The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Irregular Regular Expressions

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-04-30

Marcus A. worked for a man who believed that regular expressions were the be-all end-all and could be used to trivially solve every data problem that could possibly arise. Their code base was riddled with regular expression transformations that would reduce most developers to tears. This manager also believed that anything that could be explained could be implemented more cheaply offshore.

Their main application contained a raw text field that held comments by customers. Someone got the idea that these comments could be mined and used for business purposes. However, to do this in a free format text field, the non-standardized words and phrases used by humans would need to be cajoled into something that was more easily processed. To this end, Marcus was tasked with managing an outsourced effort to standardize this data. The input would be a Customer Data table with a comments column. The output would be the same column, but with abbreviations, acronyms, etc. converted to standardized text.

111 comments - Last comment @ 2013-07-25

Testing Patience

by Bruce Johnson in Feature Articles on 2013-04-24

The process used to test new applications before delivering them to the user base at Eric's company had never been particularly formal. This is not to say that there was no process at all. Of course there was. After all, what kind of a company would develop software and then release it to the user base without running it through some testing. But 'rigorous testing' and 'robust validation' were not phrases used within his organization. Neither was 'successful rollout' or 'satisfied users', but that's a story for another day.

One reason for the lack of formality was that the company didn't feel that having dedicated testing resources delivered sufficient benefit for the cost. Shouldn't developers just write code that didn't have any bugs? Was that so hard?

97 comments - Last comment @ 2022-11-21

The Six Million Dollar Patch

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2013-04-22

QA, UAT, and performance tests passed. John received authorization to promote his first major release to production. He checked in the code, and nothing exciting happened. No cake or streamers fell from the ceiling, but no errors or warnings bleated out at him. None. Given the complexity of the product, John’s success was the IT-world equivalent of winning both showcases on “The Price Is Right”.

John sent out emails to all the relevant stakeholders, and basked in the glow of a major project finally being done. The good feeling lasted for less than half an hour.

96 comments - Last comment @ 2013-05-23

The Scottish Breakfast

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2013-04-17

There were days when Robert felt like a British Monarch. He worked for a cryptographic hardware/software company based in England, and spent his time bouncing from client-site to client-site, all across Europe. One day, a Scottish customer named Willie called, panicked because his cryptography server had stopped working. “Achh, I’ve givin er all I can give! She willnut run any more!” Robert settled Willie down and asked the obligatory troubleshooting questions (Is it plugged in? Is it switched on? Was the crypto hardware unit connected properly? Has a giant sea monster eaten your server?) but to no avail.

Robert then broke the news to Willie: this required on-site service, and Robert wouldn’t be available until the following week. “I’m actually in France today, at another customer site.”
“That willn’t do, laddy! I need this workin before I go to the Aberdeen football match on Sunday!” Robert informed Willie what the charges would be for an emergency weekend visit and Willie agreed without hesitation.

190 comments - Last comment @ 2018-01-18

Manual Time Entry

by Erik Gern in Feature Articles on 2013-04-15

Kolby had gotten a stellar reputation as a developer able to solve difficult problems. His newest client was an international food supplier. "We’re so glad you’re here," said Rita Manesh, the CEO. "The IFS Quality Control scheduler is too slow. It takes fifteen minutes to enter a single schedule. We hired five developers before you to make it faster, and they couldn’t do it."

"I’ll give it a shot," Kolby said. "Do you have the source code?"

84 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-23

The Database Master

by Dan J. in Feature Articles on 2013-04-10

Maurice had always found it curious that his company didn't administer any tests to new hires. It seemed like a minimal amount of work to save the company time and money. The new "IT Systems Expert" that HR sent to his department did little in his first few weeks to dissuade Maurice from his opinion.

This particular expert, Ben, liked to toot his own horn. He would toot it at length, and to whomever was in the vicinity. He was tooting one of his favourite achievements at Maurice one day, a gripping story of triumph at a major telecom company, when the telephone rang: A branch office couldn't access the main application supported by Maurice and his team. He turned to Ben.

85 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-19

A Fat Pipe

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2013-04-08

The 1990’s: a simpler time, when our cell phones only made noise when we had an incoming call, and the most amusing thing a computer could do was render 3D pipes, or flying toasters. The CTO of Paul’s company, Mario, was easily amused.

Mario’s experience as a Microsoft Server administrator/evangelist led him to claim Microsoft’s offerings were far superior to any other server technology. Windows NT, he argued, was so easy to use that any idiot could set it up. This made Mario the prime candidate to configure their behemoth of a web server: dual 200MHz Pentium Pros, 512MB of RAM, fast SCSI disks, and Windows NT4.

105 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-17

The Windows 7 Upgrade

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2013-04-04

The latest fad among free-wheeling startups may be BYOD, but government offices tend to be far more conservative. Government offices handling confidential data even more so. When Miguel started his contract with a state office, they issued him a laptop. For security reasons, he was forbidden from using any other machine, nor should anyone else use his. Also for security reasons, the laptop was not allowed to leave his desk. It was locked in place with a security chain too short to move the laptop more than a few inches.

The computer had a great deal of… character. It was so old that archaeologists kept stopping by, asking to place it in a museum. Over its lifetime, it had received a few upgrades. The HDD was 500GB, and its RAM was maxed out- at 2GB. This created special challenges for Miguel, since their software required VS2003, VS2005, VS2008 and VS2010, installed alongside their third-party SaaS reporting tools. The machine limped along on Windows XP.

130 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-21

Technically Competent != Qualified

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2013-04-02

When I interview people, part of my observations include whether they can be understood, and whether they can understand me. After all, a huge part of working with someone, anyone, is communication; if you can't communicate with a person, you and that person are not going to be able to work effectively together.

We've all had to deal with programmers who came to our teams from foreign lands where languages other than our own are spoken. With some effort, one can learn to understand these folks, even through their sometimes heavy accents. However, it is required that they can understand and communicate in the language that we speak.

134 comments - Last comment @ 2013-04-30

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