The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Confessions: Network-Terminating Protocol

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2013-12-17

Paul's family has a long, proud tradition of working in IT. His father ran support for a Stanford computer lab, and his grandfather — a greengrocer — claimed to have seen a UNIVAC one time. Ambling dutifully down the path their ancestors trod, not only was Paul sysadmin for a research lab, but his brother, Saul, was on the same university's network security team. The brothers' relationship was an amicable one, but there was one incident about which Saul always felt the need to give Paul a hard time.

It had been like any other day at Paul's workstation when an IM arrived from his brother: "I'm going to forward you an email we just got from the operator of a public NTP server - it's about one of YOUR machines." That sounded ominous, but Paul didn't have long to wait; a moment later, the complaint arrived in his inbox:

89 comments - Last comment @ 2014-01-02

Jumping the Resigna-gun

by Dan J. in Tales from the Interview on 2013-11-20

A large bank is one of those places where bureaucracy tends to rule supreme. While that makes it easy to goof off while waiting for other people to make decisions, it can also leave you exposed in the middle of a storm of bad decision-making. That's just what happened to Paul when his team had to hire a new Windows sysadmin. One of the recruitment firms they partnered with - Human Solutioneering - put them in touch with Bob. Bob was very strong in administration and Active Directory, and he already lived in Iowa, where the bank was headquartered.

Paul and his H.S. contact had been through several hires that quarter, and they both knew the drill: since the team had given Bob the green light, they just had to wait for management sign-off. Paul said they would most likely extend a formal offer by the end of the week. When Friday came around, though, Paul received a no-go email from his boss:

168 comments - Last comment @ 2014-05-16

Remember, Remember the Thirty-Third of November

by Dan J. in CodeSOD on 2013-10-28

Some say that time is nothing but an illusion. The degree to which some software developers struggle with times and dates certainly suggests mysterious and unknowable forces swirling beyond the brink of human understanding. Consider this code that Ian found while pruning an old application. It's meant to provide the correct suffix for any given day of the month:

string num = "th";

int day = Convert.ToInt16(DateTime.Now.ToString("dd"));
switch(day)
{
    case 1:
        num = "st";
        break;
    case 21:
        num = "st";
        break;
    case 31:
        num = "st";
        break;
    case 2:
        num = "nd";
        break;
    case 22:
        num = "nd";
        break;
    case 3:
        num = "rd";
        break;
    case 33:
        num = "rd";
        break;
    default:
        num = "th";
        break;
}

105 comments - Last comment @ 2013-12-14

What Should He Do, Indeed

by Dan J. in Tales from the Interview on 2013-10-24

Leighton started his career as an apprentice ICT technician for a Secondary school. The job was roughly what you would expect, but the interview went down as one of the most surreal moments of Leighton's life. With his first interview scheduled to begin at 9:15 AM, Leighton arrived forty-five minutes early in his new suit and tie. At T-minus two minutes he remained the only candidate in the reception area, and his confidence was growing. But at 9:13, in walked Dave.

Dave had a strut to him, an air of cool detachment that Leighton couldn't seem to match, even though they were about the same age and Dave had elected to wear jeans and a t-shirt. It turned out they were vying for the same position, but while Leighton was relying on his community college experience, Dave had been putting computers together since he was in Secondary school. By the time the receptionist asked them who wanted to go first, Leighton's confidence was on the floor in pieces. His brand new tie seemed uncomfortably tight, and the collar of his dress shirt kept tickling his neck. Dave was out of his chair before Leighton could say anything, and looked back at his competitor with a smirk.

114 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-29

Advanced Adventures in ActionScript

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2013-10-14

"That's a natural twenty," Eric said, leering at his coworkers over his Dungeon Master's screen. "Tim, the kobold decapitates your Elven Ranger." The players groaned, and Tim could only mutter in protest. This was only their first adventure, and his character was already dead? Eric smiled. Tim and Alanna would soon learn that suffering abrupt decaptitation in their weekly Dungeons and Dragons game was much-needed preparation for their new jobs at ScriptCloud.

Eric had only joined the company a few months prior, as their first in-house developer. "They" were ScriptCloud Actionware, a local startup dedicated to reinventing the world of mobile app development. With the hindsight that only half a year of nonsense can bring, glimpses of ScriptCloud's deep-seated WTFitude were there right from the beginning. The interview process had gone slowly, not because of stiff competition or a monolithic HR department, but because ScriptCloud had chosen to post the job opening right before their entire staff went on summer vacation. The staff meeting on Eric's eventual first day was somewhat unnerving, ending as it did with the CEO swearing at the creative director after a twenty-minute argument about a single screen of the app's user interface. The app in question was ScriptCloud's first, a game with about the same complexity as Angry Birds (if none of the success). It was built by Costly European Consultants, and it would be Eric's job to support it.

White Plume Mountain

72 comments - Last comment @ 2013-10-29

An IDE Impostor

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2013-10-08

Despite having written code for twenty years before he'd even turned thirty, Jim couldn't help feeling like a bit of an impostor. He wasn't suffering from the Capgras delusion, though. He felt the way many of us feel when presented with a new job using new technology - in this case, the .NET framework and C# - that surely he couldn't be good enough at this to keep the job for very long. Surely his peers would find him wanting. While Jim struggled with his own self-worth, one thing he didn't struggle with was choice of IDE: Visual Studio. Intellisense, one-click refactoring, and a host of other features allowed him to fake it till he could make it. As far as Jim could tell, there was no reason to use anything else when developing a .NET solution.

Jim's first assignment was to work on a codebase created by Biff. Biff was a Something-Something-Level 3, so Jim was ready to learn a few new things when he fired up Visual Studio and opened Biff's solution. And learn he did. For example, he learned that VS marks syntax errors with a red, squiggly underline, much like Microsoft Word does with spelling and grammar mistakes. Biff's code lit up like a first-grader's essay about summer vacation, loaded as it was with misspelled identifiers, missing semicolons, and AWOL closing braces. Jim would have wondered if Biff had ever tried to compile the mess, but he was too busy wondering if the senior developer made a habit of typing with his eyes closed, since Visual Studio would have helpfully pointed out these sorts of mistakes as he made them.

123 comments - Last comment @ 2024-09-27

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.

125 comments - Last comment @ 2013-09-09

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.

116 comments - Last comment @ 2014-03-01