The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

The Agreement

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-06-29

In addition to our “bread and butter” of bad code, bad bosses, worse co-workers and awful decision-making, we always love the chance to turn out occassional special events. This time around, our sponsors at Hired gave us the opportunity to build and film a sketch.

I’m super-excited for this one. It’s a bit more ambitious than some of our previous projects, and pulled together some of the best talent in the Pittsburgh comedy community to make it happen. Everyone who worked on it- on set or off- did an excellent job, and I couldn't be happier with the results.

22 comments - Last comment @ 2018-04-01

Not so DDoS

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2017-06-27

Joe K was a developer at a company that provided a SaaS Natural Language Processing system. As Chief Engineer of the Data Science Team (a term that make him feel like some sort of mad professor), his duties included coding the Data Science Service. It provided the back-end for handling the complex, heavy-lifting type of processing that had to happen in real-time. Since it was very CPU-intensive, Joe spent a lot of time trying to battle latency. But that was the least of his problems.

The rest of the codebase was a cobbled-together mess that had been coded by the NLP researchers- scientists with no background in programming or computer science. Their mantra was “If it gets us the results we need, who cares how it looks behind the scenes?” This meant Joe’s well-designed data service somehow had to interface with applications made from a pile of ugly hacks. It was difficult at times, but he managed to get the job done while also keeping CPU usage to a minimum.

42 comments - Last comment @ 2018-10-05

I Need More Space

by Ellis Morning in Feature Articles on 2017-06-22

Shawn W. was a newbie support tech at a small company. Just as he was beginning to familiarize himself with its operational quirks, he got a call from Jim: The Big Boss.

59 comments - Last comment @ 2019-05-29

The CMS From Hell

by Jane Bailey in Feature Articles on 2017-06-20

Contracting can be really hit or miss. Sometimes, you're given a desk and equipment and treated just like an employee, except better paid and exempt from team-building exercises. Sometimes, however, you're isolated in your home office, never speaking to anyone, working on tedious, boring crap they can't convince their normal staff to do.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-23

Classic WTF: The Accidental Hire

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2017-06-14

At least we get a summer break, I suppose. Not like over at Doghouse Insurance. Original -- Remy

Doghouse Insurance (as we'll call them) was not a pleasant place to work. Despite being a very successful player in their industry, the atmosphere inside Doghouse was filled with a constant, frenzied panic. If Joe Developer didn't delay his upcoming vacation and put in those weekend hours, he might risk the timely delivery of his team's module, which might risk delaying the entire project, which might risk the company's earnings potential, which might risk the collapse of the global economy. And that's just for the Employee Password Change Webpage project; I can't even begin to fathom the overarching devastation that would ensue from a delayed critical project.

To make matters worse, the primary business application that poor souls like Vinny maintained was a complete nightmare. It was developed during the company's "database simplification" era and consisted of hundreds of different "virtual attribute tables" stuffed into four real tables; it was a classic case of The Inner-Platform Effect. But amidst all this gloom and despair was an upbeat fellow named Chris who accidentally became a part of the Doghouse Insurance team.

18 comments - Last comment @ 2017-10-11

Classic WTF: Server Room Fans and More Server Room Fun

by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles on 2017-06-12

The Daily WTF is taking a short summer break this week, and as the temperatures around here are edging up towards "Oh God I Want to Die" degrees Fahrenheit, I thought it'd be great to kick off this week of classic articles with some broiling hot server room hijinks. -- Remy

"It's that time of year again," Robert Rossegger wrote, "you know, when the underpowered air conditioner just can't cope with the non-winter weather? Fortunately, we have a solution for that... and all we need to do is just keep an extra eye on people walking near the (completely ajar) server room door."

31 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-14

The Gassed Pump

by Remy Porter in Feature Articles on 2017-06-08

“Staff augmentation,” was a fancy way of saying, “hey, contractors get more per hour, but we don’t have to provide benefits so they are cheaper,” but Stuart T was happy to get more per hour, and even happier to know that he’d be on to his next gig within a few months. That was how he ended up working for a national chain of gas-station/convenience stores. His job was to build a “new mobile experience for customer loyalty” (aka, wrapping their website up as an app that can also interact with QR codes).

At least, that’s what he was working on before Miranda stormed into his cube. “Stuart, we need your help. ProdTrack is down, and I can’t fix it, because I’ve got to be at a mandatory meeting in ten minutes.”

50 comments - Last comment @ 2022-05-21

The Insurance Plan

by snoofle in Feature Articles on 2017-06-06

When designing a new feature of an application, among other things, you always want to decide how it will be used. Is it single threaded or will it need to happen in parallel. Will only one user do it at a time, or does it need to support asynchronous access. Will every user want to do it in the same way, or will they each want something just a little different.

Charlie C. worked for a modestly sized financial startup that had gained some traction. The company had grown to about 100 people. They had garnered about 300 customers, and they were building software that would solve a problem that was causing regulators all manner of headaches.

53 comments - Last comment @ 2017-06-22

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