Shit that you come across daily that pisses you off

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > Shit that you come across daily that pisses you off

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

Janin posted:

They've also banned "hard-to-read" language features like the ternary operator,

We kind of did the opposite - we formalized it, to the point where if you had an if-else assignment block shorter than like 10 lines it was expected to make it into a ternary operator in the code review.

I didn't really agree with going that excessively, but using ternary for small stuff is fine by me.

At my new summer job, we have no standards (or code reviews, or source control, or issue tracking) whatsoever. I'm using my own local subversion repository and copy of trac to keep track of development, and simple concepts like refactoring and commenting are not really working out for the fulltime employees, so I do a lot of rebuilding of their code while they're not looking.

It's exciting, because cowboy programming always is.

# ¿ May 7, 2009 17:45

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# ¿ May 24, 2013 18:00

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

PirateDentist posted:

That sounds more like a fancy spreadsheet interface than a time clock. There should be one button, if you're punched in, it punches you out, and vice versa. Everywhere I've worked uses a Kronos system, just swipe the card and that's it.

That's what my kneejerk response was, and then I read that River Raid's problem is that the users are too stupid/ignorant/oblivious to clock in at all.

No matter how you change the interface, it can't force them to use it. One solution would be to rig it up so that use of some critical system is dependent upon the clock-in (perhaps rig it to a login script on their terminal or something) but even that has a ton of deployment hassles.

# ¿ May 21, 2009 02:23

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

You hired me to work on C# software development, how the hell should I know how to fix your personal printer?

No, don't bring it into the office.

I'm afraid to mention that I like cars too loudly lest I start getting asked to take a look at the founder's shitbox IS300. Apparently the developer before me freaked out and had a screaming fit for upwards of an hour and a half after a year of this treatment and this doesn't register in their minds as it being a "bad idea" to force programmers to administer Exchange Server.

e: vvv I know, I wanted an IS300 until I found out he has one. It's an automatic with kerb rash and fender rust, and for some reason he keeps parking next to me in an otherwise empty parking lot.

Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at Jun 2, 2009 around 03:53

# ¿ Jun 1, 2009 19:33

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

My current demon is companies that are just big enough to afford a wad of software but too rinky-dink to bother keeping track of what licenses are in use.

Echo187 posted:

I hate this one! People will contact us for their password even though we have a "Forgotten Password" link right next to the login button.

My aforementioned boss tried to send a summer publishing intern to find the phone number for Amazon so he could call them to have them reset his password - because with the phone, you get results, right away!

I can't imagine it having a better outcome than my first week of employment, where he yelled at a Dell CSR for upwards of 30 minutes about his ethnicity and place of employment (with his office door wide open) until he got transferred to the US and told that the Windows product key was actually on the front of the case.

Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at Jun 9, 2009 around 07:15

# ¿ Jun 9, 2009 07:12

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

Stored procedures and views are not the same thing, guy who worked on this app before I did.

# ¿ Jun 22, 2009 17:15

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

Mick posted:

It's under source control, dude. Besides, do you see the 500 lines of code before and after that stuff you added? We're getting along just fine not knowing the exact day they were put in.

One of my illustrious teammates on my summer job likes to comment out all of the code he is replacing. Which is fine, I do it too, except I actually delete it when it comes time to check it in because I know that I can look at the svn log.

Also I actually write commit messages. And I don't use the terms "update" and "commit" interchangeably. And I don't check in conflicted code.

I swear that one day I'm just going to write an Idiot's Guide to SVN and carry it around to every job.

Seat Safety Switch fucked around with this message at Jun 24, 2009 around 02:50

# ¿ Jun 24, 2009 02:47

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

TokenBrit posted:

If you do a really good job here, you get what are basically vouchers you can use in various stores. I got �30 worth. Once. After pulling 12 hour days for a week non stop.

Our "IT guy" (a high schooler that was hired as a summer student after I informed management that software developers are not equal to Exchange administrators) worked a 70 hour week in order to rebuild a domain controller, and he was told that he would receive a bonus by the skinflint founder.

It was a Best Buy gift card with $31.85 on it.

# ¿ Aug 18, 2009 15:27

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

boo_radley posted:

We had somebody "using subversion" who was actually copying files by hand from dev to live; never checked a single thing in.

Same here, except worse; he would check out the code, copy and paste it to a different directory on his computer, and then just arbitrarily copy and paste the changed files back into his original checkout directory (as well as into the checkout directory used for testing in the wwwroot of the IIS test server) and then do an update and commit, overwriting all changes made since he last checked out the code (sometimes months).

My blood pressure has just started to go down now that I haven't been working there for over a month.

# ¿ Sep 17, 2009 21:47

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

Mr Chips posted:

pressing two small keys (command + o) is so much more intuitive than hitting a single large key, accoring to Apple. Also, try cutting & pasting files in finder...

You can also do command + up/down to navigate up and down the directory structure. Down to open stuff, up to go up the tree. It's been like that since the late 80s.

# ¿ Sep 24, 2009 15:24

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

Ryouga Inverse posted:

Oh, and then, in order to fix this issue on their own, they would check out a new copy, copy their working set over the new copy, and commit.

This happened all the time, except they'd check out a working copy on production and copy the production files back in and try to overwrite the development files. I assume this is why the guy who set up all the SVN repositories quit in the first place.

So glad I'm not working there anymore - I can't work without source control, but next time I suspect I'd better keep it to myself instead of trying to push people who obviously don't care a bit about it to use it.

# ¿ Nov 10, 2009 23:00

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

boo_radley posted:

We have subversion for a reason, but nooo:

web.config Copy of web.config Copy (2) of web.config web.config.02MAR2009 web.config.JQD web.config.old web.config.older
there's 90+ of them.

That sounds familiar, except our guys also checked in all the relevant binaries (and then got upset when a merge/diff broke things). No matter how many times I appealed to them about it, they just kept doing it. It's not like they were paid very much, but still - have some basic ability to understand why you are having a problem and try to fix it.

Apparently since I've been gone they've fired the other clueful developer, so now it's a bunch of extremely cheap, inexperienced guys who don't even know Subversion exists, let alone how to use it. I strongly suspect they're changing stuff on the production server directly.

# ¿ Nov 25, 2009 06:32

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

Zhentar posted:

Pretty much. My parents use some special geology software (with license at something like $50k/user) that was just, in the past two years, updated to use more than 16 colors.

As a person who developed special geophysics software, this is chiefly because a lot of the people who buy the software threw a near-violent screaming poo poo-fit when we introduced drag and drop. The average user of the software (according to marketing/sales) was somewhere close to 60 years old. The tech support line got calls for months, and frequently rerouted those calls directly to the developers - I spent a half hour on the phone trying to explain how drag and drop with a mouse worked.

This is most likely because the sales team likes to go for the lazy sale, and possibly because the app cost so much that customers didn't want to put a workstation running it in the hands of fresh grads.

# ¿ Dec 22, 2009 22:59

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# ¿ May 24, 2013 18:00

Seat Safety Switch: May 27, 2008; Ask me about my slow EJ25.

Ryouga Inverse posted:

code:

// Y2K fix
// FIXME: years above 2010
if (year < 10) {
  year = 2000+year;
} else {
  year = 1900+year;
}

There is a lot of code that has had this hack applied to it. One particularly high profile case concerns German credit cards. F-Secure had something on their blog earlier about it, but I can't find it now.

Curiously related but not for the same reason, the Apple Newton also seems to have problems with dates past 2010 because its scripting language stores dates as 30-bit ints and will overflow sometime today. Save your Newtons! Put them in a box so they don't know what time it is and send them to me.

# ¿ Jan 5, 2010 16:36

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware / Software Crap > Shit that you come across daily that pisses you off