The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Don't Touch That Dial!

by Dan J. in CodeSOD on 2013-08-07

You can't really blame Bjørn for not listening to the radio much anymore. If you'd had to spend months maintaining the in-house web application he inherited, you'd develop some negative associations of your own.

Bjørn was always baffled by the occasional complaints he'd receive from users, reporting that the filtering and categorization functions on many of the application's pages were broken. The pages displayed sets of radio buttons to allow users to select among various options, and apparently these buttons didn't always work. The problems always had hazy descriptions and, no matter what, Bjørn had never reproduced a single one.

The Old Switch n' Bait

by Dan J. in Tales from the Interview on 2013-08-01

A few years back, RJ was hiring developers. Besieged by pretenders, he had devised an online coding test and hired a recruitment firm to subject candidates to it in hopes of weeding out the lower-quality developers. Since RJ and a teammate had to assess each candidate by themselves, the test was an important time-saver: if the candidate's code wouldn't even compile, refused to run, or obviously didn't work, that was an easy write-off. But this story wouldn't be much of a WTF if it were merely about some feckless applicant.

One day they received a submission from a Mrs. Qiu Jiang. Her code not only compiled and ran, it actually worked. It passed RJ's test cases quickly too, which meant Qiu hadn't simply brute-forced her way through. RJ had high hopes for their face-to-face interview.