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“HEY! YOU!” barked a frantic and unfamiliar fellow in a frumpled collared shirt who barged into Daniel’s cramped little office.
“Are you running...," he asked while consulting a clipboard, “Google Desktop??”
Please show your support for The Daily WTF by checking out the companies that have been kind enough to sponsor us. And, in doing so, I’m sure you’ll find some pretty cool products and services built by like-minded developers and IT professionals.
The Daily WTF Sponsors
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“I’m not questioning your expertise,” Paul cautiously said to the Certified DBA, “it’s just that I’m just not used to requests with… this level of detail.”
Paul should have done what he was asked, exactly how he was asked to do it. After all, he was not an expert but just a lowly systems administrator. Fortunately, the Certified DBA made sure to keep him in his place.
With the Webinar I'm doing this morning, I didn't have a chance to finish today's article. So instead, let's do a classic! Meaninglessness was originally published on April 19, 2007.
As you may or may not know, my day job is a Software Developer at Inedo, and I work on a pretty cool application called BuildMaster that helps software teams build, configure, and deploy their software applications. Years before, however, Inedo was a custom-software firm that was primarily focused on building all sorts of businessy software that does all sorts of businessy things for all sorts of businessy, erm, businesses. Bank stuff, manufacturing stuff, health care stuff, you name it. Most days, it was a challenging and satisfying job; I’d go home thinking, I accomplished something today. But every once in a while, I couldn’t help but wonder, why am I spending my life building cold, meaningless business applications?
A few weeks ago, the fine folks at the IASA invited to speak at one of their webinars to discuss an article I wrote a little while back. It's a free webinar, and runs tomorrow (Thu, Mar 18, 2010) from 11:00 AM - 12:30 PM Eastern:
If you’ve worked at enough companies in the IT industry, you’ve probably noticed that the most talented software developers tend to not stick around at one place for too long. The least talented folks, on the other hand, entrench themselves deep within the organization, often building beachheads of bad code that no sane developer would dare go near, all the while ensuring their own job security and screwing up just enough times not to get fired.
When Hassan joined Meteor's IT department in 2006, he was pleasantly surprised to find everyone abuzz with excitement.
Months earlier, the previous CIO retired, and a new Head of IT had just been appointed, bringing with him the mandate that old Pentium III PCs that sat on each desk had to go. With 128MB, they struggled to keep up with Windows NT 4.0 and Office 97. He had persuaded the board to allocate millions to replace every workstation and server, and upgrade the infrastructure to match. The company would move on up to the heady delights of Windows XP SP2, Office 2007 and Exchange 2003.
"Half the world's IT people hate our company's guts," Aaron told the HR lady. "For once, can we hire someone from the other half?"
"The last round of consultants didn't hate us," she replied.
“It’s impossible,” Gerald said in a matter-of-fact tone, “simply impossible.”
“Now just so we’re clear,” Craig responded, “by ‘impossible’, you actually mean ‘a big pain in the ass’, but you’re a smart guy who can make it happen, right?” That drew a few chuckles from the handful of other coworkers who joined them in the conference room, but Gerald just sighed. “No, Craig, by impossible, I mean impossible. Not doable. Can’t be done. Im-poss-i-ble. Well I mean, unless you can somehow change the underlying structure of the way everyone communicates on the Internet.”
It's time once again for Share Your Bizarre Email day! mail in or post your favorite emails in the comments. Here's three to get started...
"My company takes safety very seriously," Adam wrote, "and here is a partially illustrative message. What's especially funny about it is that we receive examples and protips like this on a routine basis."
Feb 10
