to develop the service suite.
One of the web services that the consultants developed was the Global Customer Search. Essentially, it searched for customers through a handful of different systems throughout the entire enterprise. "According to the documentation," Randy wrote, "the GES uses an advanced scoring algorithms to determine how close of a match a record may be when someone searches using the web service. As you can see from the code, the consultants started off on the right foot... and then decided to give up at the end. "
Mike writes, "Oh, the things that I find in our codebase."
"I have no idea who put this in, or why it was put in. But it's there, and it's somehow called in a few places. As tempted as I was to investigate how it was used, I figured I'd spare my sanity."
The Missing Interview (from Charles Ross)
I went for an interview to work as a junior IT support Engineer at a certain Royal bank here in Scotland. It was a late interview, around 4:45 in the afternoon, and I turned up at 4:30, sharply dressed, and with all the documents I'd been requested to bring. Since this was a bank and security was a must, I had a full five year history sitting in front of me.
I sat down and was quickly ushered into an interview room. I sat there for 20 minutes waiting, occasionally sticking my nose out the room to see if anyone was coming. After another five or so minutes, it was about 4:55 and I decided to go hunting for someone.
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The Daily WTF Sponsors
Microsoft WebsiteSpark - a great program for web shops and freelance web developers and designers where you get some great software (Visual Studio Pro, SQL Server, Server 2008, etc), at no upfront cost for three years; it also provides support and resources to help grow business Peer 1 - provides award-winning Managed Hosting, Dedicated Hosting, Co-location, and Network services offered through 15 data center across North America. With over 10,000 businesses hosted on their legendary SuperNetwork™backbone, PEER 1 delivers one of the highest server performance and network outputs in the industry. MindFusion - a great source for flow-charting and diagramming components for a variety of platforms including .NET, WPF, ActiveX and Swing SoftLayer - serious hosting provider with datacenters in three cities (Dallas, Seattle, DC) that has plans designed to scale from a single, dedicated server to your own virtual data center (complete with racks and all) SlickEdit - makers of that very-impressive code editor and some pretty neat Eclipse and VisualStudio.NET tools and add-ins, some of which (Gadgets) are free. Check out this short video highlighting just one of SlickEdit's Visual Studio integration features.
"I had a professor once who said that given enough NAND gates, he could rule the world," writes Rob B. "This was a roundabout way of saying that, using a whole bunch of NAND gates, you could create the function of any other logic gate. You shouldn't, because the other logic gates exist and it would be hugely wasteful to use NAND gates to do the same thing, but it can be done. It turns out this applies to code as well."
"We got some utterly garbage C++ code from a subcontractor. The error-to-lines ratio was amazingly high, and there were a lot of things to hate about it (like having one global function to get bits from a binary value which didn't work, and several different localized one-off solutions which did work). My main WTF moment, however, was the following."
Jan 10
