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Funniest IT Related Boasts You've Heard?
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."
Unfortunately, this is true in some cases. I'd even say "Bad code is self documenting." The code base my nose is stuck in right now is a prime example. I'd rather this code base have no docs than the misleading and outdated docs it does have. Sigh.
I often hear Linux & Unix admins talking about their tremendous uptime. I regard these people as a little unwise and arrogant, more concerned with meaningless bragging numbers instead of focusing on the stability of the system.
Lately, I inherited [1] a surviving dotcom [2] with 20 unix computers. The
Of course, 2 months after the previous Unix admin quits, power goes out on a couple power strips at the AT&T Datacenter [3] and I need to restart the computers.
The OS comes up fine, but the init scripts for the Apache, Java App server, and misc. servers were all hosed, and I had to investigate each one and restart all of the important services on all machines. This turned a 5 minute downtime into a 2 hour downtime... AT 3 IN THE FUCKING MORNING!
Screw your uptime, test your startup scripts. Distaster recovery is more important.
[1] I was hired, then the parent company laid a bunch of people off. Fuck me!
[2] Not surviving any more! Fuck me!
[3] Top of the line reliability, yeah right.
94% of Repubs and 21% of Dems voted to renew the Patriot Act
Yeah, my old boss used to give me resumes to vet. I used to see stuff like "ten years .Net experience!" At first I was shocked, but then I got out my red pen and started annotating. I'd use very descriptive terms: "Bullshit", "He's lying, it hasn't existed that long", "Does this company even exist?" and so forth. Nobody cared. They ignored my comments, hired the low bid, and never asked me to look at resumes again.
Since then I've realized that at some companies, resumes really ARE expected to be fiction, and they select the fiction they enjoy the most.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
I guy who just took an SQL intro class blurted out in the middle of a meeting, "Can't you take your system and rewrite it all in [just] SQL so that it is only a few lines?"
And then another time someone claimed that they could make something 1/2 the original code size by rewriting it in Lisp. I gave them a code example to try it on, but they made some vague excuses and changed the subject.
Somewhat related, the C2 wiki has an interesting "alarm-bell phrases" list to help detect when big claims are about to be stated:
http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlarmBellPhrases
Table-ized A.I.
I've given up on programming for a private company. There are plenty of jobs in civil service, academia, large public institutions... Many of those won't be programming jobs in the future, but at least they pay the bills.
The real last straw for me was the start of the recession, right around 2000, when I started seeing job offers that required several years experience in twenty technologies, some of which were mutually exclusive.
Let alone the fact (the FACT) that no one is capable of getting five years meaningful experience in all those technologies at a single company.
No, what really bothered me was this: Companies inflate their requirements for two primary reasons:
1. They want to make sure that NOBODY will qualify for the job so they can justify hiring an H1-B to fill it, instead of an American, or a Brit, or whatever.
2. They want to make sure that anyone they DO hire MUST have lied on the resume, so they can fire him whenever they want without paying unemployment benefits.
This wasn't what was going on where I used to work; that manager just didn't care, and didn't want to listen to my complaints. But you can be pretty sure that a lot of companies work this way.
Be careful with those resume fictions; they could bite you in the ass later, when you try to vest stock options or otherwise stand up for yourself.
Farewell! It's been a fine buncha years!
Me (code reviewing): Were are your error handlers? You didn't write any...
He: My programs don't have errors. I don't need no error handlers...
Additional note: He wrote a VB6 app that had to do alot of file access
Slightly O/T, but for interest: there have been a couple of public reports recently from people who investigate CVs for potential employers here in the UK. Currently, they all put the proportion of CVs containing a seriously misleading (inflated) statement at around 1/3, and rising.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
We once got an application from someone who claimed to know "every programming language" on his resume.
You can, in fact, write a simple raytracer in a couple of hours. Here's one of mine.
My website
Well your slashdot uid is still not as low as mine. I got my account on day 1. Where were you?
here is a transcript.