Best posts made by Zenith
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What a strange exchange.
My mind is still reeling from this exchange.
Hello,
I received your info from one of the job boards and I was wondering if you are still in the market for a Sr. Dev lead?
If you are, please send me your resume.
Thank you
Wanda Tracy FallenarchesReceived my info from "the job boards." But needs my resume. Because it;'s not on "the job boards?" Well, I was in a mood, so I sent both my resume and my newly minted buzzword manifesto.
Good evening,
Would you be able to call me first thing in the morning to discuss this opportunity?
Thank you
Wanda Tracy Fallenarches
555-867-5309Now I'm a little concerned. This person is expecting me to call them? So I look up the domain. Same as her last name. It's a WordPress template site. Couple stock photos of smiling hipsters in an open office plan and not much else.
Still in a mood, so I don't call ion the morning but the afternoon. And the hits keep coming.
She has a phone that, when she drives, loses all volume. I am getting three words, some squeaks, three words, some squeaks, and so on. She starts asking me what I think of the position description that she never sent. I tell her that I have no information other than this e-mail from out of the blue. Now it's a front end engineer. And uses banking software that she's surprised I don't know of. After some questions about .NET, now it's Javascript UI modernization. What libraries? Oh, you know, JavaScript. Like, yknow, whatever and junk.
Now at this point, I've totally lost interest. This woman hasn't looked at the resume she asked for and doesn't know anything about what's going on. Now she needs my e-mail to send me a job description. Because she somehow e-mailed me twice without seeing my e-mail? So I told her I don't know, I just used webmail to reply, maybe there is a reply button she can use. I can't believe my tone is not coming through over the phone though I still don't expect to see anything.
Five minutes later, she calls me back. Did I see the e-mail? No. Wait five minutes. Now it's here. OK, this sounds a little more coherent.
Now she's confused about which resume to look at, ZenithResume.doc or ZenithResumeColorBuzz.doc (yes, I named them that). Now there's confusion over what I do, which evolves into, somehow, that I lack experience. I didn't put what specific versions of .NET on every line and what JScript framework on every line so I have somehow not recently done any development. Lots of "uh" and "like" and "I hear ya bro" and "maybe." Asks what I want to do. I want to do desktop development or backend development. I don't want to learn a new JavaScript framework every other day to rewrite the same commodity front end over and over and over with half the functionality of the previous versions. "Oh, but that's how the industry is, they want people that can keep up with shifting dynamics and trending opportunities" (said totally without sarcasm).
Suddenly, the talk shifts to clouds. I have used Azure, a little. I understand that a cloud is just a server at a Microsoft data center versus a server on the 3rd floor of my building. What have I been using it for? Oh, machine learning, artificial intelligence, market strategy analysis, you know, that sort of stuff. What frameworks do I use? What do you mean framework? There's an Azure console to set up databases and firewalls and file stores. Yeah but what frameworks? I don't understand what you mean. Well strategic shifting of resources in transitioning. Shouldn't your operations director being laying out that roadmap? Well all engineers have a cloud framework they like for developing projects in the cloud. Oh, well, I don't, I just use Azure. OK, maybe UI engineer postings are a poor fit. Yep, I agree, thanks.
Then another development description, a solicitation for another copy of my resume, and a LinkedIn friend request show up in my mailbox.
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RE: What users say versus what they mean
At my previous job, where I was a DBA, "something is wrong with the database" could mean any, or all, of the following:
- The Indians did not close, and thus ran out of, socket handles.
- A record that did not exist was not found.
- A query that updates 500 million rows for lack of a where clause is still running. In production. Three days later.
- A job that has always run on Thursday morning did not run on Monday night.
- The server is out of disk space. Again.
- 7zip was deleted (it launched from powershell concatenated by a batch script concatenated by an agent job kicked off by a Windows app with command line arguments kicked off by the Windows scheduler).
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RE: Things that remind you of WDTWTF members
@Polygeekery's fire truck doesn't put fires out; it delivers them:
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RE: Do people actually like poor quality user interfaces?
@levicki That's my take on it too. We've suffered a series of bozo explosions where I work. The answer to every problem is "let's hire another manager (or five)" and none of them can even ask a halfway intelligent question.
This application that only 30 people in our bureau use crashes several times a day.
I am being thinking not enough Windows. Do the needful and buy more servers with purple monkey dishwater.
1 OK.
2 Excellent work Pajeet.
3 So, you're saying, we should do the needful?
4 Is 8 enough Windows or should we do 10?
5 I like orange. Does it come in orange?
6 Electric yellow in the brain banana.
7 zzzzzzzzz
Here's the actual problem. They're not closing sockets, so it's leaking memory until it crashes. If we change these eight lines, we can actually decommission all of the additional servers they had us rent last time this issue came up.
7 You're really starting to piss people off. -
RE: IT departments of the world
@NeighborhoodButcher The attitude that I've seen in state government (but not only state government, mind you) is "users will get what they get if we feel like it." It's very difficult for me to cope with because I got into software development because I like to solve problems. Most IT people that I've worked with in the last decade don't want to be bothered and are an endless fountain of excuses. The situation reminds me of a quote (from Colin Powell) that I recently dug back up:
"Leadership is solving problems. The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you have stopped leading them. They have either lost confidence that you can help or concluded you do not care. Either case is a failure of leadership."
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RE: The Belt Onion club
Here's a good one. I was telling somebody an address and I said blah blah pound sign. They asked if I meant hash tag. Curse you Twitter...
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RE: So yeah. CentOS? Dead. You now get the beta version of RHEL!
@hungrier said in So yeah. CentOS? Dead. You now get the beta version of RHEL!:
@error "You wanted extended support? Go to RHEL"
Is the R silent?
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RE: The Official Funny Stuff Thread™
@Arantor said in The Official Funny Stuff Thread™:
See, you all joke, but I give you https://www.npmjs.com/package/true
This is a real fucking package, that literally just returns
true
. It even has fucking unit tests. And, inexplicably, 618 downloads a week.Benjamin Franklin supposedly said beer is proof God wants us to be happy. I submit JavaScript as a counterargument.
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RE: The Belt Onion club
@error_bot This is the one that always gets me. I have to remember most of the kids at the store are somewhere between 16 and 19. They really don't get any references older than about 2010. No Monty Python, no Seinfeld, no classic Simpsons, etc. I went bowling with a few of the older ones recently wearing an A-Team shirt and they had no idea it referred to a TV show. Or a movie...
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RE: The Most Absurd Thing You've Ever Coded/Built
@dkf I love making custom controls. Real custom controls, too, not jamming regular controls into a UserControl panel. It should set me apart at interview time but they usually just think I'm a witch or something if I mention it.
Anyway...most absurd thing I've ever coded...
The department had bought (code and all) a desktop application for managing corporate/charitable registrations. It was written in VB5 or VB6. Of course, none of the H1Bs that you pick up in the 7-11 parking lot these days can do classic VB, so it had to go. They built a new application, wrongly, on top of MS CRM, against the explicit advice of Microsoft themselves because they knew better (LOL). It constantly returned wrong information, because nothing was ever tested, so the users didn't trust it. When the executives found out they were using both systems in parallel, they had the bright idea to make the legacy database read only, so users continued to use it to verify existing data. Until, randomly, installations of this old application would just stop working and nobody could (or would) figure out why (because effort).
So, the CIO at the time, who was exasperated with both bureau management and their pet H1Bs, wanted me to write a verification application...in SSRS. Yes, SSRS. Because something something dark side.
So there's an IIS instance out there, running two search pages written in JavaScript, that link to two SSRS report "screens," with several embedded SSRS reports posing as containers/controls, that all call down to a dozen or so T-SQL procedures (plus supporting functions and views), written to replicate the logic of a 20 year old VB application, and it actually does the lookups faster than the "state of the art" CRM solution.
There are so many s here, I don't know which is .
Is it bringing in a 3rd potentially unstable system to verify/correct the results of a 2nd definitely unstable system?
Is it kludging together TSQL and SSRS to replicate a VB5 desktop application?
Is it that I didn't quit immediately after being asked to bring such a monster into the world?
Is it management acting like I don't know anything about development despite this miracle that I've performed in plain view?
Is it continuing to assign no-bid blank-check contracts to the H1Bs despite a track record of projects that never end because they never work right? -
Do people actually like poor quality user interfaces?
I really don't understand this.
- Why is "oops something happened, try again later" an acceptable error message?
- Why is a page whose elements keep jumping around as parts load so you can't click anything for a full minute acceptable?
- Why is server side, and only server side validation, considered efficient?
- Why is validation done one field at a time considered efficient?
- Why do so many form fields (besides passwords and the like) reset on a failed form submission?
- Why is not focusing on any fields upon loading considered user friendly?
- Why is a postback on filtering and sorting and paging lists of less than 50 items acceptable?
- Why is the even worse infiniscroll abomination not just tolerated but embraced?
- Why don't sites underline regular links anymore?
- Why can't we just have actual buttons for actions instead of styled links?
- Why is there a push to remove borders that would define the edges of elements, in particular mouse-activated elements?
- Why doesn't anything online ever print right?
- Why do people reinvent the selectbox if they're not going to do anything that the browser's built-in selectbox can't do?
- Why do some sites render checkmarks and radiomarks the same way?
- Why do mobile-optimized storefronts have pictures that only zoom in ~20% because they're constrained by being inline elements inside a fixed viewport?
- Why don't "specifications" tabs include physical dimensions, OS requirements, or other critical details?
- Why are window sizes fixed and unscrollable when they're clearly way too small for the content?
- Why didn't anybody involved with HTML standards ever make table headers/footers fixed so the rest of the rows could scroll?
- Why is absolute positioning still such a kludge that I can still see headers/footers jump away from the edge when I scroll?
- Why did non-IE browsers fight against a modal/blocking dialog window?
These are all easily solved problems. Yet, somehow, they persist. Does somebody out there like it this way or what?
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RE: Resources want to be free!
I once supported an app where the Indians never closed sockets and it took them years to figure out that was a major bottleneck. Then they turned around and wrote their next app the same way and still don't know what's causing its bottlenecks.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
@Zenith Would anybody be surprised to hear that I was tired of waiting for support to figure out what they broke and fixed it myself by changing a config file that hasn't been touched since 2014?
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RE: The Official Status Thread
@dcon said in The Official Status Thread:
Well, my company portal for paychecks and AT&T's website simply don't work on FF. Makes me wonder how many others are broken. Started after one of the recent FF updates.
Q: What's the difference between a recent browser update and a not so recent one?
A: An hour. -
RE: The Official Status Thread
@Zerosquare The kitten earns your attention by acting cute. The computer steals your attention by being an asshole.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: I still have the ability to get a thread nuked.
There's a mook on LinkedIn trying to sell a freelancing course. He starts off by asking if you build websites as a side hustle and why or why not. I said no, because clients either want a Facebook clone in a week, the sort of website I personally hate to use, or both. Then he goes on to shame me with laughing/curious "likes" for not listening to the course he's peddling. So I said "look, I've heard it all before and I don't particularly care to be insulted by a salesman." Poof, entire thread disappears.
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RE: When the reviewer doesn't understand my Javascript it's his fault
@pie_flavor said in When the reviewer doesn't understand my Javascript it's his fault:
Right, but the people who accept 'you get what you pay for' and outsource anyway will become fewer as they start paying more for less.
You'd think that. If you owned a small company, you might learn, because it was your money at stake. But a larger company or government, it's not your money, so there's no consequence to giving the contract to your friend and his army of "guest workers." I can tell you right now, at the low end, state government pays $100/hour for H1Bs while an Application Developer 2 is maybe $50/hour including benefits. And the ratio of H1B to AD2 is like 10:1. The theory is the H1Bs will come in, do a job, and go away, taking their costs with them, but they never do.
What I'd found in state government was that this practice drove off people with hands-on experience, leaving an upper management that didn't know how to do what it was managing. It's like the crooked mechanic billing thousands in repairs to the little old lady who knows nothing about the car she only drives on Sundays. Except these idiots are paid six figures to flush hundreds of millions of our tax dollars down the toilet.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Well I guess I was a bit of a Karen yesterday. I was at Burger King when the following scene unfolded. An old man was in front of me trying to order a single meal from what was the dumbest cashier I’ve seen in awhile. He just could not understand that the guy wanted one meal. He said, and I quote, “but I already put in two.” So? Take one off you mook.
When he finally figured that out, he gave the old man a cup and, of course, the soda machine is still broken. Why these dingbats give you a cup when they know the machine is broken is beyond me. So the old man asks if the kid can get him a regular Coke from the back. The kid says I don’t know and just stands there. The old man asks if he can check with somebody. The kid says OK, then comes back, and gets him a soda. Then he says “it came out kind of red, might be Cherry Coke.” The old man said he wanted regular Coke. The kid looked dumbfounded and then was gone for five minutes and presumably came back with a regular Coke. The old man was so mad he probably would’ve punched him if it was a Sprite.
Then the kid wandered off and an older lady took the orders of those of us in the line that had formed. I was just about coughing up sand but only ordered a burger just to not have to deal with that shit. But I went home and filed a complaint with the company about the drink machine being broken for so long. And somebody actually e-mailed me back saying they’d yell at the franchisee.
So I turned around and filed a complaint with Wendy’s because their drink machines have been broken even longer. But nobody responded to that one.
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RE: IT departments of the world
@LaoC said in IT departments of the world:
Also, about twice a day:
I can't reach my workstation via VPN. Can you fix that please?
It doesn't ping, so it's probably turned off. Don't turn it off if you're planning on using it remotely. I can send it a wake-on-LAN and if you're lucky it will come up; otherwise someone will have to go there and push the button.
Butbutbut it's like 5 km to the office and we're in lockdown!
Dude, every single one one of my team is at least 500 times, two national borders and another lockdown further away, so …In their defense, if IT didn't do retarded stuff like automatic shutdowns and no way to change your expired password without going through the VPN that won't let you in because your password expired, that would be less of an issue. As my employer's operations have transitioned from "retarded IT" to "retarded non-IT managing retarded offshore IT," the same malaise of thoughtlessness has persisted...
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Recruiters are so stupid.
: Hi ! I saw your resume and thought you'd be perfect for this .NET position at BizCo! E-mail me at ima_fukkin_retard@shitbrains.com for more details!
: Alright, what's the deal with the .NET position at BizCo?
: We have lots of positions! What position were you talking about?
: The .NET position at BizCo. You pinged me and said to e-mail for more details so here's my e-mail asking for more details.
: Sure, just share me your resume!
: You fucking retard.
: I don't understand why it's so hard to find people. Purple is my favorite flavor crayon. Dirk-dirk dirk-dirk-dirk da da-da-da. -
RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: My German-made screen protector, ordered from a .us storefront, is shipping from Australia. Globalism!
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RE: Programming Confessions Thread
When I landed my first real development job, I didn't really know how sockets worked. Not as much exposure to real world programs in school as I would've liked. I knew that I was guaranteed at least one byte unless the buffer was cleared out. So when I had to send some LPR commands between a PC and a printer, I did it one byte at a time. Fortunately, it was only a couple of KBs, so it wasn't a big deal and the Nagle algorithm probably covered it up anyway.
TRWTF was going back to that company about a decade later and seeing that nobody had updated it to handle multiple bytes.
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Something I hate about Chrome
I don't even know what to search to find a solution for this. Chrome apparently cannot figure out that middle column width if it's set to 100% even if the table itself has a fixed width and the other columns have fixed widths and colgroup tags are set up. I tried searching 20 different combinations of Chrome, table, colspan, width, bug on Google and found nothing.
Then, by accident, I found people complaining that "colspan=0" was removed. People had been using it as shorthand for spanning all columns. Really great idea so of course it was removed. Somebody suggested using "colspan=100%" as a fix. Which is technically wrong because the "%" is ignored. Which led me to try setting my colspan to 4. Which suddenly worked.
Chrome can't operate right with specific instructions but telling it to account for phantom columns that are never defined anywhere somehow works. And worse, this dopey browser is the new IE6, with so much marketshare it doesn't have to fix anything ever (I have a list of basic stuff that shouldn't still be broken in 2019). Except IE6 at least did what I expected in terms of layout. I want to strangle the Cult of DIV because DIVs have never been fixed to act like the tables they were supposed to replace.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
@MrL said in The Official Status Thread:
@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Took a nap during lunch break.
1
Status: took a nap during meeting.1
I scheduled a meeting so I could take a nap! -
RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Everything is a data miner these days, isn't it?
I wanted to try chatgpt. They want an account. Nothing "free" is ever free. Fine. Oh, e-mail verification isn't enough, by Grabthar's Hammer, what a surprise. A name? How about Indiana Jones? Now you want a telephone number too. Couldn't you tell me this a little sooner than four steps in? Fuck you.
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RE: JAVASCRIPT OUTDATED JAVA OVERRATED LONG HAVE WE WAITED PYTHON ACTIVATED
@PleegWat said in JAVASCRIPT OUTDATED JAVA OVERRATED LONG HAVE WE WAITED PYTHON ACTIVATED:
@Rhywden said in JAVASCRIPT OUTDATED JAVA OVERRATED LONG HAVE WE WAITED PYTHON ACTIVATED:
And sometimes you get people who don't understand what they're supposed to do at all.
"Oh, you were looking for an article on how to use the
Camera
plugin? Let's talk about theImagePicker
instead! Same thing, really!"Q: How do I do X without jquery?
A: Use jquery.I feel like there's a ridiculously large overlap of those people and the people running developer interviews here. You tell them "no, I haven't used the Purple Monkey Dishwater framework yet but I know JavaScript" and they look at you like you have two heads.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: So while I get told I "don't have enough HTML experience," it turns out my bank's recent "upgrade" pushed out a transaction listing page that can't escape ampersands. Thus my bills from AT&T and PP&L show up as AT and PP.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Ah, modern software. Try to open a 5K x 3K 2.7 MB JPEG.
FireFox 24 from 9 years ago? Loads fine.
Chrome 98 from a week ago? Out of memory crash. -
RE: The Official Status Thread
@Zenith And of course because I spent $30 on said batteries, I managed to find two of the three lying around the house. I love it when a plan comes together.
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RE: The Official Status Thread
Status: Beat.
Doubled my previous record without selling the $600 Galactus (not how I expected that to work out). Had a really good spot, a corner in fact, that likely helped. I was a little disappointed that some familiar faces didn’t show up. I got to meet the voice of Firestar from Spiderman and his Amazing Friends though. Mom indirectly helped keep my spending in check so I only bought three figures - a die cast A-Team van, Marvel Legends Scarlet Witch, and an exclusive legends class black Megatron. I even made a few hundred bucks for my friend who couldn’t attend although his selection of items to send along was dubious at best.
though has been everything else. The hotel was one I went to a few years ago. I only stopped because I registered too late one year and started going to a different one. It was still nice but the TV was weirdly placed, there were no drawers to put stuff in, the door handle inside the bathroom was missing, and the phone was dead.
Square decided to play “your settings are right where you left them.” Per-charge e-mails has been the default for, oh, a decade at least. Until they randomly shut that off. I panicked a little not seeing charges come through. When I reactivated the notifications, through the site because it’s not in the app (fuck you very much), they’re useless because they no longer contain the tax and fee breakdown (hur dur login to HipsterScript site). Also instead of getting my money deposited at the end of the each day, I only got it today because suddenly the bank I’ve received instant transfers to for a decade is magically incompatible now.
The GPS took us back a weird way so we didn’t see a food place until Roy Rogers on the turnpike. This was the Roy Rogers that was mysteriously closed early last time we stopped at it. Well, they somehow ran out of buns (along with half of the menu) and put all of the burgers on bread. Don’t expect to stop there ever again.
Also, I almost went through an entire show without a weird customer. So of course, while boxing up, this mook showed up. He wanted a deal on an already cheap figure, so I said only if he bought two. So he slowly browsed (keep in mind that I paused packing up to accommodate him) and then….decided sub-retail on two figures was too much. Asshole.
But I made some real money for a change so it all worked out!