Slashdot Mirror
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."
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...
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.
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!
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.
"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!
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!
Of course it was a long day. A day is 86400 seconds, and a short can only hold 65536. Duh.
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.
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.
You should get (Score: 6, Insightful) for that comment as today, November 2, 2004, millions of American voters go to the polls and select a candidate for the topmost job in the land based on exactly that same criterion.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
You kids...
-davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.