My friend Sven, a programmer by trade who never stops complaining about the cretinous sub-literates that are subordinate to him, messages me:
sven: Wow. I so need a break.
sven: A colleague checked in some code that broke EVERYTHING, and then went home.
sven: His checkin comment? “For some reaoson it was bug.”
sven: WHAT DID GO WRONG
sven: FOR SOME REAOSON IT WAS BUG
John: HOW IS BABBY FORMED? HOW GIRL GET PRAGNENT?
sven: I ‘m just amazed at the “contaminate source repository, leave ESL comment, GET THE FUCK OUTTA HERE” mindset.
sven: I wonder how people would react to a “I’ve killed people for less.” roll-back comment.
John: I am truely sorry for your lots.
Programmers! Your horror stories in the comments, if you please!
What about commit updated project files for a newer version of the IDE we use (which not everybody in the team has yet) and leave for 2 week vacations? Of course, he didn’t check everything and some stuff won’t compile at all.
My pary is with the compiler.
Halls of horror:
http://thedailywtf.com/ or if they’ve decided to change the name this week, http://worsethanfailure.com
Within ye shall find interviews fraught with misfortune, bureaucratic labyrinthes, unplumbable logic, and the occasional creative spelling.
The phrase “You’re doing it wrong.” applies in many cases.
Given that guy’s attitude, I can totally see why subordinates would want to GTFO ASAP.
I once saw a note re an issue that had to be fixed:
// TODO: code is borken.
I could not help but laugh, though I know his pain.
At least they use source control.
I work as internal QA for a company that contracts out most of its web development work. Strangely, we have one company that sells us our e-commerce platform, and then another company that they make us deal with to get changes to the platform made.
We had a deployment go wrong a few weeks ago, due to a missed step by a new employee on their side. But once we had that resolved, the development team recommended that rather than redeploying the build that had failed, we do an entirely new build, and test it from scratch. Why? To pick up any changes that might have been made to the code. Not that he could tell me what changes were made, or even if any were made.
I was half hoping they had found some catastrophic problem and were trying to fix it without telling us, but this same organization has shown such complete incompetence with source control (the contract company kept checking development changes into trunk rather than branching, and the core vendor didn’t seem to understand going back to an older build and branching from there) that I have to conclude they just don’t know what they’re doing.
And yet, we still give them money…..
The best thing about programming in Basic is waiting three hours for the cassette tape to load.
/yeah I know that tech didn’t stick around forever I just wanted to point out how leet and old-skool I was.
//Now some punch-card jerk will post and pw0n me.
I’m a C++ win32 programmer. Now, my “team leader” comes up to me one day and asks me this:
“Hey, I just spoke to some clients and I was wondering.. If we were to take your code, and run it on a linux machine, would it work?”
I proceeded to explain why W I N 3 2 doesn’t work on LINUX.
God, he’s an idiot.
Hey, LONGRAT, at least he asked. He didn’t TELL you to make it work.
Longrat: see http://winehq.org/ .
I took a C++ course in college where all the assignments used win32. I did them all on linux, using winelib instead.
One of the most painful projects the development team I’m in went through is still going on even though everything is supposed to be completed a year ago. The guy who started it is a great analyst, but his code makes me wish I wasn’t his friend just so I can hate him and not feel bad.
The following is an actual line he left in the code:
$value = ($value = 0.0)? 0 : $value;
His only excuse? It was written around 3 am.
We made a demotivator out of it, labelled it as “3 AM Code” and posted it around the development team’s area as a reminder of fail.
LogrusZed, punch cards are strictly for kiddies. Why, in my day we programmed the drum memory on the old SEL with ten toggle switches. Octal op code, load register, clear, repeat…
My “Great Moment in Programming” was when the boss insisted that we take time stamps on every data point – this was while we were testing the launch system for a nuclear missile, and we were gulping down over 80,000 data bytes per second but only sampling the real-time clock every 200 milliseconds. He wanted a time stamp on EVERY SINGLE WORD – which would have meant trying to record almost twice as much data, and we had already reached the limit of how fast it could be physically written to disk. Somehow I could not pound this idea though his head… he kept saying “you have a clock, so you know what time it is, just write it down when you write down the data point, dammit!”
For several days afterwards I went around forcing innocent people to learn two’s complement notation, just so I could prove to myself that it was the boss’s lack of comprehension and not my lack of teaching skills that were the problem.
That’s what you get for not using Erlang.
qwhen i can bbuy tshirte???
I worked at a place once whose Taiwanese/Chinese programmers put in an error message in our software that popped up telling the users “You are the self”. I could never figure out if it was meant to be useful information, an obscure Mandarin insult, or just way existential.
A while back we came across a stored SQL procedure that had the following conditional:
IF (column > 1 AND column < 3)
BEGIN…
Pretty obtuse way of checking for a value of 2. I’m still not convinced it wasn’t done on purpose to get a chuckle though.
Was that supposed to be “$value == 0.0″ (equals) or “$value = 0.0″ (assignment)? Either way it’s fubar
#16 – see, he’s comparing it against a floating point zero, and setting it to an integer zero. Or something.
Maybe the compiler might do something non-obvious with it, I don’t know. I do most of my programming these days on 8-bit MCUs with hundreds of bytes of memory. Floating point is a luxury, one which I can rarely afford in my code. Fortunately you can do lots of clever (and fairly ugly) things with integer math.
I once had to debug some VBA macros in an Excel spreadsheet (We all had to start somewhere). The functions all had automatically generated names like function1 function2 etc. The only comments that had been added were:
‘old section
‘new section
‘new new section
‘old new section
‘old old section
I thought for completeness I should mark my code as “new old section”, but after realising that almost all the code was never actually called (the working code was in a section that had no comments at all) I gave up and started from scratch with a database and web front end.
John, is it really appropriate to mock the man’s english skills because he didn’t uphold his co-workers work expectations? These seem to me to be separate issues, and frankly conflating them disses every ESL student out there. Believe me you, I’ve seen plenty of negative correlations on English skills and work ethics.
I was hoping that the ESL reference was programmers’ speak that went over my outofdate head.
Makes the funny much less so.
as pointed out by a CF programmer at my work: “I wasn’t sure what this did, so I commented it out”
Hmm.