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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."
Yeah, I can write a raytracer in a single day. /He did. It was a looooong day.
badness 10000
We have a person at our work place that once boasted that he did not have to debug his programs, they just worked. And he was completely serious. Of course what we did not tell him, but we should have, is that we found a bug in his program.
Mid-Eastern Pennsylvania Gaming Convention
Not quite a boast but -- a low-level admin at my wife's old workplace sent out this (paraphrased) email:
"I'm leaving this job to start my own network consulting firm. I'm feeling a lot of emotions right now, and here's a song that really captures them."
And he attaches a 5 meg MP3 file and sends it to hundreds of people, completely sinking their mail server.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Best one I've heard was from a newly-minted and very pro-MS CIO who claimed (right after Win2K first came out) that Active Directory was a much better solution for their company network (thousands of employees and dozens of offices) than the existing Novell Netware/NDS.
They went through half a dozen consulting firms before firing the CIO and everyone else involved in the project...
The Campus network services at a Jr. College I went to a few years ago: "Yes we do know our ass from a router."
This of course was after a quick nmap found everything running telnet. Which was also running without a password. Turn dhcp off on a few of those babies and somone has to work a Looonng night.
There is nothing wrong with being gay. It's getting caught where the trouble lies.
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.
"Good code is self-documenting."
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
"I started using Gentoo on the desktop and now I've rolled it out as a production server using some great technologies: ReiserFS, RAID-5, Gentoo patched kernel, Samba ... you name it."
heard once per interview
I'm not sure I see the reas...oh, waitaminute, I see it! Fortunately code is self documenting obviously implies that you're working on a COBOL system.
Top 12 Things A Klingon Programmer Would Say
12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!
11. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!
10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.
9. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!
8. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.
7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.
6. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.
5. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.
4. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!
3. By filing this SPR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!
2. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!
1. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!
The friendliest digital photography forums on the net!
He was right. HE didn't have to debug his programs. He had you for that.
- For the complete works of Shakespeare: cat
I've never missed a cover sheet on my TPS reports!
Direct away from face when opening.
Thats a good one.
The funniest boast I ever heard was a guy at a computer game shop. I was looking at the games and this guy started talking to me. After chatting about games for a bit, he started telling me about how he had obtained the full Windows 2000 source code, made some changes, and compiled a special version that played his games better.
15 years Java experience... when Java's not that old. I've seen a number of cases like those on resumes, using technology for longer than it was around for.
In the case of Java, no, they weren't working for Sun while it was being developed.
-beaker
"I've been posting on Slashdot since before there was moderation, or even user accounts. No man, it's true! I even have a low, three-digit UID, to prove it. I swear, man!"
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Must have at least 5 years expirence.
I see that on resumes all the time. So I put them in front of a white board and ask them to show me the code to add an item to a singly linked list, using the language of their choice.
1 out of 15 pass. It's pathetic.
Can you pass this test? Post a link to your resume, we are hiring in the East Bay, California. C#.
The Vulcan computer science directory has determined that the existence of programming bugs is impossible.
I overheard a salesdroid touting that their support line offered 24/7 support, Monday-Friday 8am to 8pm.
INsigNIFICANT
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
Higher up boss was complaining why the project wasn't being done the wau he just suddenly came up with.
Low-level boss, who had fought to do it that way for months and was shot down by this higher up boss only to do it the current way, says, "I can't beging to think about doing it the right way until I finish doing it the wrong way... poorly."
Wheeeee
2) We don't need to test it!
3) Requirements? What are those?
4) We're a level 5 organization!
5) We'll save money using window's Outlook
6) Extreme Programming
7) Cleanroom.
Strangely enought, it isn't.
ntoskrnl.exe is.
Kernel32.dll is the user-mode public interface to the basic kernel functionality.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
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.
One manager at my work boasted that his group's code didn't have any bugs in it. Whenever a bug was assigned to his group, he would reassign it elsewhere. Seriously! When challenged on it he would get very insulted.
Then one day a bug he reassigned got fixed. The root cause was code that the manager had written back in that distant two week period when he actually touched code. Rather than tell him who wrote it, the other managers talked about the "really lame" coding error. We he got all righteous about the bug as well, they told him he wrote it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Of course it was a long day. A day is 86400 seconds, and a short can only hold 65536. Duh.
I was told that I had to set up the server to include the cwd in the path so that students didn't have to always type ./a.out
Later I was asked if I hade done it and the conversation went something like this:
boss: did you get that done?
me: Yep, students group is all set up.
boss: only the students?
me: Well I figured the staff should know to change their own path.
Fastduke
There was a ten year old in my intro to CSE class who'd already written an ada compiler. That'll kill your self-esteem.
... I hacked the school network once. It's not exactly hard. I used a website I wrote in C++. My monitor's way faster than yours and my CPU's made my GeForce.
I had a 13 year old kid tell me "I know everything about computers". I grinned, and sold him a modem for his mom's computer.
itanium will kill the RISC server market.
itanium was the first mass-market 64-bit processor.
64-bit is not required on the desktop.
People are waiting for itanium before they move to 64-bit.
itanium is the fastest processor in the world.
itanium is the industry standard 64-bit architecture.
itanium is an open standard. Other 64-bit processors are proprietary.
Next year, itanium will be the biggest-selling 64-bit processor.
Windows NT is more advanced than UNIX.
Linux can't do everything Windows can.
Windows NT will kill UNIX.
Windows is faster than Linux.
Next year, everyone will be running itanium servers running 64-bit Windows.
Windows NT is portable.
Stick Men
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
Had an error when posting it... didn't know it came trough... posted another version
"If you can do it, it ain't braggin"
I don't get it, is it supposed to be impossible to game under linux? If the gamer in question is basically just playing the few games that are actually ported to linux, it would not be difficult at all. And for Windows-only games, you can still run the games fine using WineX in many cases. I run Warcraft 3 just perfectly with WineX. I can not tell the difference from playing it under Windows. This is not a boast, I simply used WineX and it worked.
Or was it an attempt at +3 funny?
A short can hold values from -32768 to 32767. You meant an unsigned short day.
It's easier than you might think to fall into this kind of trap. If you are strong at writing expressions and flow of control type statements, you may have a much lower defect rate for things like 'off by one' than many programmers. This can lead to an illusion of invincibility.
The problem is that so many bugs come from the interfaces between different program modules and (worse yet) systems.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
I used to be responsible for a number of Shiva LANRover dialin boxes.
When Shiva started to sell their VPN boxes, a guy from Shiva came and presented them to me, my boss and a few others.
The most important feature about the Shiva VPN boxes was that they where the only one in the market that could actually talk to boxes from other vendors...
I worked for a company that had never even considered doing peer review before an Indian (not the Native American type) was overheard bragging about how for the last two years, he had written all of his variable names in Hindi and that they wouldn't dare fire him now. He was half right. They didn't fire him at that point, but for the next six months, he had to go to daily meetings with his three tiers of bosses to show the work he had done in translating the variable names back to English.
Problem solved, right? Not really. While he was translating some files to English, he was also busy translating others to Hindi. Right before he was put back on a project, his new "work" had been discovered because, again, he was overheard bragging about how they would never fire him. This time they cut his pay by $20 an hour for the duration of the repairs, locked him out of the version control software to prevent any more damage, and the day after he finished, there was a total peer review of every file he had ever worked on. Once the day long meeting was over, he was asked to stand up in front of everyone and told by the VP of engineering that he was fired.
The bad thing is that the company still doesn't believe in peer reviews, but it's a good company to work for because it is almost impossible to get fired.
------
There's a fine line between cuddling and holding someone down so they can't get away.
Linux contains SCO source code!
"Yeah, they tell me I've got the best response times in the entire company. Probably helps that some of them are negative -- brings down my average."
No, he didn't invent time travel... he actually got some problems fixed before the helpdesk called him and told him to go over and fix them. So he had dang-near-zero response time on a lot of calls... and yes, some that the central-helpdesk newbies put in as being done before being started, so he had negative times.
Pity the company got hit with fraud charges and I ha... erm, he had to move west...
"After I graduate, I'm going to college as a computer engineering major. I'm going to make a computer where the whole Internet is in hardware so it's faster."
"Be Happy or Die." -- AoN
Uh, so create a view for the moron and be done with it.
We once got an application from someone who claimed to know "every programming language" on his resume.
The guys at Best Buy are worse. They'll just spout off nonsense
The best example of this was when Best Buy was selling the original blue iMac. I thought I had heard it all until I overheard a sales goon tell a potential customer, "Bill Gates had a virus on his network, the only way he could remove it was by adding an iMac".
Wow.
"Chips and Dips", anyone? I think I first came for the Windowmaker dock apps.
I stayed for "duck pins".
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters.
"Additional note: He wrote a VB6 app that had to do alot of file access"
;-)
Well, that's one error right there....
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Why would anyone ever use a linked list?
You want a specific example? Okay, the kernel process queues. These are linked lists that store information about which process is waiting on what: there's a queue for processes that are waiting for a CPU to become free, a queue for processes that are waiting for activity on a filehandle (for example, all the preforked web servers waiting on the accepting filehandle), etc.
They cause memory fragmentation
You can use a free list of processes, or have the processes in an array and just link them onto the queues as needed without pulling them from the array.
screw up your cache
I have no idea how you come to that conclusion
add two pointers of overhead per item (quite possibly in a different memory location from the data)
The link field is in the process data structure, so it's one pointer per item, and always in the same location as the data.
are slow to access thanks to all that dereferencing
Ah, that's a big deal there. For example, the run queue is a sorted list. You almost always pull elements off from the head. Moreover, you put elements on in the middle, sorting on their PRI.
If the run queue were implemented as an array, you'd have to move stuff on every insert. If you're smart, you're putting the soonest-run process at the end, so you don't have to move everything when you delete. But now you're also having to track the length so you can find the last one, instead of just having a pointer straight to the element you're about to access (ie, the head).
Also, you can move processes between queues quickly. When a SYN comes into your HTTP socket, you can move one of the preforked processes from the accept queue to the run queue by changing a few pointers, instead of having to do laborious copies of array chunks.
In general, arrays are good for indexed access, and changes at the end. But they suck at changes in the middle. They also don't let you walk a list as it's changing, at least, not as easily as a linked list does. Also, linked lists let you very easily move items between multiple lists. There's lots of reasons to go one way or another. You implied that you've read Knuth; I find it surprising that you didn't pick up that there are different structures for different needs.
This is just one example; there's many others. Don't make sweeping assumptions about what the right data structure is in all cases. If the interviewer tells you to write a linked list, then write a linked list; don't argue that no-one would ever use a linked list.
meep! meep!
You kids...
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
I interviewed a guy back in '96 I think for a VB job. The company that recommended him even flew him out from his current job in Iowa to NJ to talk to us. I was impressed...his resume was 4 pages long and talked about all the technologies he had worked on. One got the impression that this was a VB/SQL Server guru, who would be everything and more that we needed.
When I met him, he was visibly nervous, and I figured it was just the usual interview stress plus he had just flown in a snowstorm. As we were trying to get out of there ourselves (it turned out to be a *huge* snowstorm), we got down to business, and I asked him a couple of difficult VB questions that would have been winners if he could answer. Well, he couldn't.
Okay, so ask a few easier questions. Nada. I drop it down to *extremely* easy questions (max value of int in VB3, how to do arrays, etc.). Zip. My partner asked a *very* simple sql question ("how do you update a table?") and he came up blank.
Now I'm starting to really *read* his resume, instead of skimming it, and I came upon this little gem: He had put into production some huge program written in VB 4 back in 1995 (not a typo, as it also mentioned being 32-bit). I excused myself for a second, got my beta copy of VB 4 dated 1996 and returned. I dropped the disc on the table and said, in effect, that he had lied on his resume, that there was no way he could have done this and here's the proof.
He was silent and said "Please don't make me go back to Iowa." I then was able to use the famous bartender line of "Well, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."
That was the only person I've ever interviewed that had to be escorted out by security.
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.
Over a year? Pretty unlikely. Windows 95 crashes after no more than 49.7 days. See this . But a cdrom over dial-up is reasonable; I dowloaded all 7 disks of debian woody that way.
This post written under Gentoo-linux with an SCO IP license.
"We've written a client-server database system" was a MS Access application with the MDB file on a network drive - and they couldn't understand why running the app over the WAN didn't work very well.
"I've done lots of network programming" (meant that the compiler was installed on his PC's hard disk but the source code files were on a shared drive, so everytime he compiled he thought he was doing network programming)
"When you write data to a socket, TCP/IP guarantees the data will be delivered" (hmmm, and they were going to write a global trading system that's now done over $20 trillion of trades).
"We've written the most sophisticated database in existence and so you can't see the source because you'd steal our secrets" (turns out they didn't know what indices were, the whole thing had no indices on any table, and the code was crap, oh, and it was Access 2)
"Our encryption is unbreakable" (data was encoded using the string OVER_THE_TOP_ENCRYPTION which was present as plaintext in the EXE - was later changed to CUSTARDCREAMS, still present as plaintext)
"The performance test of this software running on a 4-CPU Sun machine on a 100BaseT network was invalidated because we detected a rogue packet on the network (was actually a single UDP broadcast packet of about 800 bytes every 15 minutes) and that was chewing up all the cpu time as the network stack thrashed trying to decide what to do with the data because no program was listening to that port" (that from the networking expert of the consultancy department of a global carrier)
"The smartest programmer in the world who we were going to lend you to replace 50 of your crap guys - he won't be coming over because he refuses to fly over water and we've just explained that New York is an ocean away from London" (seems he didn't know that)
"I'm such a great programmer that the code I've written here is unreadable by anyone except me - in fact if you looked at it you'd probably think it's shit code, but in fact it's just that I'm so smart" (erm, well, it was shit, and it didn't work)
Oh there are loads more, but just typing those in has made me depressed.
I spent a lot of money on booze, birds and fast cars. The rest I just squandered. - George Best
Double digits? How'd you sign up, with punch cards?
Mod point free since 2001