@Zylon said:
For those of you who don't speak English, a "full stop" is a period.FTFY.
Anyway, those not speaking English, or at least proper English, are the American colonies. Things have gone downhill ever since their purported independence.
@Zylon said:
For those of you who don't speak English, a "full stop" is a period.FTFY.
Anyway, those not speaking English, or at least proper English, are the American colonies. Things have gone downhill ever since their purported independence.
@Xyro said:
Long story short, it didn't support upper-case characters. It couldn't use them in searches or in saves. Reports failed, lookups were silenced, users frowned. I don't know what kind of backend database the ancient ruin was using, but apparently the computer was built before the lower case was invented. We ended up having to drop a toUpperCase() in our system if the input was to be sent to the legacy backend.So did it, or didn't it support upper case? Or lower case?
The TRS-80 model I only knew upper case. I think you needed to buy a disc drive to get lower case.
@zelmak said:
Well, at least they'll do it right (aka, my way) instead of doing some random-ass crap that no one understands.With the latter, I presume the numerous eamples that Sun provided on their web site?
Made that mistake with my very first Java project: follow the Swing examples on Sun's site. These days, I know better and simply don't write GUIs any longer.
Perhaps somebody should explain standard XML Schema datatypes to them.
@dhromed said:
@Severity One said:More like a replacement for a club with spikes in it.Everybody is always complaining about lawyers, but the reason that lawyers exist is because people are such assholes.So lawyers are like embodiements, representations, avatars, if you will, of assholes.
@Helix said:
Dates and Times are indeed a big issue with law cases, and there is a call to standardise 'law time/date'. Apart from 12:00am is new/last day issue they have big fights in contracts such as 'one year from from' '3 months from' etc, asshat lawyers would use the ambiguity to their advantage. Uk government recently got pulled over on this doozyCorrection: lawyers use it to their clients' advantage. Everybody is always complaining about lawyers, but the reason that lawyers exist is because people are such assholes.
Being married to a lawyer, I can tell you that the job sucks, because you only get clients that have some sort of problem: either they're getting divorced, or they got run over, or they ran over somebody, or they were daeling drugs... the list goes on.
A doctor also deals with people who have problems, but contrary to lawyers' clients, usually not of their own making.
@blakeyrat said:
Look, if the FOSS community is truly trying to create "software anyone can use", they've been doing nothing but failing for 20 years. They can kind of sort of keep up with Microsoft and Apple, if only by completely ripping them off. But they've never truly succeeded at their goal, and there hasn't been a single original successful user-facing open source project that wasn't just a ripoff of a commercial product. Something like the Office 2007 Ribbon interface, or the iPhone touch screen interface, or the Kindle, could never have been developed the open source way.Funny you should mention Apple, because Darwin, the basis for OS X, is open source.
Also, I fail to see what product Apache HTTPd would be ripping off. Sure, on the front-end side of things, open source hasn't been very successful, but on the back end, it's a different story. If you don't see that, you either need glasses, or get rid of the bottle.
@NSCoder said:
I've heard people being confused or arguing about whether midnight is 12a.m. or 12p.m. or neither, so if you're going to use a.m. and p.m, then it might be clearer to use 12:01.Well, there are two options:
The most logical choice is #2, so it's obvious that it won't be chosen.
@Speakerphone Dude said:
Another WTF is that according to Netcraft this site is located in the Netherlands. It is totally acceptable to have European customers for the American internet, but the other way around makes no sense.Perhaps they wanted reliability? Power lines (except the high voltage ones) run underground in the Netherlands, for one thing.
@El_Heffe said:
Why do I immediately think "Piece of Shit" whenever I see the acronym POS.Our "point of sale" system shares that alternative monicker, too. In fact, the guy who wrote it used it as well.
He has since left, and now I'm in charge of the POS. Thanks for reminding me and ruining my day.
@julmu said:
I quoted only the sentence that I objected to. The other sentences in that paragraph referred to reasons why one would miss such bugs and I agreed with those so I didn't see a reason to quote those extranously.And in doing so, you completely missed the thing called 'context'.
@julmu said:
If you haven't seen stupid code in you line of work then consider yourself lucky for having decent predecessors and co-workers.Ha ha ha! You're funny. In fact, I'm the one responsible for maintaining coding standards, including things like static source code analysis (you'd be surprised how many bugs you find that way) and such, but without the authority to actually inflict corporal punishment on my co-workers for breaching the rules. And I didn't have time either. I hope I won't have to explain what happened when we decided to change the 'numberOfThreads' configuration parameter in a rather complex application written by a developer (I'm using the phrase loosely here) with a preference for static fields.
This will be solved by taking away the option for developers to deliver their own archives to the support people (who deploy our applications). Instead, there will be a Netbeans → Subversion → Jenkins CI (continuous integration server) → Artifactory (Maven repository manager) → Netbeans cycle. Unit tests and static source code analysis are run by the CI server, and the results e-mailed to me. I'm currently on the look-out for a cane, like they used (use?) in British public schools.
@julmu said:
Neither of us know which position the interview was for.Which makes it all the more surprising why you came up with the senior position. Nobody else did.
@julmu said:
I did mention the position I was talking about so people would know that I don't think that it applies to all positions. You didn't, so I was under the impression that you consider stress endurance an unimportant ability for all developers.You lost me there. But what's this obsession with stress? Most of my job is stress-free. If you are under stress for more than 10% of your time as a developer, you're doing something wrong. Either you're unfit for your position, or your employers have horns on their head and insisted that you sign the contract with your own blood.
@julmu said:
It's true that in real life developers are usually given the symptoms of the bug and not the exact function that is wrong. So you would get a bug report saying "program keeps on printing the first line of the file on to the screen" which would make it easier to figure out the cause.Which brings us back to my contention that this is a completely artificial question.
@julmu said:
But in real life there are also bugs which aren't hidden in a single five line function and which don't happen always but still need to be fixed so it kind of balances out the bug.In real life, this would never have made it past alpha testing, unless your company is run by Shaun the Sheep.
@julmu said:
We all have our bad days so I didn't mean to imply that you're a bad programmer if you didn't see the bug in the given code.I should bloody hope that you didn't mean to imply that, because I'm pretty much the rockstar kind of programmer, including the long hair. And no, not the kind of rockstar whose body is found in a hotel room at age 21 after he'd OD-ed on some contained substance, or one that would grace the pages of this venerable web site.
As other have pointed out before me, the way we write code means that such silly mistakes as in the interview question would never happen. As soon as you write a loop, you have to ask yourself: what is the invariant? Or at the very least, how will the loop end? It took me two full seconds to see the bug because my brain simply doesn't work that way. And if I hadn't been told that there was an infinite loop, it might even have taken me longer.
@julmu said:
I don't think that somebody getting a job or not should be decided based on a single question but if they didn't do particularly well on other questions either then I don't think you can blame the interviewer for the candidate's bad day.A day made much worse by a bad question, or at the very least, a bad interpretation of the answer. Basically, candidates get punished for the interviewer's lack of understanding that perception works differently between people, and between situations.
@julmu said:
If they're applying for a senior developer position then they should have the ability to fix stupid things under stress. The clients won't care how stupid the cause of a critical bug is -- they just want that bug fixed as soon as possible.Who said it was a senior position? Other than that, it's a completely artificial situation. I have fixed ciritcal (or perhaps even stupid) bugs under time pressure, but none that even remotely resemble the interview question. It's difficult to gauge a candidate's prowess, and so you need to resort to artificial questions, but the point I was trying to make (and which you completely miss by picking this exact question from my post) is that it's a bit more complex than one might assume, and what appears clear to whoever wrote the question, may not be clear at all to somebody else, for whatever reason.
The interviewer blames it on stupid candidates; I'd be tempted to lay part of the blame on a lack of empathy and lack of preparation on the part of the interviewer.
@campkev said:
Right. So we were actually told that there's an infinite loop in there, and yet it took some of us (including myself) a little bit of time to actually see it. Which leads me to believe that the combination of the nicely formatted code, the using-construct which looks like a loop, and the somewhat ambiguous question, leads candidates to simply not see the bug. Remember, they are under stress, and the infinite loop is a pretty stupid thing to do. I'd never write code like that, so it didn't immediately occur to me that somebody else might.not the exact code but close enough to give the idea:
public void OutputText(string filename) { using (StreamReader sr = new StreamReader(filename)) { string temp = sr.ReadLine(); while( temp != null) { Console.WriteLine(temp); } } }
So before critisising all those dumb candidates, perhaps you should review your question, think of all aspects of it (after all, you know that you're writing an infinite loop, and that's the answer that you expect), and perhaps give it to your co-workers; after all, they did make it through the selection process.
It would be interesting to find out the results.
@Cassidy said:
Not with the AA, but I've had to update some details (ebuyer, domain registrar, ISP) where a CC was used as payment method and the CVV and/or expiry date changed, causing some payments to be rejected.Parse error: too many acronyms in sentence.
@toon said:
Unfortunately it works the other way around, too. In my native language of Dutch, there is a letter that is a ligature of the letters i and j, making an 'ij' letter; I don't know how to make one with my keyboard. Anyone who types Dutch, you see, just types an i and a j. I've yet to meet the first exception to that statement. But TRWTF is that when I try to explain to people that this character exists, I am met with disbelief and even mockery. In practice, the character has actually vanished from the alphabet and it's no longer taught in schools AFAIK. All of this started with the advent of the typewriter. Having said that, one might make the case that since the character is a ligature of two other ones that are already in the alphabet, it might have disappeared, typewriter or no.It's a bit more subtle than that, according to Wikipedia:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IJ_%28digraph%29
For me, the 'ij' is very much like the Maltese għ (in capitals GĦ) which in Maltese is considered one letter (it is, in fact, silent and only influences the sound of nearby vowels), although it doesn't use the same capitalisation as the 'IJ' in Dutch. An example is the town name of Għargħur. Which according to the rules should be pronounced 'Ayrooyr' (English approximation), but everybody calls in 'Gargoor', probably because that's what the British did.
@no laughing matter said:
@Severity One said:Trust a bunch of developers to go all anal over a generalisation.But it's really simple. In Java, if it starts with a capital, it's a class. If it starts with a lower case character, it's an instance. If someone goes against this convention, he should be taken out and shot.So interfaces, static variables, packages, enums, parameters and local variables are forbidden now?
@ubersoldat said:
Wow... and after all this years, I never tried to write a class, method or variable in my native tongue in any programming language.I can't help but notice that there isn't an Umlaut in 'über' in your nickname.
@Mason Wheeler said:
Or in Java, it's far too common to declare a variable whose name is identical to its classname, just with different capitalization. Code like that makes me wanna smack somebody.Well, as our little furry friend already pointed out, people in general and developers in particular have moved away from 80x24 monochrome screens, and modern IDEs actually show you the difference between a class and an instance. Heck, even vi(m) does it.
But it's really simple. In Java, if it starts with a capital, it's a class. If it starts with a lower case character, it's an instance. If someone goes against this convention, he should be taken out and shot.
@Speakerphone Dude said:
[...], but once in a while PHP needs a break.PHP is perfectly capable of being broken without our help.
@ubersoldat said:
OK, so let me get this straight, the php interpreter is trying to be multilingual? Because that's what I understand from this:Contrary to popular belief, not every country in the world uses English as its main language. So if your native language is German or Turkish or Swahili, it stands to reason that you might want to use that language in the names of classes and members.In Turkish, the undotted ı is the lowercase of I, and the dotted İ is the uppercase of i.Shouldn't "class Öbject" throw some error even if my locale is de_DE? This is how every no-german programming language works... right?
Weird shit they have in there.
Java supports that, and I've never seen a single comment of this mucking up; apparently, PHP supports it too, but goes as far as providing a "feature" that is basically a hack for lazy programmers that are too lame to press the "shift" key.
Isn't it wonderful how the differences between bugs and features in PHP are but shades of grey?
Right, all together now: the real WTF is...
@Zemm said:
A closer analogy would be if you own two cars and driving one in rain causes the other one to require panel work. Whether or not both/either are parked in your double garage.But we're talking a Mac virtual garage there, so it's made of Lego.
They've had the ServiceLoader interface since Java 6, so at least three years before your original post. This can be done completely transparently and elegantly.
But then, what would there be to discuss at TheDailyWTF?
You know... recently, I dabbled with Hibernate for the first time, and I'm trying my hardest to do things the proper way. So how do sequences and stored procedures work from Hibernate? Ah... that way.
Sometimes, though, I wonder why I bother. Professional pride maybe? But with so many inadequate people calling themselves programmers about, how does one stand out?
Thinking about this a bit, I can see the user's point, although he's not making it very well. In certain contexts –for example, when filling in a tax form– it does actually make sense to consider an empty string as 0. The mistake that the user makes is to assume that it makes sense in all cases, and failing to see that his code relies on a bug, rather than a feature.
TRWTF is that it took the PHP authors 15 years to take care of that bug.
@superjer said:
I don't find that using intuition is the best way to get code working.Nothing wrong with Intuition.
I'm at work, and internet usage is monitored. Even though I'm a developer, I'm not entirely stupid.
@Speakerphone Dude said:
That is even worse than in X-Files when Scully calls Internet to get the phone numbers of all subscribers who used a specific website.You mean, like Facebook? I'm pretty sure that Facebook could give you that information.
But 'sizeof' is a keyword and not a function. It's like undefining the 'for' or 'while' keywords. You're also not supposed to put brackets around the parameter to 'sizeof', unless it's a type.
@RHuckster said:
Every so often when I find the cause of a critical bug that absolutely has to get deployed in the next 5 minutes and I have to take shortcuts around some major refactoring to get it done, I leave comments like that.You will be reborn in India and forced to write crappy PHP code from a young age.I almost always go back and fix it the right way soon after, removing the comment, but I do recall a time or two where I never went back. I hope the bad karma doesn't come onto me too hard in the future.
@zelmak said:
We have a c-shell script [...]TRWTF is using the C-shell to write scripts. Whilst the TC-shell is my shell of choice, writing scripts in anything other than the Bourne shell or bash is generally not a very good idea.
Have a look at the code. To me, it sounds like they use a target, and if this target has a name (let's say, "youtubehtml5" or "woof" instead of "_new"), it will be reused. In which case, the fault would lie with YouTube, not Firefox.Firefox's default behaviour is to open a new tab instead of a new window if you have "_new" as the target, but also if you use a name that is not in use.
The fact that IE9 does it differently may or may not be relevant. Mind, it could still be a bug in Firefox, but the above is an alternative (and arguably less far-fetched) explanation.
@lettucemode said:
@Severity One said:O-kay... you also name all of your variables a, b, c, etc? And anyway, Oracle SQL Developer helpfully provides you with with the possible field names, saving you even more keystrokes. Unless you do all your SQL coding in PHP or something similar, of course.As for the naming, both 'car.id' and 'car.car_id' wil work. What one prefers is much a personal choice, and it would be somewhat silly to state that solution A is superior to solution B.I prefer not to waste keystrokes, and thus time, when working. If solution A doesn't waste my time and solution B does, I'd say solution A is superior.
The code is messy and has several boo-boos, but a real WTF?
Functionally equivalent, and a lot easier to read:
private final static Collection<String> TRUE_VALUES = Arrays.asList( "yes", "y", "true", "t", "affirm" );
private final static Collection<String> FALSE_VALUES = Arrays.asList( "no", "n", "false", "f" );
public final static boolean toBoolean( String value )
{
if( TRUE_VALUES.contains( value.toLowerCase() )
return true;
if( FALSE_VALUES.contains( value.toLowerCase() )
return false;
throw new IllegalArgumentException( "value must be one of the accepted values" );
}
Cool. I know very little about GPUs and parallel programming, but what I do know is that GPUs have a somewhat (rather?) limited field of applications. You can't just chuck anything at a GPU and expect it to run faster.
What a GPU is very good at is having a scantily clad protagonist run around Steelport and shoot the heck out of everything that moves. (In case you're wondering, I'm playing Saints Row the Third now, which basically is a politically incorrect version of Grand Theft Auto.)
@boomzilla said:
@Severity One said:With 'first field' I mean whatever shows up first when you use 'desc table' or a tool like TOAd or SQL Developer. There are tons of reasons why this doesn't always work, I know. But if you never have to change your table, or at least not its primary key, it's a convention that is easy to follow.I usually keep the first field(s) as the primary key. Works just as well. And of course, you can see which is the primary key, because it has the same name as the table, with "_id" behind it. Not a particularly strong example you gave there.I'm not sure what you mean by the "first field." In the table? In you SQL? The first doesn't help you when you're looking at queries and the second assumes that you always do it right, and so does everyone else. However, if a single column PK is always named ID, then it's always named ID, and obvious what it really is, no matter how sloppily the query is written, which makes it a lot stronger than your argument.
As for the naming, both 'car.id' and 'car.car_id' wil work. What one prefers is much a personal choice, and it would be somewhat silly to state that solution A is superior to solution B.
Nevertheless, it's all personal preferences, and I hate the compulsive table prefixers like I hate the camel casers, and the most important thing is to be consistent with this sort of thing.Exactly. I'm not telling anybody to prefix a field with the table name. What I'm doing is arguing why you might want to do it, and that it's a bit silly to argue that it's redundant.
@boomzilla said:
Another benefit of using a simple "id" for a primary key column is that it's obvious which columns are primary keys and which are foreign.I usually keep the first field(s) as the primary key. Works just as well. And of course, you can see which is the primary key, because it has the same name as the table, with "_id" behind it. Not a particularly strong example you gave there.
But I repeat, nobody has yet managed to come up with a convincing reason why this practice would be wrong, and nobody has convincingly argued that it does not, indeed, help people understand the structure without having to resort to TOAd or Visio.
I suggest that you re-read (or perhaps, read for the first time) my last paragraph, particularly about monster queries and artificially construed examples.
@JimLahey said:
How do you deal with levels of retardation like this without planting bombs under chairs?A very strong adhesive stuck to their steering wheel and accelerator pedal? Less dangerous for you than the chair bomb, and much more ecologically responsible than the aforementioned dangerous animals (which are often critically endangered).
Alternatively, you may consider replacing his chair by one of the redundant ones they probably have at various correctional facilities. You know, the kind that comes with a leg brace, skull cap and power cable.
@PJH said:
@this_code_sucks said:What kind of rubbish reasoning is that? Just because you reuse the table name in a key, it becomes redundant and therefore bad in the Lord's eye?Rubbish. Pub quiz database to display stuff for a quiz round:
I respectfully disagree with you on the PK name. If I am doing a join, I was the PK name and FK name to match, and it's obvious why you would want a FK to have the table name.
select * from rounds, questions where rounds.id=<whatever> and rounds.question_id=questions.id;
versus
select * from rounds, questions where rounds.rounds_id=<whatever> and rounds.question_id=questions.questions_id;
Where do you get your ideas from? The Department of Redundancy of Redundant Department of Redundant Ideas Redundancy Department?
The problem of when your table is self referencing has already been raised. Same database as above has an 'establishments' table - pubs and owners of pubs. And those owners themselves can have owners (companies own breweries, the breweries own pubs) What should the FK be there? Apart from 'owner_id' which self links to 'id' in the same table.
Guess what: your database engine doesn't care a hoot whether you call your field "id" or "guest_id" or "woof_woof_woof". A reason (and in my opinion, the most obvious reason) to include the table name in the ID field (by definition, the single-field primary key of a table) is when you have foreign keys pointing to them, and likely to have joins over multiple tables: to add clarity to the reader.
Not everybody is 773t h4x0r enough to look at a monster of a query involving several WITH clauses and multiple joins, and immediately figure what each "id" stands for, table aliases or not. You can come up with all sorts of artificially construed examples where you don't need to include the table name in the primary key, but the fact of the matter is that (a) it doesn't do harm and (b) it helps people.
@morbiuswilters said:
I disagree with both of you. Seeing as this is from the Federal government, I can only assume it started out as a plan to construct an airport in Bumfuck, Kansas named after a currently-serving Senator. By the time it had made it out of committee, 3,000 pages of amendments had been tacked on, mostly dealing with "fixes" to health care and miscellaneous corn subsidies. On the floor of the Senate, the Democrats argued that the airport/health clusterfuck/ConAgra payoff was necessary for the future of our country and brought out orphans with leukemia to strengthen that point. The Republicans retorted that spending $1 trillion on an airport in Kansas makes about as much sense as, well, spending $1 trillion on an airport in Kansas.In Europe, these things happen completely differently. It would indeed have started off as a requirement for a tool that measures fuel-efficiency, so that it can become an EU guideline to be implemented by all EU member states. Individual states may, and will, add their own amendments to this guideline, which generally pisses off the population but which is blamed on Brussels.
Instead they offered a proposal called the "Free Freedom Act For Strengthening the United States' Freedom" which was the same exact bill but with a modest price tag of $999 billion. The left screamed "Orphan killers!" The right screamed "Those orphans probably got leukemia by having premarital sex!" A confused, elderly Republican Senator wondered aloud why Negroes no longer tip their hats when you pass them on the sidewalk nor will they dance an enchanting jig for a nickel. Flabbergasted, members of both parties award him a "Lifetime Service Award" for his 97 years in the Senate; photos are taken and Dom Perignon is served.
Eventually the bill passes with a price tag of $999.9 billion. Both parties claim victory. The EPA immediately files a lawsuit demanding an environmental impact study because the Kansas airport is going to be built in a corn field, corn now being a Federally-protected endangered species after a generous donation to Senators of both parties from ConAgra. Worried that they will have to give the taxpayers back their $999.8 billion (after deducting Dom Perignon-related expenses), the money is reallocated into something else the EPA has been suing over: electric cars. $7 million is spent finding a suitable contractor to build the $20 thousand modeling software. The contractor's painful rickets from a corn-only diet have left him with no money to purchase tools, so he uses the only software available on his computer: Excel.
Lobbyists analyse the proposal, decide whether it's in the interest of the automotive industry (which it usually isn't), and start inviting major and minor key players for 'business lunches'. The Brussels restaurant business is doing a roaring trade.
Great Britain states its opposition to the proposal, because it's not in the British interest, nor will it create British jobs, and British people (especially those in Wales) are used to pollution anyway, so it would be unfair to have Brussels-imposed clean air. If the British wanted clean air, the Queen would have moved to a country with cleaner air, like Mexico. The British sentiments are ignored, but it allows Rupert Murdoch's newspapers to print some more indignant headlines about Brussels' arrogance, just below the article about the shopping trip that the football wags went on in Poland, whilst their husbands visited some concentration camp or other.
The Germans see this as an opportunity to manufacture all the fuel-efficient components you could ever dream off, and support the proposal. France initially supports the proposal, but backs down after mass rallies and strikes. The Italians have an interim government, after the previous one collapsed at 11:17 that morning, and everybody is having a latte whilst being on strike anyway. The Greeks riot in the streets and set fire to several banks.
The Irish hold a referendum where five people bother to show up, and the proposal carries with a convincing 60% majority, because otherwise the funds from Brussels will rapidly dry up. The Portugese are in favour for the same reason, and nobody can afford a car anyway, so it's a moot point for them. The Spanish are in favour too, because they know they will need the funds next month, and because they're all unemployed they don't need even cars, whether fuel-efficient or not.
The Middle and Eastern European states are generally in favour, because it's one chance they have to clean up their air a bit, and not have 10% of the population die every year of accute lead poisoning. Nobody cares about what the Mediterranean island states think, mostly because they're unaware that these are EU-members, too.
Evventually, after 10 years, a much-watered down version of the original proposal passes through the European parliament, where actually three MEPs showed up for the plenary session (because they would otherwise lose their rather generous stipend), and is implemented by all states, except the British who got an opt-out. The Danish got an opt-out, too, but they didn't make such a song and dance about it.
An open tender is issued for a European company to come up with the tool, which concludes after two years. One provision is that it cannot be made with Excel, because Microsoft have abused their monopoly in the past, and been fined heavily for it. Microsoft sue the European Commission at the European Court, arguing that the EC is breaching its own rules on competition. Sentence is passed another five years down the line, and Microsoft is fined another €1bn for good measure.
The work is immediately offshored to India, where they write using a pirated version of Excel. It takes them another two years to figure out how to save it in OpenOffice format, and another two years for the EU officials to figure out they need the Excel version anyway, because nobody actually uses OpenOffice.
By the time the measure is fully implemented, fossil fuels have run out.
'Root' is someone who should not be given a login shell that resides on /usr, if /usr is mounted on a different filesystem on an old Solaris system.
@morbiuswilters said:
@DOA said:Well, Netbeans has made great progress since then, although some might argue it's the same kind of progress as getting a lethal injection instead of being burnt at the stake.Maybe that was some old version? I just checked NetBeans 7.1 on this PC and it takes 5 seconds from startup to loaded project. Of course this is on an SSD, but still...Well, the last time I used it was 2002, but SEMI-HYBRID said it is still slow (although he apparently felt this wasn't a negative.)
@morbiuswilters said:
@Cassidy said:Most definitely serious. I'd say that in our software development section, I'm probably the one with the least social skills; it's actually a bit of a handicap. I tried my hand at demand management for some eight months, butI got frustrated at never actually creating something (other than documents and more documents).@Severity One said:It's the same reason why they don't (or shouldn't) let developers talk to customers.Not sure if serious....Probably serious. Many organizations keep developers from talking to customers because they think developers lack social skills, which is true in many cases. However, those organizations turn out crappy software and probably should just hire non-aspie developers in the first place. (Those same developers take a perverse sense of pride in their inability to relate to their users; after all, it's more important that they micro-optimize their code than putting any effort into making usable UIs. Those developers tend to be awful and I usually try to fire them when I take over a department.)
I have the ability to fix code of an application that I've never used and don't understand much either (after all, you just have to look at a stack trace, and usually that's enough to figure out what's going on), but I do try to think from the perspective of the user, and keep things simple and understandable. I love simplicity when it comes to development, although some (well, actually, most) of my colleagues would argue that my perception of simplicity doesn't completely match theirs.
@SEMI-HYBRID code said:
And for these people, Word is one of a few of their BASIC tools, they spend anywhere between 20 and 60% of their time in it, yet they don't have an idea of how to use the most basic functions, AND YET, they can get away with saying they're qualified for their job.Well, you could have your legal documents drafted by a secretary instead of a lawyer, but I'd advise against it.
It's the same reason why they don't (or shouldn't) let developers talk to customers.
@this_code_sucks said:
After my meeting today I am going to close my account, their trades are expensive as shit anyway.Well, you know how to do that now, although it may take up to a year to process.
@havokk said:
On the other hand, the airport security staff have never been anything other than friendly, polite and respectful. Completely inflexible on the rules, yes, but respectful.I don't remember the security at Newark, but what I do remember is US Immigration.They're not very pleasant people. They sit in a little glass cage and 'surly' is probably the best way to describe them.
A little further away, in Canada, the immigration officer sits behind a big desk, no glass in sight, and he's not just polite, but very friendly as well.
@El_Heffe said:
@Rhywden said:20 countries? More like 50. And yes, me being from the south-east of the Netherlands, I speak a distinct language (actually a bridge language between standard Dutch and standard German), and culturally I'm quite different from those in the west of the Netherlands. This is in a country less than 200 by 150 miles in size.The typical moronic attitude of US-Americans:Typcial moronic attitude of Europeans. 20 countries that are all pretty much the same, other than language, and each loudly proclaims "we're SO much different than all those other guys". Other than language Spain is to Russia as California is to Maine.
Equating a state to a continent full of several very different countries, most of which have culturally different states/provinces themselves.For example, I trust you'll find Spain a very different experience from Russia. As I said: Moronic attitude.
As far as I know, all 50 US states have pretty much the same setup, with a governour, senate, house and counties. In Europe, we have parliamentary republics, presidential republics, semi-presidential republics, constitutional monarchies with a ceremonial head of state, constitutional monarchies where the monarch wields some power, and even an absolute monarchy (Vatican State).
Whilst Europeans are largely aware that there are cultural differences within the US itself, to claim that such differences are equally large as they are in Europe is ludicrous, and showing a lack of both insight and knowledge (which, unfortunately, didn't stop you from opening your mouth).
@arh said:
I don't know what's the biggest WTF.. that I was allowed to carry ammo on board a plane, or that I brought it with me through two different airports in US without anyone noticing.Which reaffirms my belief that US airport security is a joke; at least pre-9/11 it was.
You don't easily get shot in the Netherlands. It's a pretty cool country. Although I am surprised they let you take ammo onboard a plane, but as you said, it was pre-9/11.
@snoofle said:
More time to get paid to surf I guess.I was sourced out for six months in the late nineties, at a company that apparently didn't have much work for me. So that was indeed mostly six months of surfing. As the six months came to an end, all of a sudden there was a frenzy because they wanted to keep me there (they were very happy with my surfing prowess, or so it seems), but sadly they didn't manage to find the budget.
That company was, via other companies, owned by Worldcomm.