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Steve had been working as a web developer, but his background was in mathematics. Therefore, when a job opened up for internal transfer to the "Statistics" team, he jumped on it and was given the job without too much contest. Once there, he was able to meet the other "statisticians:" a group of well-meaning businessfolk with very little mathematical background who used The Spreadsheet to get their work done.
We continue to enjoy a brief respite from mining horrible code and terrible workplaces. This classic includes this line: "It requires that… Adobe Indesign is installed on the web server." Original --Remy
Have you ever thought what it would take for you to leave a new job after only a few days? Here's a fun story from my colleague Jake Vinson, whose co-worker of three days would have strongly answered "this."
One of the nice thing about externalizing connection strings is that it's easy to duplicate a database, duplicate the application's files, change the connection string to point to the new database, and bam, you've got a test environment.
Wow, it's summer. Already? We're taking a short break this week at TDWTF, and reaching back through the archives for some classic stories. If you've cancelled your road trip this year, make a vicarious stop at a filthy gas station with this old story. Original --Remy
“Staff augmentation,” was a fancy way of saying, “hey, contractors get more per hour, but we don’t have to provide benefits so they are cheaper,” but Stuart T was happy to get more per hour, and even happier to know that he’d be on to his next gig within a few months. That was how he ended up working for a national chain of gas-station/convenience stores. His job was to build a “new mobile experience for customer loyalty” (aka, wrapping their website up as an app that can also interact with QR codes).
At least, that’s what he was working on before Miranda stormed into his cube. “Stuart, we need your help. ProdTrack is down, and I can’t fix it, because I’ve got to be at a mandatory meeting in ten minutes.”
Our friend and frequent submitter Argle once taught evening classes in programming at his local community college. These classes tended to be small, around 20-30 students. Most of them were already programmers and were looking to expand their knowledge. Argle enjoyed helping them in that respect.
A few years back, Mike worked at Initech. Initech has two major products: the Initech Creator and the Initech Analyzer. The Creator, as the name implied, let you create things. The Analyzer could take what you made with the Creator and test them.
For business reasons, these were two separate products, and it was common for one customer to have many more Creator licenses than Analyzer licenses, or upgrade them each on a different cadence. But the Analyzer depended on the Creator, so someone might have two wildly different versions of both tools installed.
May 20