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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.
heard once per interview
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..."
> Can you pass this test?
Yes. But:
> C#.
You can't pay me enough.
[ approaching AI ]
You don't have to cheat to forget naming.
For many of the people I know, going to college for CS is about 2 things:
1) Learning basic programmatic workflow and practices
2) Being able to show the piece of paper
Unfortunately for alot of people hiring, #2 is most important. For employers who I have -respected- #1 is the most important and they can recognize that with #1 and a creative thinking brain that any coder can quickly pick up new languages and technologies.
And people who excel at creative programmatic thinking often are the types that remember concepts, not trivia (the idea of testing intelligence and not memory). Expecting a person to remember, in a high stress situation, the terminology you learned in school tests the trivia.
Forgetting terminology (versus forgetting -theory-) doesn't mean that they cheated in school, it only means they remembered stuff differently. How many of us remember more than one or two geometry theorems even a few months after passing our last geometry test?
It is sad, but there are a number of elitists out there who use tests like the one you are so proud of. Do you give any type of explanation if the interview-ee says "what do you mean by that?" or do you assume that they have failed at that point? If you assume failure at that point you are the problem, not them.
If on the other hand you give a brief example and wait to see if they catch on, then you should be able to see who is truly good by how quickly they can code and/or how efficient that code is.
A person doesn't need to know the terminology -before- they join a group to be useful to that group. They need to be able to quickly put your group's terminology into a working context and start expanding on it. Otherwise all you are doing is a form of secret handshake.
This is one of the reasons that the original IQ tests were considered to be biased. They measured vocabulary knowledge as a prerequisite to concepts. Newer tests try to be language independent, recognizing that cognitive ability is more important.
Or in shorter terms, I agree with the grandparent of this post, you made the kind of boast that the submitter was talking about.
It is more productive to voice thoughtful opinions (reply) than to judge (moderate) others.
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!
Bob: "With the magic of Gentoo, I'm already running KDE 3.4!"
Joe: "KDE 3.4 isn't out yet."
Bob: "Like I said, with the magic of Gentoo..."
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
Get real. I have an NT 4 machine which dates from 1995 in production and it never ever crashes. That machine has mucho better uptimes than any Linux servers I have. In fact, its my primary domain controller.
And my dad still runs a machine with 286 Xenix on it. Still works fine. In production.
The dangers of excessive individualism are nothing compared to the oppressiveness of excessive collectivism
Nice boast. ;-)
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
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.
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.