The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

It's Nobody's Baby

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2013-07-29

Daan O. arrived at work only to find all of his peers sitting in the conference room, looking scared; very scared! The salesman had snagged a new client by promising that all of their data from their current application could be trivially imported into Daan's company's primary product - no problem-o! Unfortunately, the salesman had not bothered to ask the new customer what the data looked like. Or in what format it existed. Or how much of it was there. Or if it was in any way consistent. He had just made the promise. Now it was their problem to make it all work. Unfortunately for Daan, he had been ~~victimized~~ assigned with the task of making the magic happen.

First, the data was delivered as a plethora of Excel spreadsheets, each one representing a table in the client database. Perhaps job-one should be to dump it all into scratch tables and try to work from there.

124 comments - Last comment @ 2013-09-26

A Questionable New Hire

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-07-17

Chris S. worked at a large financial firm that had its roots in the wild and crazy days - long before political correctness was all the rage. Men behaved savagely, both financially and socially. Women, no matter their skill and/or rank, were objects, targets ripe for abuse. Fast forward a few decades into the PC era and the madness was scaled back quite a bit, but the characters remained. The off-color jokes and emails are still passed around; just more discretely. Right or wrong, it's just the way the business side has always been in large financial firms.

One day, Chris received an email from the CTO asking him to consider the attached resume for the open position on his team. The resume looked decent, and the level of business knowledge the candidate would bring to the team would be extremely helpful, so Chris decided to reply and set up an interview. As he hit reply, Chris noticed that the email had been forwarded from the broker to the CTO; it was initially a series of exchanges between the candidate and broker who were obviously buddies, so he decided to read it all, starting from the bottom up.

195 comments - Last comment @ 2013-11-20

May the Sad Force Be With You

by snoofle in CodeSOD on 2013-07-01

A long, long time ago, in a software shop far, far away, clouds of bad management began to gather. The evil CEO, in his hooded shroud, commanded a dearth of Darth's that a powerful sphere-of-influence be built to help enforce His will. Rules and regulations would abound. Roles would be restricted. The twin suns were obscured and darkness covered the land.

It was the beginning of a period of Great Sadness.

65 comments - Last comment @ 2013-07-08