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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 I'd rather this code base have no docs than the misleading and outdated docs it does have.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.
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'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!
Well your slashdot uid is still not as low as mine. I got my account on day 1. Where were you?