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The Worst Development Job You've Ever Had?
manavendra asks: "I'm currently working for a solution provider for telcos, and as part of product migration the entire API has to be 'internationalized'. Owing to a legacy architecture, most (if not all) application logic is still embedded in PL/SQL stored packages. My job: find hard coded strings, and replace with calls to the globalization API.
Yes there is a script written to handle most tasks, but its quite primitive (not to mention fears of automating 'too much'). Boredom is at all time high. Have tried all means of whittling away the time, and hence this question to other Slashdot users: What's the worst ever job you had to do in the name of 'software development' (or as a software developer)?"
Yeah. Populating a database .. manually.
Internet startup.
Turn batch perl scripts for searching domain names for sale into a live cgi.
The "server" was a P133 running bsd. Once I got it to run, it would take 15-20 minutes
to generate the output. The web page would periodically reload once a minute. The Boss
had a cable modem set-up where after a certain number of reloads, they would just cache the
page. He never actually got to see it work.
THe next day another guy just loaded all the possible names in a database on a fast machine
with gigs of ram. Response time? Sub-second.
I still got paid, though (much to the chagrin of the owner).
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
Unless you were in the manager's office I don't know anyone who would like working on a production line.
...worked on an Open Source project (:-P
"I work at Slashdot and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt"
worst. job. ever.
In my dad the worst job I ever had was converting those bloddy cog wheel counting machines into valve computers. We considered ourselves lucky if we got one vavle each too. Software? Kids these days are so spoilt.
EGG, the Electronic Gamers Guild
a developer job you insensitive clod!
It's hard to believe that's how Micronians are made. Why don't we see it right now by having you both kiss one another?
Writing worms and viri for spammers. And go figure, the fucker split when I had finished and paid me in Penis Enlargement Pills.
... from the no-shit department.
;)
was also my first job, first assignment. Rewrite all date/time routines to offset the year so the company wouldn't have to pay for their DEC RSTS license. They planned to set the system clock back 4 years.
I found a new job within the week.
Worked at a startup .com that thought it was going to make billions selling cult/foreign movies. My boss was a flaming 300lb male crossdresser who hired other 'developers' who barely knew front page. I was under pressure to make this amazingly creative super site while the Big Gay Al constantly changed his mind about what he wanted.. I had to be frisked before i went to my office because the rest of the employees often stole stuff (our office was above one of their video chains in nyc). And if things wernt working out, my boss would threaten to "fuck our asses.".
---------
No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
*shudders* That is wrong on at least two levels.
So you worked for Keane too, eh?
Never by hatred has hatred been appeased, only by kindness - the Buddha
Donald Trump, but I got fired.
The worst development job I've ever had was cleaning up Malda's code in S.L.A.S.H.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Converting a quarter of a million lines of VB code to Java...
How many billions of lines of Java did you end up with?
[ shudder - twitch ]
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
"The plural of anecdote is not data" -- Bruce Schneier
In the words of the my boss's boss (the guy who wrote this mess), "It'll give you a chance to learn java..."
-Eldurbarn
The XAS code was closed and only the boss had access to it. However he wanted us to develop some VB apps that would work with it. We had no documentation and when I asked why the boss told me that we don't work with documentation anymore but with UML. I asked where the UML models were and he muffled something about not having any.
I tried guessing what things did by their variable name but the boss enjoyed variable names like varTempOne, var1, var2, var3, generic1, generic2, myVariable, etc...
One day I asked if I could see the source code to XAS. I learned quickly that it was a mistake.
Clients were constantly calling because the XAS servers were going down unexpectadly. The problem was the logs growing to more than 2 gigs in size. Every second line of the logs would have a copyright description with the name of my boss all over the place. He was so proud of his XAS. Unfortunatly though his XML wasn't valid in any sense. He pissed me off so much!
After 22 days of this BS I had rashes from the stress of working there. I told the boss I needed XAS source code to work with or documentation to work with. That night I received a phone call telling me I didn't need to come in the next day, that they were going to do without me. I was so relieved I did a huge party.
I talked to the boss's boss the week after. I explained what was going on and a month later the boss I had trouble with got fired along with his bum buddy. I was so happy! :)
Last I heard the guy's wife left him too. I couldn't be happier! :)
> I don't know anyone who would like working on a
> production line
Quality Assurance in a Twinky factory?
Norman Cook's Ode to Sl
"I just paid a about 6000 for this software, i want you to integrate it into our system"
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Another job I had in the late 80s was at a CASE software vendor. The salesguy came back from Japan and announced that he had sold an installation in Kanji, then asked us if we could get it ready by Labor Day (it was mid June). After working 13 days on, 1 off it was ready just in time.
My manager thanked me and said "Take two days off, but don't tell the rest of the team. I'm only giving them one day off>"
The punchline: Of course I told my co-workers, and found that the PHB has said the exact same thing to each of them.
To err is human. To arr is pirate.
My wrost job was riting the OpenOffice.org spelchekker.
I know two people who liked standing in a line shoving ads into newspapers.
However, they were both retarded.
Damn, you are luckier than you know.
Where do I begin? Oh yes...
I once was employed by an insurance product publishing company in indianapolis. The project manager made all his decisions with rock-paper-scissors. I'm not making this up. Whenever a bug needed to be fixed, he would call all the developers into a room and play RPS until there was a loser.
Once, I worked for a company run by Scientologists. They did software for the timeshare industry. I lost that job when the IRS seized the company for failure to pay payroll taxes.
While working at walgreens corporate, i was once asked to clean desks with paper towels and windex... for $68/hr.
I once worked for a trading firm in downtown chicago where my boss, while standing behind me to look at my code, would put his... package... on my shoulder. I would scoot in to get away and he would step closer until I could no longer get away. That job didn't last long.
These are just the highlights of my ilustrious IT career.
Disconnect your television. Do your own research. Draw your own conclusions. They're probably lying. Don't be a sheep.
Posted AC because I don't want this one coming back to haunt me ever...
Worked for this company during the dot com boom. They wanted to be another monster.com job site -- only uglier and with crazy people managing the place.
When we started they asked things like "Can we capture people's social security numbers and personal information automatically the moment they visit the site?" Uh, no. They also used catch-phrases like "Less Volvo, More Porsche." Ugh.
We had a very small development team, with a very short deadline, almost no communication at all, and gross mismanagement. I drank so much coffee and was under so much stress that half my face froze for about a week. Maybe it was just a stress reaction, maybe I had a mini-stroke. I still don't know.
The best part was when someone made a last-minute change to the site literally minutes before the launch party was set to begin, and broke the whole thing. Lots of panicked cell-phone calls going around at that time, let me tell you. We got it working again just in time, but it barely mattered. A few months later almost the entire dev team was laid off due to gross mismanagement. That left me as the sole guy in charge of the web dept., where I was completely miserable until the day they laid me off too. What was funny about that was the boss sent a nice letter to the whole team talking about how big our profits were and how great we were doing... the day before he called to tell me we were doing -terrible- and he was very sorry to let me go.
Worst job ever. I don't miss it.
Incidentally, that last big job was a five-million dollar contract, being managed by a guy who was getting paid $150K a year to, as far as I can tell, ignore phone calls and generally screw up the entire company. I never learned the whole story, but there were some sexual politics involving that guy, our boss, and somebody's girlfriend. I never learned all the ins and outs (snicker), but I think the moral of the story is, don't hire a guy whose ex-girlfriend you're nailing and pay him $150K a year to fuck over your company.
Incidentally, the site I worked on is still around, some five years later now, and I check back every few months to see if the snarky notes I wrote in the HTML source ("Meta tags when we get to it." "This is only working by some miracle of God; don't touch it.") are still there. They are.
You know, we're looking for some political candidates...
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
So, you worked for SCO?
JADBP
Oh, you worked for hotmail?!!!
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
I'm looking for some voters
- John Kerry
I was coding a (somewhat simple) PHP application to read data from a textfile and stick it into an HTML table, along with a header and footer to make the page look pretty. It also had an "add" function where a user could add entries to the textfile which would then add a row to the table. It was a program for updating a web page with the latest scores from a sports league. Pretty simple, but it was my first PHP program I'd written from scratch so it took me all day to code, debug, test, code, debug, test, etc.
I finally got it working exactly the way I liked it, so I uploaded the "final" version to the server and ran it one last time. Then I noticed a typo on the submit button. Simple enough, I said. I had been using a Cygwin version of vi to write the script (you'll see why this is important later), but I had already closed all the windows I had open with the exception of my browser. So, I opened up FileZilla (FTP client), connected to the server, and double-clicked the file. Here's where the trouble starts.
When you double-click a file in FileZilla (at least with my configuration) it downloads the file to whatever directory is open in the file browser pane. Normally, if a file with the same name already exists, it'll prompt before overwriting the file. But I had just restored a site from a local backup so I had FileZilla set to automatically overwrite without prompting. The bottom line is that it downloaded the PHP file off the server onto my machine, erasing my local copy of the script. In a normal situation this would have been fine. BUT...
I had FileZilla set up to open PHP files in Notepad - yes, Windows Notepad. You probably know what happens when a *nix textfile is opened in Notepad - it displays nice little "blocks" wherever a line return should be. I didn't feel like getting vi back out, so I used Ctrl+F to search for the typo and correct it. Done. I closed Notepad (after saving the file) and uploaded it back to the server.
Everything should have been fine at this point. However, when I refreshed the page in my browser, I got a syntax error. Argh! I quickly opened the file in Notepad again - and later vi - only to discover that Notepad or FileZilla or something had stripped all the line returns out of my script! It seems to me that the script should have run after this, but for some reason it didn't, and FileZilla had overwritten my local backup.
So, I spent the next hour or so going through my code and pushing Enter wherever it was necessary until I got the code running again. The best part?
I showed the finished program to the client later on and they told me they had decided against using a computer to keep track of scores. Thanks for your effort but we decided we don't want to use your program.
*sigh*...
-- If you can read this, you are too close to my signature.
I doubt this qualifies as the worst software development job ever in anyone's mind, but it's a story nonetheless...
I was working at a dot.com-focused consultancy during that period in which the "New Economy" was going down in flames but no one was really talking about it yet. After completing my development work on one project, I was informed that I, along with a few other developers that had survived the last round of layoffs, was being given an "alternate assignment."
Since our sales department couldn't sell work for shit, we were assigned to work to help them find leads. What that amounted to was the following: we were each given a section of a list of big companies in the area. First, we were to ascertain what kind of web presence they currently had, and propose some ways our company could help them improve it. Wait, that's not the funny part.
Second, we were to obtain direct contact information for their CEOs, CTOs, etc. by whatever means necessary. Now, occasionally you could dig something like this up via the company's literature, possibly with the assistance of a phone book, but usually it wasn't publically available. In this case, we were encouraged to call up the company and tell them whatever we had to for the receptionist or whoever to give us that information.
Picture, if you will, a small handful of mostly socially inept geeks. Picture them cold-calling companies and try to string together various tall tales, misdirections, and outright lies to scam poor employees of said companies out of the direct line phone number, e-mail address, and home address of several of the companies' top executives.
Hilarity ensues!
i wish i had the willpower to wait 15 minutes
The project was outsourced to India, where more time can be wasted for less money. This will ultimately be good for the economy as a whole.
turned up to a new client with a suit only dress standard to do some "network consultancy" I ws promly shown a ladder and a drum of cat5 cable and told to run it through the roofspace to these 25 new outlets.
Sometimes I'll even repetitively fiddle with something at hand while I'm thinking about something else. That, my friends, is how you pitch one right over the plate.
"Nobody owns the fucking words man." - James Dean
I had to assemble my own cubicle. I died a little bit that day.
"If you think you have things under control, you're not going fast enough." --Mario Andretti
He'll let you know when he's done....
"Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the President to explain to us what the exit strategy is." G.W.Bush
Why not just use a couple dozen lines of perl?
reech bee-yond ur clip-0n
At CompUSA, mine had the delectible odor of cigarettes and coffee. It was super-great when I'd be sitting there hunched over a computer, removing some part, and he'd come over and start talking to me about how I should be doing it, like he knew a better method for removing RAM or something. Nothing worse than a smelly dumbass for a boss.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
My first programming job, right out of school was with a small mortgage company. I knew things were going to be bad when the monthly processing run to distribute interest payments to the various loan 'investors' crashed on my 3rd day, while I was still figuring out where my predecessor had hidden stuff before he was fired.
2 years later, I quit after my entry in the employee pool on which regulator would close them didn't win. My final check wasn't really a check, since no bank would open an account for them. I got a paper sack literally filled with small bills.
I thought I was done with them, but 2 months later the trustee handling their bankruptcy called and I went to work for him as a consultant, recovering their data. We got almost 90% of the principal identified and recovered, which surprised everyone and netted me a nice bonus. But the real bonus didn't occur until over a year after that, when armed guys with badges and everything showed up at my door. I didn't even know postal inspectors carried weapons, but they do. They wanted me to help them prosecute and convict the owner of the mortgage company.
There is nothing in the world as satisfying as the sight of a former bad boss being led off to serve time in federal Pound Me In The Ass prison.
First, cool username.
Second, I find this astounding as most RPGII coding was bangalored years ago. I can still see code comments like "Please to be updating this code in the very nearest future."
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
My immediate supervisor was a dude who was best friends with the department manager, which is why he had his job. I know this because they had the same working relationship at their previous bank, and bragged about it. Anyways, my supervisor fancied himself a programmer, which he was not. I was saddled with existing Perl code and it was my job to fix it and enhance it during the course of the day. I did my job well. Apparently, my supervisor would get bored late at night, and would wade through my code and reformat it and re-comment it to suit his own style tastes. No functional changes, just comment styles and formatting. And broke the code in the process. Every night. Every morning I came in and there were people waiting for me wanting to know why the software was broken. Nothing I said to my supervisor or the department manager made any difference. I fixed the same stuff over, and over, and over. And all my co-workers knew was that my software was always broken.
I had a friend. He had a job. "Just a few screens," he said. I said "Ok! I'll do it."
:-/)
Then came the meetings. Then came the time. "About a month and a half in man hours." I said. "About a month and a half," is what they heard.
"Five screens only," said they. "Five screens," said I.
But wait! There's more. Next week there were four more! Four more screens and reports to go. Four more screens - but a month and a half still to do them in.
But then came next week and lo and behold! Sixteen other screens had to be made you know. Because the ones from before required these screens or else they would not operate. So now we were at twenty-five. But a month and a half - no more.
So off I went and checked them out and who should be hidding but twenty-five snouts. Yes! Twenty-five more screens hidden under buttons and some even had twenty-five cousins. So now I was up to seventy-five. "Seventy-five screens!" Says I. "But only a month and a half to do them in," says they. "Preposterous!" Says I. "Not so!" says they. "You can do it - you're a wizard today."
"Fat chance!" says I. "Look at the reports! One for each is seventy-five reports! Whatever happened to the five? Where did these all come from?! I'm working night and day but these screens are falling like bullets from a machine gun!" "But you said you could do this!" they quipped. "Yes, but it will take seventy-five years at the rate you are going!" I said.
And so the dust flew and we squawked and we chattered and finally decided the fate of the matter. There just was no way to do the screens in the time alloted. I gave them the five and then bravely departed. The extra fifteen I threw in when they paid me some more, but I've stopped work on them and they leave me alone.
I talked with my friend again the other day. Now there's an upgrade and the other members of the company say: "There's only five screens we want you to do. They are simple - they are few." And now my friend must face them and say "You're full of S*** - just go away!"
(Taken from a true story. The company has well over 150 screens, has nothing in writing about what they do or how they do it, all of the screens are interconnected and require all of them to be created before anything will work. Even after it became obvious that there were hundreds of screens and we tried to talk about it the company would not sit down, print out copies of all of the screens, and even tell me how they worked. It became a nightmare which we (thankfully) stopped after almost three months had gone by. Although the screens were being made I would be told each screen should operate in one way only to have someone else say it should operate in another. No cohesion, standards, nothing. But a nice program still.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
The CEO had this Physician buddy to whom he owed a favor and since I was pretty much twiddling thumbs between projects (and playing copious amounts of Quake) it landed on my lap.
I had to take a VB Form based App (this was way back in 98) which was essentially for a Doc, which takes him through a million forms with questions (with a liberal dab of option buttons/check boxes/list boxes and combos) which he would choose and choose and after what seemed an eternity, will finally spew out some BS in the last form which sounded like what the disease was, the symptom list and what he should do.
Anyway, the problem for me was (did I tell you that it had a million forms of all sizes) all the labels/text boxes/frames/ FUCK!! all the controls had dark green/purple/red/radiant blue/deep yellow/bright orange and every conceivable color as ForeColor and Back Color. Which meant that if the Patient even saw the UI, he would go color blind for a week. So I was assigned the task to clean it up and not touch the functionality. Ofcourse I pleaded with the CEO to let me rewrite the piece of shit software (in better words), but they wont let me. Why? It was the bastard's pet project, so I had to clean it up and thats it. And Did I tell you that there was not even a fucking DB used to store all the information being entered, it went in to a Text file. I guess the sonofabitch while learning VB on his own, didnt buy a book advanced enough to teach him the 123's of Database Management.
Anyway, to top it all, I had to give justification about my hours to my Project Manager. I toiled day in and day out (to the extent that I promised myself never to touch the UI ever again), and cleaned up the mess to a point where if someone looks at the UI, he or she doesnt clutch their heart and keel over (Think Dilbert!)
All through the two weeks it took me, I had to suffer all my counterparts sitting around me coding in C++ and passing smart ass comments on how the backcolor of TEXTBOX1 didnt match the Forecolor of LABEL1.
Rapid Nirvana
I used to build all kinds of custom multimedia presentations for a former employer. Typically, various parts of the presentation would be customizable by the end user (e.g. ability to swap out videos or change some text). On one project, the requirements kept changing every day but I worked hard to meet them, adding and removing features as requested. I spent about 3x the hours budgeted working on this thing. Finally, it ended up that what the client really wanted was an empty presentation with a pretty background that would let them add their own bullet lists to slides and then display the slides linearly. Yes, I had just re-created PowerPoint, only with less functionality and for 10x the price!
Your fantasies contain the seeds of important concepts.
You can have the best job in the world and it still sux because of who you work for.
Gee, are you talking about EDS?
I'd say the worst programming task (not job) I have heard of was when a programmer was told to search through hundreds of thousands of lines of source code and search for all profanity and "unprofessional references". The task was to allow the code to be made available for a 3rd party who might take offence at the profanity and other assorted comment gems. With a lot of the code datang back to the late eighties there were truckloads of changes and lines like "I don't know what the f#ck this does." became "The intent of this function is uncertain." Of course some could be done by regexps, but a fair bit of it had to be reading through the code file by file.
This did not sound like a fun job to me!
and you have until jan 19, 2038 to fix it right
bite my glorious golden ass.
In my day, we used analogue computers and the requirements changed continuously
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
I once had to debug a legacy TCL script that was serveral thousand lines in length. I win already, but, in fact, it got worse. Every variable was named after a different species of rodent. No lie.
if {$vole == $mouse} {
set temp_9 $weasel
} else {
set temp_9 $stoat
}
So THAT'S why we haven't seen Duke Nukem Forever yet!
This is my sig. There are many like it but this one is mine.
One of the funniest and scariest things I've ever heard in my life: >extreme anger "GOD DAMNIT VISUAL C IS A FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT! IT ONLY ALLOWS 16384 LOCAL VARIABLES!!!!"
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
At my first programming job, my first moronic PHB treated us all like we were a big MBA project. Yes, he WAS getting his MBA at the time.
He came up with a "mission statement" that had three parts: "Productivity, Punctuality, and Preciseness." He actually had a great big banner made up with a logo with three great big P's on it.
Truth be told, our productivity remained about the same, but the banner itself boosted our morale greatly. On the way to the restroom, we would look proudly at the banner and say, "I've got to P, P, P!"
Later, when designing a database to track our P, P, and P (at the PHB's request), one of the developers edited the logo, turning the P's upside down, making the new logo have a big 666 on it.
That PHB was an utter moron. But on the bright side of things, some of the other people I worked with were top-notch and are still great friends to this day.
The company itself, however, did stupid things, the least stupid of which was firing the newly-MBA-titled PHB that came up with such imbecilic mission statements and logos.
I'd write more, but suddenly I have to P, P, P!
.sig wanted. Inquire within.
Because no monitor known to man is capable of displaying lines that long.
Initech?
-ashot
I'm not fat, I have an eating disorder. I can be bothered to pay attention, I just have ADD. I don't want to shirk from intellectual effort with menial tasks, I just have OCD. I do want to interact with others, I'm just autistic. I try to learn to spell, I'm just dyslexic. I'm not afraid of progress, I'm just a conservative. I do believe in society, I'm just a Libertarian. I'm not envious, I'm a Marxist. I'm not using Windows, I'm running fdisk in preparation for a future Linux install. Ad nauseam et infinitum.
Purported duties: Develop database schemas, input forms, and reporting tools for a small nonprofit.
Actual job included: Feeding envelopes into a laser printer one by one, by hand, because the individually-printed addresses would purportedly increase the willingness of donors to part with their money in our fund-raising campaigns.
I almost told them I'd do the grunt work for double the pay, but in the end I just quit.
You worked on Daikatana?
I quit Keane without notice and the HR person saw fit to point out that, by Keane policy, I would never be able to work there again. I almost bit my tongue right off.
Premature optimization is the root of all evil
Actually I designed "Clippy" at the behest of management in Redmond...Let me see anyone TOP that for worst job. I KNEW no one would want him..
Year 2000 work reading through hundreds of pages of PL/SQL looking for non year 2000 compliant code - that sucked.
Other than that; the worst job I ever had was pulling lobsters out of Jayne Mansfields arse...
What are you listening to? (http://megamanic.blogetery.com/)
I once had to debug about 100,000 lines of code where the author had #define'd malloc to be phalloc
My boss can be a total bitch sometimes. She drools, screams inceasantly and demands every waking moment of my time. I'm on call 24/7 and I do mean 24/7. There hasn't been a day this week where I wasn't called by her at 4am and spent at least an hour working before getting to go back to sleep and wake up again at 7am to her voice. Oh, did I mention that there is no monetary reimbursement for this position? I get paid in shit, literally.. My boss is my 9 month old daughter..
On the bright side, she is definetley the most intelligent boss I've ever had and when I do spend time with her, its been the best use of my time among any other boss I worked for. Plus I'm guarenteed a vacation in another 17 years and 3 months!
The road between democracy and tyranny is paved with secrecy in the name of security.
One summer, I worked in a web dev team in a university hospital. We took in "orders" from various professors in the medical school (class webpages and whatnot) and made it for them. One of the huge projects that summer was a complete and concise pictorial encyclopedia of all known STDs (and I don't mean std::cout - well, I suppose it comes from careless std::cin std::cout std::cin std::cout). Let me tell you - I managed to save a lot of money that summer - because I did not need to eat lunch all day during my 8-hr shift after looking at these pieces of art. It's amazing what people can manage to do to themselves.
On top of all that - it was $9/hr.
There are a huge number of yeast infections in this county. Probably because we're downriver from the bread factory.
I've done the manual DB filler also (10,000 snail-mail addresses that were sent on PAPER for me to build a mailing list from for a National Laboratory Symposium)
The main reason was when I worked at a contractor to a National Paging Company about 10 years ago. Here's the list:
-- PHB of project worked in another state. Was always on vacation, and was overheard "I will kill everyone on this project"
-- Code review was trapping PHB at some resort or the other and showing him the program. He would critique it (nothing written about what the damm thing was supposed to do), and send changes back requiring huge rewrites as well as making the next milestone.
-- Everyone worked ~20 hrs per day 7 days per week. I was considered a slacker when I only put in 110 hrs per week w/ a newborn at home.
-- Phone menu system that covered 3 walls of a 10k sq foot office. Even the designers got lost in there every day, and they had rejected voice samples for the "Press one for...." voice. One number in a string would be OK followed by a number that sounded like it was said thru 10 inches of insulation in a whisper.
-- 20 yrs of RDBMS research was thrown out in favor of a custom built (from the ground up) database that crashed every time one message passed thru it (it was supposed to handle 100K concurrent connections)
-- Company stole all the development systems so that they could fleece some investors. They had a lackey in the back room to do the following. Message was sent and system flamed out. Lackey powered off the system, got another working, and repeated until 8 mesages went thru (60 systems flamed all over the ground by that point). It took 3 days to rebuild the charred remains back for development, and we were still required to make that week's milestones.
-- Windows code took over 2 days to compile (I guess that's a feature...less time for it to actually cause damage by running)
-- Some idiot decided that MFC was easy enough to work with (It's C++ after all), so they stuffed the entire MFC code set on top of the Macintosh C++ Libraries unchanged....man talk about a cat fight of code......NOTHING worked. Every call had to pass thru the MFC to the Mac Libraries, and back again so double the effort for ANY action...including touching the mouse or keyboard.
-- I was asked to debug a problem in the Macintosh code. I found it in a very low level library and fixed ~20 other bugs that hadn't even been identified yet. I got yelled at for going outside the code for the one window that the bug had been listed for.
I lasted about 6 months and actually cried on the way to work on occasion. When I quit, the only reaction from the others left behind was jealousy that I had actually had the balls to quit.
I still love the programming process, but now I do it for the odd CGI need, to automate my Sys Admin chores and to study Math and Graphics as a hobby. I'm MUCH happier
"I never get lost because everybody tells me where to go"
"Like when your boss has chronic halotosis (or "halo" for short.)"
Whoah! You worked for Gooshie?!
Ah crap. Perfect setup for a rare Quantum Leap reference, and I can't make it funny.
"Derp de derp."
I was working as a consultant at a large oil company, and one of my tasks was to train up an employee on the framework. She was this older Chinese lady, very nice and seemed to pick things up as well as any other employee there.
The thing was, she'd come over to my cube, which was in a very quiet area of the floor, and let off these loud farts. She never gave the slightest reaction. I didn't know how to handle it at all. I couldn't bring myself to make a joke about it to this lady who was probably someones grandmother. Definately the most awkward joke ever.
where missing something would land me in court and not the boss.
I don't know about you, but I'd rather end up landing in court than landing in the boss.
What the hell project were YOU on? Duke Nukem Forever?
-R
"Converting a quarter of a million lines of VB code to Java..."
Man, talk about overworking your colon....
"Derp de derp."
5 years ago a PHB where I was working decided that we had to go object oriented and in all his wisdom decided that re-compiling the existing code with a c++ compiler would do the job. possibly the worst 2 week assignement i ever got.
BP http://www.card-central.com
You'd be better off internationalising it... ;-)
They will never know the simple pleasure of a monkey knife fight
You're underestimating just how depraved and desperate some porn-junkies can be. If there's a market for scat-porn for goodness sake, there just has to be a market for vienna sausages.
Sounds to me you are not a real programmer.
Real programmers don't have friends, they don't travel places (unless for job reasons) and they don't work doors at bars. ever.