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Tales from the WTF company, part I
- rokhayakebe 19y agoshe did you the biggest favor.
- gojomo 19y agoUltimately, tales like this (and DailyWTF postings) are "junk food" for the mind. Sure, they may give a smile and easy sense of smug superiority... but do you learn anything? Don't we already know there are a lot of bad workplaces, a lot of fubar'd codebases, a lot of clueless-muddle-along programmers? Indeed, so many that you could read a sad-funny tale every hour on the hour for the rest of you natural life and not exhaust the FAIL? But is that a good info-diet? Or just cheap sugary click candy, fattening one's ego without any mental nutrition?
- malkia 19y agoYou learn that it happens anywhere. The NIH syndrome, and all that.
- TrevorJ 19y agoAlso, you learn from the mistakes of others. A much less risky approach than learning from your own.
- gojomo 19y agoIf there is a lesson, sure. But the point of "WTF?!?" is that the stories include blatant, astonishing incompetence. I've never seen one end "but it turned out there was a genuinely good reason for what made me think 'WTF?', so I learned something". They're all, "<nelson>Ha-ha</nelson>, even a slightly competent programmer can feel better than those poor saps!"
- jcl 19y agoSure, some stories are more enlightening than others, and there is a point of diminishing returns. But I think the stories are pretty useful; they provide anecdotal evidence for various development anti-patterns. They imbue an appropriate sense of apprehension whenever someone says "Source control is too complicated." or "Then we serialize the object to an XML text field..." or "A testing environment would cost twice as much."
- angstrom 19y agoPerfect example of not asking the right questions during an interview. You can usually find out if a place is this jacked without ever joining the payroll if you know what to ask them. Interviews are a two way process. You're interviewing them, just as they're interviewing you.