Good Code VS Bad Code



  •  [IMG]http://www.osnews.com/images/comics/wtfm.jpg[/IMG]



  •  That reminds of something written by a former Microsoft employee:

     

    The next day was my "BillG" review.

    June 30, 1992.

    In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.

    In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.

    Bill came in.

    I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being. He had my spec in his hand. He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed. Bill turned to me. I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!

    Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.

    He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty easy, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were, because I couldn't stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec...... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

    The questions got harder and more detailed.

    They seemed a little bit random. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy. He's a nice guy! He read my spec! He probably just wants to ask me a few questions about the comments in the margins! I'll open a bug in the bug tracker for each of his comments and makes sure it gets addressed, pronto!

    "OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec and left.

    "Four," announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, "wow, that's the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He was, you know, 36.

    Later I had it explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it's never happened before."

     



  •  I concur and feel amused by these posts.



  • Awesome! 



  • I had a Bill sort of like that at my first job. Except, we didn't have an F-bomb counter, because he was pretty calm. But you know if he didn't like your work. And he had notes on almost every page of every document you ever gave the guy.

    As an EE coming in to a software development environment, I was pretty scared, but truth be told, Bill helped me become a better developer



  • @El_Heffe said:

     That reminds of something written by a former Microsoft employee:

     

    The next day was my "BillG" review.

    June 30, 1992.

    In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.

    In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.

    Bill came in.

    I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being. He had my spec in his hand. He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed. Bill turned to me. I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!

    Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.

    He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty easy, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were, because I couldn't stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec...... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

    The questions got harder and more detailed.

    They seemed a little bit random. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy. He's a nice guy! He read my spec! He probably just wants to ask me a few questions about the comments in the margins! I'll open a bug in the bug tracker for each of his comments and makes sure it gets addressed, pronto!

    "OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec and left.

    "Four," announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, "wow, that's the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He was, you know, 36.

    Later I had it explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it's never happened before."

     

     

    Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.

     

    I looked it up, and you are correct sir.  Not to mention that his overall story is much more technical and interesting than El_Heffe's.  Sorry you got called out El_Heffe.



  • @CRNewsom said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.

    I looked it up, and you are correct sir.  Not to mention that his overall story is much more technical and interesting than El_Heffe's.  Sorry you got called out El_Heffe.

     

    I don't think anyone got called out. But when you know where something came from, and perhaps the OP of that quote didn't, you post it and give them credit. I am sure no one meant anything malicious here.



  •  That is fantastic, got a chuckle out of me at least.



  • @CRNewsom said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.

    I looked it up, and you are correct sir.  Not to mention that his overall story is much more technical and interesting than El_Heffe's.  Sorry you got called out El_Heffe.

    Link for the interested



  •  

    I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.

    I had saved this a long time ago as a text file and forgot who wrote it   Jeez, i didn't realize I was writing a term paper and got points off for lack of footnotes.  And yes i did cut out a lot of the original story.  The "F Bomb" counter was the whole point -- the rest was irrelevant to this post.



  • I didn't mean to give anyone a hard time.  Well, not too much of a hard time.  We've all done the same thing.  I tend to quote comedians, and do a terrible job at it.  I think I get laughed at more than the jokes, but I'm used to it.



  • I didn't mean to give anyone a hard time either, but now that El_Heffe got pissy about it, I do.

    Quote your sources!



  • let bofh = new xkcd();

    return bofh; 



  • @savar said:

    let bofh = new xkcd();

    return bofh; 

     

     tdwtfc.com is free. You just need to start drawing more of these (and install lighttpd).



  • @El_Heffe said:

     

    I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.

    I had saved this a long time ago as a text file and forgot who wrote it   Jeez, i didn't realize I was writing a term paper and got points off for lack of footnotes.  And yes i did cut out a lot of the original story.  The "F Bomb" counter was the whole point -- the rest was irrelevant to this post.



  • Yeah, except this is from OSNews's Focus Shift



  • @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @El_Heffe said:

     That reminds of something written by a former Microsoft employee:

    The next day was my "BillG" review.

    June 30, 1992.

    In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.

    In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.

    Bill came in.

    I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being. He had my spec in his hand. He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed. Bill turned to me. I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!

    Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.

    He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty easy, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were, because I couldn't stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec...... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

    The questions got harder and more detailed.

    They seemed a little bit random. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy. He's a nice guy! He read my spec! He probably just wants to ask me a few questions about the comments in the margins! I'll open a bug in the bug tracker for each of his comments and makes sure it gets addressed, pronto!

    "OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec and left.

    "Four," announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, "wow, that's the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He was, you know, 36.

    Later I had it explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it's never happened before."

     

     

    Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.

     

     

    "We can all see the OP too... no need to quote it everytime you reply."  Hey look, you're needlessly quoting huge amounts of text as well!  One of the many things you've been so whiny about lately!



  • @dml said:

    @MasterPlanSoftware said:

    @El_Heffe said:

     That reminds of something written by a former Microsoft employee:

    The next day was my "BillG" review.

    June 30, 1992.

    In those days, Microsoft was a lot less bureaucratic. About 6 layers from top to bottom. We made fun of companies like General Motors with their eight layers of management or whatever it was.

    In my BillG review meeting, the whole reporting hierarchy was there, along with their cousins, sisters, and aunts, and a person who came along from my team whose whole job during the meeting was to keep an accurate count of how many times Bill said the F word. The lower the f***-count, the better.

    Bill came in.

    I thought about how strange it was that he had two legs, two arms, one head, etc., almost exactly like a regular human being. He had my spec in his hand. He sat down and exchanged witty banter with an executive I did not know that made no sense to me. A few people laughed. Bill turned to me. I noticed that there were comments in the margins of my spec. He had read the first page!

    Considering that we only got him the spec about 24 hours earlier, he must have read it the night before.

    He was asking questions. I was answering them. They were pretty easy, but I can't for the life of me remember what they were, because I couldn't stop noticing that he was flipping through the spec...... and THERE WERE NOTES IN ALL THE MARGINS. ON EVERY PAGE OF THE SPEC. HE HAD READ THE WHOLE GODDAMNED THING AND WRITTEN NOTES IN THE MARGINS.

    The questions got harder and more detailed.

    They seemed a little bit random. By now I was used to thinking of Bill as my buddy. He's a nice guy! He read my spec! He probably just wants to ask me a few questions about the comments in the margins! I'll open a bug in the bug tracker for each of his comments and makes sure it gets addressed, pronto!

    "OK. Well, good work," said Bill. He took his marked up copy of the spec and left.

    "Four," announced the f*** counter, and everyone said, "wow, that's the lowest I can remember. Bill is getting mellow in his old age." He was, you know, 36.

    Later I had it explained to me. "Bill doesn't really want to review your spec, he just wants to make sure you've got it under control. His standard M.O. is to ask harder and harder questions until you admit that you don't know, and then he can yell at you for being unprepared. Nobody was really sure what happens if you answer the hardest question he can come up with because it's never happened before."

     

     

    Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.

     

     

    "We can all see the OP too... no need to quote it everytime you reply."  Hey look, you're needlessly quoting huge amounts of text as well!  One of the many things you've been so whiny about lately!

     

    either contribute or shut the fuck up.  Seriously. 



  • @dml said:

    "We can all see the OP too... no need to quote it everytime you reply."  Hey look, you're needlessly quoting huge amounts of text as well!  One of the many things you've been so whiny about lately!
     

    You may even want to read the context... Moron.



  •  @Lingerance said:

    @CRNewsom said:
    @MasterPlanSoftware said:
    Just thought I should point out, I am pretty sure that is a Joel Spolsky quote. He should be given credit at least.
    I looked it up, and you are correct sir.  Not to mention that his overall story is much more technical and interesting than El_Heffe's.  Sorry you got called out El_Heffe.
    Link for the interested

     Wow. I had heard about the Lotus 123 inherited bug before, but at the time I thought it was an urban myth.


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