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Funniest IT Related Boasts You've Heard?

Posted by Cliff on from the humorous-distraction-from-american-politics dept.

Karma asks: "The other day I saw a Slashdot comment which read, '[Projects] don't start getting interesting until you are dealing with Staff Years to develop them. Anything under that and you can actually keep the full design in your head'. An immodest boast, but not too funny. This made me wonder, in the macho worlds of IT and developers, what are the funniest and silliest boasts or bragging claims you've made, or heard? Tell us how they came back to haunt the overconfident."

5 of 490 comments (clear)

  1. The classic Bill Gates by tantalic · · Score: 5, Informative
    "640K ought to be enough for anybody"

    Of course there are disputes as to whether this was actually said or not, or the context...but certainly one of the funniest and most famous tech boasts.

    1. Re:The classic Bill Gates by mbourgon · · Score: 3, Informative

      It's interesting, yes. I went looking through my stash for the video. I'm reminded of the "that'd be up the butt, Bob" story on The Newlywed Game. They had a special a year or two ago, and the host of The Newlywed Game said that he had told people for years that it never happened, it was an urban legend, etc... and then his people found the tape. The question was "where's the weirdest place you've had sex". Hispanic couple, the wife said "in the ass". (The husband's was "in the car")

      Not that that really proves a damn thing (except that one urban legend is true), but it's a cool story.

      --
      "Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
  2. Re:"Expert Programmer" by some+guy+I+know · · Score: 3, Informative
    Expecting a person to remember, in a high stress situation, the terminology you learned in school tests the trivia.
    "singly-linked list" is not some obscure specialized computer term. Anyone who doesn't even know what a singly-linked list is has no business writing software (except maybe some financial software or web pages (if you consider HTML et al to be "software")).

    Here is my solution, written in LISP. Since the OP didn't specify where on the list to add the item, I will add it to the front.
    (push item-to-be-added my-list)
    --
    Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
  3. Two simple anecdotes by daem0n1x · · Score: 3, Informative

    Some years ago, my boss had a meeting with a colleague of mine about a new product. In the end he asked him how much time he needed to develop that. The guy answered "two weeks". It took him a year. We still use the "two weeks" joke to refer to never-ending projects.

    Once, I was talking with my boss about how stupid some blue-collar people are when they refuse to use helmets or safety-goggles at work, just to play macho. Then I said a stupid joke about macho IT workers: "True men don't make backups". It was intended to be a joke, but some weeks later we lost our entire codebase because the server disks fried. The server was managed by a different department. The guys that were in charge of nursing it didn't have any backup, in spite of THAT being THEIR job. I think my boss still shivers when he remembers that joke. I'll keep it as a motto, and never trust anyone to backup my work.

  4. Re:I AM AN EXPERT IN C++ by Daleks · · Score: 3, Informative

    As a joke a friend of mine and I started pronouncing C# as "see pound." My friend had a job interview and he kept calling it "see pound," and only realized this a few hours after the interview. Oops? No job for him.