The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Quitters Never Win

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-10-30

Lawrence’s interview started with Mark, the new MIS manager. A recruiter had hooked them up. The company was a medium sized organization, with four large locations and a few thousand employees. There was an AS/400 serving as their main back-end, and a small collection of other servers pitched in to provide extra ecommerce applications.

Despite the large userbase and the fact the company claimed to be “growing and dynamic”, their IT offices were strangely empty. Lawrence made a comment about that as a joke. “Is everyone out for a retreat or training? Must be nice.”

183 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-09

Confessions: Hacker Proof Boolean

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2012-10-25

"Years ago, long before I'd actually started programming, I spent my time learning about computers and data concepts by messing around with, believe it or not, cheat devices for video games," wrote Rena K., "The one I used primarily provided a RAM editor and some other tools which allowed me to tool around with the internal game files and I even get into muddling around with the game data all in the interest of seeing what would happen."

"As such, by the time my inflated hacker ego and I got into programming professionally, I was already pretty familiar with basic things like data types and binary. I was feeling pretty darn L33T."

104 comments - Last comment @ 2012-11-15

The Wrong Route

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-10-22

“We’ve invested quite a bit of money in our new network,” the bureaucrat said. His desk was tiny and so cheap that it sagged under the weight of the CRT and tower resting on it. “That’s why it’s probably a more rigorous interview than you’re used to.”

In practice, the interview wasn’t anything unusual to Karen, who had already done a great deal of contracting work with local government offices. This particular interview was for a contract position with the county courts.

113 comments - Last comment @ 2024-08-16

Equals

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-10-16

Dan had a business object. It represented a user’s Dashboard, a screen which had a collection of widgets that displayed some user specified data. The application needed to be able to compare these Dashboard objects to tell if two instances were the same, so someone had written a custom Equals method, back in the Cambrian epoch.

As often happens, the business requirements mutated. Dan added a thumbnail property. Now users could browse a collection of Dashboards and get a sense of what they might look like without actually switching to that Dashboard layout. Two otherwise identical Dashboards might have different thumbnails, so Dan didn’t add code to the Equals method. To make the rules quite explicit, he added a comment, instead: previewImage should NOT participate in business equals. He also added appropriate assertions to the unit tests.

113 comments - Last comment @ 2012-11-12

Server Dump

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2012-10-10

When he arrived, the first thing Florian checked for was his box of rubber gloves. It was a daily ritual, but most important on the days when he had server room duty. The new hires got quite a laugh out of his odd behavior, but that’s only because they hadn’t been there on… that day.

It was a few years earlier, when Florian was himself a new hire with the company. It had started as a normal, if gloomy day. Clouds had moved in spent the week dumping rain and depression on the city. Florian was fairly certain he had forgotten what the sun looked like, not that it mattered- he had server room duty that day.

116 comments - Last comment @ 2012-11-13

My Dearest Amy

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2012-10-09

Like any website with a contact form, The Daily WTF gets its share of spam. In addition to saying the darndest things, spammers will often push SEO services with a message like this.

From: [email protected] 
Sent: Wednesday, June 20, 2012 7:03 PM
To: Alex Papadimoulis
Subject: let's succeed together
--------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi,

My name is Amy Thompson and I would really love to tell you 
how thedailywtf.com can rank even better in Google.

I'm a SEO expert working at SEO Search Results and while doing
a research for some of my colleagues I found your email address and
decided to contact you immediately.

If you are interested I will be happy to send the additional 
information and all the details needed to make it happen.

Thanks a lot,

Amy
seosearchresults.net

176 comments - Last comment @ 2013-06-21

Best of Email: Career Limiting Email, That's What the BCC Field is for, and More

by Mark Bowytz in Feature Articles on 2012-10-04

Don't forget, The Daily WTF loves terrible emails. Got one your self? Then mail in your mail!

Career Limiting Email (from Ben)

109 comments - Last comment @ 2013-01-30

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