Slashdot Asks: What Are Some Insults No Developer Wants To Hear? (infoworld.com)

snydeq writes: Flame wars in the bug tracker might be exactly the right (harsh) feedback your code needs, writes Peter Wayner in his run-down of the insults no programmer wants to hear about their code or coding skills. "The technology world is a bit different than the pretty, coiffed world of suits and salesdroids where everyone is polite, even when they hate your guts and think you're an idiot. Suit-clad managers may smile and hide their real message by the way they say you're doing "great, real great pal," but programmers often speak their minds, and when that mind has something unpleasant to say, look-out, feelings." Instead of posting this story in a click-bait fashion as presented from InfoWorld, we thought we'd ask the developers of Slashdot: What are some insults no developer wants to hear? Some of the classic insults include: N00b, /dev/null, Eye Candy, Fanboi, and [Nothing]. Are there any insults you are familiar with that aren't mentioned in the list?

Comments

Loss confidence was biggest insult.

[gachunt]

In the 15 years of my professional career, there's only been one day when I didn't want to come to work.

That was the day after the IT department accused me of intentionally crashing their network, and my Director didn't back me up.

That loss of confidence in my integrity was far worse than any spoken word.

Re:Loss confidence was biggest insult.

[davecb]

I resigned from for cause when my management didn't back me up on authenticating a security officer before I discussed our site security with him. The parent company's switchboard, when I called them long-distance on my own nickel, confirmed they had no such person.

Re:"Did you even test this??!!!"

[squiggleslash]

They never pass bit on. It's always "I got a 'Software Fatal Error', what do I do?" "Oh, could you tell me what it said?" "Uh, 'Software Fatal Error'", "No, underneath, where it said something like "Error code 1234", "Oh, I didn't see that bit, I just clicked 'Close Program' and called you".

At one point my then employer and I had a great idea, which we never implemented, that we should show pictures with each error message, so the call would go "Hey, I just used your product, and it showed me a picture of a tree and said 'Software Error'", "A tree? Ah, that means you're out of memory. Might mean a memory leak. Can you tell me what you were doing before you saw the tree..."