The Speed of Code

http://thedailywtf.com/Articles/The-Speed-of-Code.aspx

by billpg • 15 years ago

33 22 15 years ago

yahelc• 15 years ago

This made me profoundly sad.

graceyang• 15 years ago

I find it hard to believe that someone could go from not knowing anything about coding to creating stuff quickly that works well enough to be used. Isn't that what we're all trying to do? Maybe this Alicia was just lean programming her way to the top?

JonnieCache• 15 years ago

I'm sure some of the stuff on that website is made up. They claim to verify it all, but when you're dealing with programmers the compulsion to game systems in elaborate ways is just too strong.

At the end of the day I have to believe some of it is made up or I would quickly lose the will to live.

fourspace• 15 years ago

It's basically the geek equivalent of Penthouse Letters to the Editor.

Pyrodogg• 15 years ago

Even if things are verified there is sure to be a little bit of padding to stories you get from someone who experience an emotional or bizarre situation. However, they also say reality is stranger than fiction.

billswift• 15 years ago

>they also say reality is stranger than fiction.

It has always struck me as suspicious that the first dozen "theys" I heard this from were all science fiction writers.

mseebach• 15 years ago

How could they verify it? Ask for Alicias contact details and get her to confirm the story?

msluyter• 15 years ago

It was unclear to me whether the article was a confabulated cautionary tale or an allusion to an actual event. But either way, hard to take seriously without more context.

artmageddon• 15 years ago

Same here-it seems weird that there are no other parties involved besides "Jaimy" and "Alicia". Well, aside from the two kids, anyway. How could no one else have been told about how poorly she was performing?!

patrickk• 15 years ago

If I had to guess, I would say this is a compilation of horror stories from a bunch of different badly-managed companies with some juicy padding lobbed in for fun.

MichaelGG• 15 years ago

It's probably the creative-story-class rewriting TDWTF does to submissions. The original was probably a much more credible two paragraph story. But why publish that when you can throw in "It was a dark and stormy night" and lots of unrealistic dialog?

semanticist• 15 years ago

My former employer featured on there, and I can confirm that the story was entirely accurate, as far as the person submitting it knew.

(They didn't stick around long enough to see all the many real WTFs that were happening there.)

kenjackson• 15 years ago

There is no Visual Studio 2000.

The story seems fake to me.

userulluipeste• 15 years ago

I think after "Vision Studios", it was pretty clear what is there and the Jaimy's Visual studio 2000 had to be a rhetorical bitter joke ...that was then completed with "better" one like putting the cherry on the top of cake.

groby_b• 15 years ago

And of course it had to have gender mixed into the story...

Ysx• 15 years ago

Is that a criticism? TheDailyWTF is a big site - some stories feature incompetent women, while most have incompetent men. Big whoop.

Udo• 15 years ago

I don't think it matters what gender the fuck-ups are. Do we really need to sanitize factual accounts now to reflect political correctness guidelines? Who cares what the gender of those involved is, it's the actual story that matters and this one is about general malicious incompetence, not about gender stereotypes.

Tycho2• 15 years ago

one of the comments made me laugh:

I was hired for a job for which I feel vastly underqualified about 9 months ago. I think they were desperate. Having seen the calibre of the developers I've come to realise I could never be a real developer. I'm not that smart. I was shit-hot at all my previous jobs but now I feel like an idiot.

Luckily, I tell everybody that asks me to do something that I can't, I don't have a clue how to, I've no idea what my job is and I don't understand how I got through the interview. They laugh and go and ask someone else. I figure, when the shit eventually comes down and they rumble me, I can point to the fact that I've been completely honest all along.

Maybe some of these companies are like 'fronts' for illegal money laundering or fraudulent hedge funds, so the more clueless the employees are, the better. From an employment angle that's not too far fetched -

me, age 9, after typing in a ZX Spectrum animation/macro:

    I know BASIC.

me, age 22, after writing a few scripts for Office software:

    I'm proficient in Visual Basic.

And in neither case did I really know how wrong I was... You could definitely hire a lot of 'computer users' who have no real understanding of programming abstractions, and have never met a real developer.

HeyLaughingBoy2• 15 years ago

The comment you refer to isn't that surprising. I have a friend who was hired into a software development job a large corp, barely knowing how to program. She admitted as such during the interview, and again when she was given work. Her manager's reply was "that's OK, you'll learn."

Most of her work entailed struggling to understand a bit of code and making trivial changes to it. She would confide to me over dinner that she would have no idea how to write a program from scratch, but she could generally figure out what others had done and cut & paste until she got something to work. They paid her a ton of money (after her contract agency's cut, she got $45/hour. A lot for someone who made $25k max in previous jobs) for about 6 months until the contract ran out. At no time did she attempt to deceive them about her ability, and neither she nor I could understand how she got the job in the first place, but the money was just too good to pass up!

Tycho2• 15 years ago

Was she a physics graduate? I've heard the big corps like to fast-track people like that through the interview process and just assume they'll be smart enough to learn what they need (after all, they studied quantum mechanics). In fact I understand those sorts of degrees just require students to learn a bit of programming in their final year to get their assignments done, with no extra help thrown in.

Maybe companies want 'normal, intelligent and proven hard worker' rather than 'uber nerd who can complete all the work while spending most of the day playing Unreal Tournament and despising management.' who knows.

The Speed of Code

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