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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)?"
quote from a former boss:
"while it may be faster than dlt tapes, 're-typing' is not a valid recovery strategy."
2 1337 4 u!
Writing worms and viri for spammers. And go figure, the fucker split when I had finished and paid me in Penis Enlargement Pills.
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.".
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No matter how thin you slice it, its still baloney.
You're the only one I know who's had a job in your dad.
Of course, everyone's had a job in your mom.
The Blaster Master Fighting for Truth, Justice, and Evil Pie since 1979
Converting a quarter of a million lines of VB code to Java...
How many billions of lines of Java did you end up with?
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! :)
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.
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 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!
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.
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
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.
At least you knew what you were working on. One of my first Jobs in the AF was to take a known input and convert it to a desired output in C. Nothing at all strenuous, right?
Do that for 5 months straight and still have absolutely NO IDEA what the hell you're working on. Some of them had been at it for years. The bosses would come in, give us our next assignment, and leave with the old one. That's all we saw of our bosses.
I found out later what the code was for (combined to become the lamest of all the great lamnesses) but you try finding a programming job later and answering the question "So what kind of programs did you write" and answer with all honesty "I have know Idea"
..which just shows that the human brain is ill-adapted for thinking and was probably designed for cooling the blood-T P
The beginning of the program went something like this
INTEGER MAXCORE
MAXCORE = (memory on machine)
DOUBLE PRECISION A
DIMENSION A(MAXCORE)
Yes, the array A took up every bit of memory. What about other variables? There weren't any. There was A. Store your data in A. Do you remember what A(326) is?
I seem to remember some 2-d arrays in the code as well. Well, not really 2-d arrays, they were A. Just make sure to keep track of the rows and column indices, ok?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I don't mind Photoshop designs, so long as the person doing 'em knows what HTML can do.
:)
Couple of years ago I (a lowly coder scrub) told a director (over a couple of hundred people) that the design that some ad firm made up wouldn't work. We're talking everything with rounded corners, overlapping, with dropshadows everywhere and some weird ass font for all the text. And it was all "critical" to have. On any browser. On any platform. Over a 28K modem.
Now, I'm a hell of an HTML hack. I've committed more cross-browser rendering engine abuse than is legal. But what she wanted was flat out impossible in HTML (in Flash, sure...).
After being shot down multiple times in a big meeting, I'd had it. I just said "Look, it DOESN'T WORK THAT WAY. If your designers can figure out how, I'd be very impressed". So she gives me an "I'll show you" look and tells the designers to produce an HTML prototype.
A week later the revised design (sans impossible stuff) was on my desk. Bitch
"Faith: Belief without evidence in what is told by one who speaks without knowledge, of things without parallel." - A.B.
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.