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The most outrageous moments of my career
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The most outrageous moments of my career
#11
I worked in a small gaming company (table top, not computer). I was dating a woman there, and one time both our pay checks bounce (not an uncommon occurrence). So, being a small company, we go talk to the CFO. He's very apologetic, says he has the money to cover payroll now, and cuts us new checks. Me and my girlfriend walk out of his office, out of the building, and down the street to the bank that the company uses. The checks bounce.
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#12
(Apr-26-2017, 09:01 PM)Ofnuts Wrote: Now, instead of learning to use the "reporting and dashboard" part of the bug-tracker application, they ask us to produce daily an excel sheet that...

One of my favorite things is when the owner of the company wants a report written to do something, and then a month later asks for the same info via excel.  So I go to my desk, do something unrelated, and about an hour later pull up that report, click the "export to excel" button I cleverly added the first time he wanted the report, and email him the document without even opening it.
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#13
Back in the early seventies (I've got to think this list still exists) there was a list
containing 3 columns and 10 rows of random bull.

pick 3 numbers and combine the words, then you created a document like:

Starting with 'The 374 was 263 in the first part by the 936 in the second.' in
which you pick 3 numbers and combine the words, then you created a document like:

The sequential underlying problem was ultimately uniformly discovered in the first part by
the relative modulating oscillator in the second.

What you got in the end was a random document that was nonsense but initially looked very impressive.

We created one of these with about a page and a half of nonsense and sent it to our boss.

He was so impressed that he sent it in turn to his boss!
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#14
(Apr-27-2017, 03:12 AM)Larz60+ Wrote: Back in the early seventies (I've got to think this list still exists) there was a list
containing 3 columns and 10 rows of random bull.

pick 3 numbers and combine the words,  then you created a document like:

Starting with 'The 374  was 263  in the first part by the 936 in the second.' in
which you pick 3 numbers and combine the words,  then you created a document like:

The sequential underlying problem was ultimately uniformly discovered in the first part by
the relative modulating oscillator in the second.

What you got in the end was a random document that was nonsense but initially looked very impressive.

We created one of these with about a page and a half of nonsense and sent it to our boss.

He was so impressed that he sent it in turn to his boss!

Random text generators where all the rage in the 80s. I have seen ones for business reports, hardware/software commercial brochures, Physics PhD theses, and Shakespeare plays.
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#15
years ago i gave my boss my written 2 weeks notice the first day back from a 1 week vacation during a time when jobs were hard to find.  he asked, "you took another job?" to which i truthfully answered "no" and walked out with a grin.  i had gotten 2 job offers the previous thursday (both interviews on the same day) and had not yet decided which to accept.

(Apr-27-2017, 08:24 AM)Ofnut Wrote: Random text generators where all the rage in the 80s. I have seen ones for business reports, hardware/software commercial brochures, Physics PhD theses, and Shakespeare plays.
spammers are making some interesting ones these days.
Tradition is peer pressure from dead people

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#16
There was this project - emulator of 3-rd party equipment. R&D has been begging for it for a couple of years.

There was - terribly written - small sanity test, but R&D kept on begging for the real McKoy.

So, after several months of struggling - with management Doh , FrameWork team Snooty , reluctant code reviewers Doh  - and even the customer, Sad , who half way into the project told me the whole ugly truth (undisclosed previously limitations) Wall I had it up and running, and it was added as part of acceptance test. R&D was happy, System Test team was  ecstatic Dance .

But at that point I got fed up, and decided to quit. I know that in North America, the moment you receive or give a notice,  management calls in security whose job is to escort you off the premises. In my country, it is customary to provide a knowledge handover. So, since my emulator stopped running - CLI configuration was blocked, and only RESTfull allowed - I proposed to fix it before I leave. The management decided to re-write the project.

Well, my sources gleefully inform me that the first "replacement" has quit, and there's a second victim to fill my shoes. I left the company 10 months ago...  Naughty
Test everything in a Python shell (iPython, Azure Notebook, etc.)
  • Someone gave you an advice you liked? Test it - maybe the advice was actually bad.
  • Someone gave you an advice you think is bad? Test it before arguing - maybe it was good.
  • You posted a claim that something you did not test works? Be prepared to eat your hat.
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#17
I attended a hiring committee once where a candidate had done the "onsite" portion of the interviews over two days via Skype. They were believed to be an industry expert in their specialization and there was a hiring manager who really wanted them. They had done poorly across the board, though one of the interviews had gone particularly well. For any regular candidate, it would have been an instant no, but the hiring manager advocated hard.

After a bit, someone noticed that that single interview that went well had accidentally used the same coding question, and the first time the candidate got that question they bombed it horrendously. So most of us thought the candidate was an instant no because of the lack of honesty on their part (as well as the game-theory involved; it seems so likely we'd notice!). One guy said that interviews are adversarial and that therefor it shouldn't be held against the candidate but that was not generally accepted.

In the end, the hiring manager basically said he wanted the candidate "anyway" and then I witnessed one of the most awkward moment of my professional life so far - another hiring manager said something along the lines of, "Ok, I get that you want this candidate in spite of their interview performance. I just have one question. If we're going to hire them after this, why did we bother with the interview?" You could have cut that silence with a knife.
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#18
The sad side effect of the bubble of 2000 was that it did not take much to be hired in hi-tech.

About 16 years ago - the deflated bubble was still holding in some places Pray , I had to transfer a support of a chip driver to a colleague.

Being a chip driver, that piece of code contained playing around with bits - and my colleague absolutely refused to understand the code Wall . When the guy was eventually terminated, his team leader quipped :
Quote:I can't believe <our group leader> has hired him in in the first place
Confused
Test everything in a Python shell (iPython, Azure Notebook, etc.)
  • Someone gave you an advice you liked? Test it - maybe the advice was actually bad.
  • Someone gave you an advice you think is bad? Test it before arguing - maybe it was good.
  • You posted a claim that something you did not test works? Be prepared to eat your hat.
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#19
i love bits, i want to play with them in python.
Tradition is peer pressure from dead people

What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual. Two languages? Bilingual. One language? American.
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#20
That was a major SNAFU (mine). After test automation has reached a mature state, was shown to CEO, my manager reported impressive amount of time it saved and number of bugs it uncovered - I managed to break it Cry .

In my defense - who would have though that a process will politely wait on stopped service, instead of dying in violent agony Wall ? So it took me some time to get that the fault was mine Blush . But I fixed it and pushed the solution to repository.

The morning starts with test failing again - my manager has not synched his commit before pushing. My reaction
Quote:Is it some sort of revenge? Was it worth it?

I fixed the bloody thing. Another test failure. This time Pray product bug. Another build - another bug discovered. I say to my manager
Quote:Didn't you wish I haven't fixed my bug?
Test everything in a Python shell (iPython, Azure Notebook, etc.)
  • Someone gave you an advice you liked? Test it - maybe the advice was actually bad.
  • Someone gave you an advice you think is bad? Test it before arguing - maybe it was good.
  • You posted a claim that something you did not test works? Be prepared to eat your hat.
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