The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

WTF Inc Epilogue - From the Other Side

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-10-23

Most folks know that I've spent the last couple of years on Team-WTF in Department-WTF at WTF-Inc. A while back I moved on to BigCo Inc. This place is a huge bureaucracy, but somehow, things manage to get done. As with most places, it has its share of (sometimes epic) WTFs, but those can wait for another day. This time, I got to witness WTF-Inc - from The Other Side.

Due to government regulations, BigCo found itself in need of the sort of services provided by WTF-Inc. Since there are only two companies that provide this type of functionality, and the other company has a long way to go to catch up to WTF-Inc, BigCo didn't have many alternatives, so they decided to check out WTF-Inc. As part of it, someone at BigCo got the idea to search its huge HR database of resumes to see if one of its myriad employees has ever had any association with WTF-Inc. One name popped up.

68 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-28

Which Would YOU Rather Support?

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2013-10-15

To populate a temporary database table, most of us would write something like this:

-- Assume table TempData exists
Truncate table TempData;
Insert Into TempData
Select ... From ... Where id = 1234 and Flag Is Not NULL;

77 comments - Last comment @ 2022-02-06

This Direction, That Direction, Indirection, Indigestion

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-10-01

Joe G. was working for a financial company that had accumulated more than 20 years' worth of code and cruft. This was compounded by management being convinced that the source of all of their technical problems was IT not caring enough about business interests, rather than two decades of short term thinking. They refused to acknowledge the company's technical debt and believed that IT employees' attitudes were solely responsible for their growing reliability problems.

The code was mostly C++ with some Java mixed in here and there for a few legacy front end applications. Joe was tasked with debugging a problem with one such application called TurdEditor. TurdEditor would receive several parameters from a server at startup, then let users tweak those parameters and click an apply button that ostensibly sent the new parameters back to the server. There was also an environment variable called DOMAIN, that if set would cause all company applications to connect to the test servers instead of those in production.

55 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-09