Cloud-to-butt plugin used in Amazon Job Posting?

https://web.archive.org/web/20211014200658/https://www.amazon.jobs/en/jobs/1773420/software-development-engineer

by spudlyo • 5 years ago

511 114 5 years ago

web.archive.org

pnevares• 5 years ago

For background info on the referenced Chrome extension: https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22cloud+to+butt%22

unixhero3• 5 years ago

Thank you, finally someone with butt-less facts in this clown driven thread

reidjs2• 5 years ago

Great catch, that's the oldest prank in the book, but still one of the funniest.

AdmiralAsshat• 5 years ago

Surely it can't be that old, given that the Cloud to Butt Plus extension only goes back to 2014:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...

GauntletWizard• 5 years ago

Sure, but the problem goes back far earlier than that - Automated text replacement is a clbuttic mistake[1]

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

floatboth3• 5 years ago

Plus implies it's not the original.

The original started in 2013: https://github.com/panicsteve/cloud-to-butt/commit/c518a1317...

reidjs2• 5 years ago

Yeah I definitely exaggerated haha. I think the oldest may be taking a screenshot of their desktop background and maximizing it, so they click around helplessly. Does anyone know a prank older than that?

jtvjan• 5 years ago

Probably. I used that add-on a while ago, and it also modifies your form submissions. Learnt that the hard way.

sjansen• 5 years ago

One of our lead developers used it at the height of cloud hype. You could always tell which pages of our internal wiki he had edited recently. Amusing at first, but I got tired of it much faster than he did.

kirubakaran• 5 years ago

You just need a butt-to-cloud extension to counter that.

easton2• 5 years ago

Here's a fork that fixes that: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-redu...

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

Wow, Google won't let me look at that without giving them a credit card number or uploading a copy of state ID. To prove I'm old enough to to responsibly handle the word 'butt'. Because if you can get your hands on a credit card number, that proves it.

lxe• 5 years ago

I forget I have it enabled sometimes. It's a welcome reprieve from the seriousness of daily work stuff when I catch the plugin do it's thing.

How would this make it into a posting though? Was it a copy-from-browser and paste-into-tool type of a gaffe?

easton2• 5 years ago

<textarea> and <input> are also affected by the extension, so if they saved the page and went back to it later, the instances of cloud inside the box would've been replaced with butt.

Liquix• 5 years ago

Cloud-to-butt implemented via editing live TCP streams: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RoOqznZUClI&t=1210s

spudlyo• 5 years ago

I can only imagine the terrible feeling in the pit of someone's stomach today when they realized that the plugin modifies form submissions, or they cut and pasted from a page that was rendered with the help of the plugin.

The good news is years from now they'll have a great story to tell at parties.

extrememacaroni• 5 years ago

You want me to build what what in the butt??

mkoryak2• 5 years ago

all kinds of shit

colanderman2• 5 years ago

"Rock-solid components".

mgraczyk• 5 years ago

Also posted to linkedin, not yet corrected

https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/software-development-engi...

colanderman2• 5 years ago

Archive link for when it's gone: http://web.archive.org/web/20211014210934/https://www.linked...

badwolf• 5 years ago

Incredible.

duskwuff• 5 years ago

The New York Times has run into similar issues in the past:

Because of an editing error involving a satirical text-swapping web browser extension, an earlier version of this article misquoted a passage from an article by the Times reporter Jim Tankersley. The sentence referred to America’s narrowing trade deficit during “the Great Recession,” not during “the Time of Shedding and Cold Rocks.” (Pro tip: Disable your “Millennials to Snake People” extension when copying and pasting.)

-- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/03/06/us/politics/07dc-tradefac...

airstrike• 5 years ago

So did Wired:

In 2016, Wired magazine made a similar mistake and published an article in which Donald Trump's name was replaced with "someone with tiny hands".
The error made it past the magazine's production team, who had assumed it was an intentional joke.

https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-43331054

willcipriano2• 5 years ago

Can't get past the paywall but am I the only one who is a bit alarmed that a fact checker employs such a plugin via a work machine? If you need to alter words in text of news you read in order to find it palatable you aren't really a person living on reality's terms.

45ure• 5 years ago

Some other examples, preserved here:

https://www.flickr.com/groups/cloud-to-butt/pool/

legitster• 5 years ago

I just can't get over the idea that someone who (ostensibly) works as a professional writer or editor would have that plugin installed.

Although the irony is not lost on me - a millennial, wanting to make fun of overwrought millennial tropes, ends up committing one.

munificent• 5 years ago

works as a professional writer or editor would have that plugin installed.

People whose work revolves around writing and language are probably the most likely to find this delightful and have it installed.

Most just remember to disable it before working.

spicybright• 5 years ago

Forget the extension. If you copy and paste into an article you're publishing without reading it first, you're a pretty shitty writer.

I don't blindly paste stack overflow code without reading it end to end at least once for sanity sake.

makeitdouble• 5 years ago

On top of munificent’s point, professionaly reading all day makes more vulnerable to word fatigue or blindness. Having a plugin force you to pay attention would be a good trick.

The same way people subscribe to purposefully boring or AI generated subreddits on reddit to have non sensical items in their feed.

oxfordmale• 5 years ago

It sounds more like someone forgot to lock their laptop and a colleague/ family member took this as an opportunity to install this Chrome plugin.

stjohnswarts• 5 years ago

Even the most seasoned pro can make stupid mistakes, especially if overworked and stressed.

syspec• 5 years ago

So there's a butt plugin?

benttoothpaste• 5 years ago

There is butt-to-butt plugin that replaces the word “butt” with “butt”.

chrononaut• 5 years ago

Somewhat OT, but I enjoy encountering the humorous corrections that are sometimes made to news articles for one reason or another. Reminiscent of: https://twitter.com/NPRKelly/status/1349787672345268224

sincarne• 5 years ago

Oh, it doesn’t surprise me at all. I once worked well into the night trying to debug a web site for a client, only to find the issue was he’d installed NoScript “to try it out”.

Minor49er• 5 years ago

This takes the term "backend engineer" to a whole new level

_jal• 5 years ago

In a job a long time ago, I was on a conference call in which a sales guy kept repeatedly emphasizing the value and importance of their "robust, scalable backend".

Eventually, we had to mute the phone, people around the table couldn't keep from laughing.

chestervonwinch• 5 years ago

Our elastic backend effortlessly scales with ingestion!

i1856511• 5 years ago

Now THAT's an enterprise solution!

obedm• 5 years ago

Thank you for bringing joy to my evening. This was hilarious

mandeepj2• 5 years ago

OMG! I'm in my early 40s and I've never thought about 'backend' in this way, until now. And, I can't undo it :-).

Now, I'm thinking - do I have lack of humor or imagination? :-)

jedberg• 5 years ago

You have maturity. :)

prepend• 5 years ago

Doesn’t this mean a plastic surgeon working on rears?

SJMosley• 5 years ago

When you take this joke super far and make a coffee enema website for your boss.

www.lifesapeach.club

Backend Engineer (This is actually what we call all our employees, regardless of your job)

singingfish• 5 years ago

I use "arse" rather than "butt" due to not being american.

After extensive discussion at my last workplace we configured the word replacer browser plugin to replace "cloud" with "arse", enterprise with "garbage" and architect with "clown". It makes marketing and technical docs a much easier read.

handrous• 5 years ago

"Our senior clown has come up with an arse-based solution, to meet our garbage-tier requirements"

Yeah, that seems about right.

philwelch• 5 years ago

I love the way “cloud architect” becomes “arse clown”.

floatboth3• 5 years ago

I thought "arse" is the UK alternative to "ass", not "butt"?

jrochkind13• 5 years ago

uh....

James-Livesey• 5 years ago

Am from the UK; can confirm that arse = butt ≠ ass (aka donkey)

ushakov• 5 years ago

Try reading this article with the plugin enabled, i guarantee a lot of fun

https://uk.pcmag.com/networking-communications-software/1682...

benbristow• 5 years ago

What is my butt? Where is my butt? Are we in my butt right now? These are all questions you've probably heard or even asked yourself. The term "butt computing" is everywhere.

Lots of butt fun to be had here haha

mkoryak2• 5 years ago

I used to work across the hall from a startup called CloudHealth... just saying

QuinnyPig2• 5 years ago

It's fairly likely that my Twitter thread last month (https://twitter.com/QuinnyPig/status/1438265897093763074) is indirectly responsible for this.

reilly30002• 5 years ago

Do you think you could cost-optimize my BBL?

QuinnyPig2• 5 years ago

“I can cost-optimize anything with nipples.”

hippyup• 5 years ago

Lol serves them right for not reading far enough to your moral of the story.

unixhero3• 5 years ago

This is god damn hillarious. I am laughing in tears while alone on the train here, people are looking at me as if I'm a wierdo.

"The moral of the story is that no matter how hilarious you many find them, don’t install extensions that screw with text replacement in browsers. It’s just not worth it."

Bahahahahahahahaha

khazhoux• 5 years ago

I think this is the first time I've seen a job posting which instead gets someone fired.

isatty• 5 years ago

Fired? This is instant, free and effective publicity for a faceless mega corp. They’ll take it.

beeboop• 5 years ago

Amazon leadership has zero sense of humor. I say this as someone who works with them professionally frequently. It's amazing the level of fear they instill throughout the whole organization

falcojr• 5 years ago

I once worked for a company with a name like CompanyCloud and wound up sending an email to a customer saying I worked for CompanyButt. That was an embarrassing day.

erdo• 5 years ago

That reminds me of when I was at university in the 90s, a favourite trick was to set MSWord's auto correct on the communal computers to change the word "the" to "wanker". People would arrive with their floppy disks, print out their assignments ready to hand in and then notice (or fail to notice) a page full of wankers. Hilarity ensued (...mostly)

the_hoser• 5 years ago

I have a funny story about this plugin.

The team I was working on was developing a new product with the word 'cloud' in the name. We were deploying database changes to facilitate the new product. This was a long time ago, and the organization still deployed things by hand, so there was no tooling for us to automate the deployment. Part of the deployment process involved pasting some SQL to create the tables and populate the initial data into a JIRA ticket for an administrator to run in production.

Said administrator was a fan of the cloud-to-butt plugin, and dutifully copied and pasted the SQL that they saw, like we instructed. When our code failed, an inspection of the production database revealed the culprit. Fortunately, 'cloud' and 'butt' are close to each other, alphabetically, so we didn't need to search very long.

We never let that admin live that down.

gdsdfe• 5 years ago

A butt that requires reinventing database systems? ... Yeah I wanna see that haha

mikl• 5 years ago

Clbuttic mistake.

ccn0p• 5 years ago

thanks hacker news. today I learned that "people who cannot be reached for comment" are "guilty and everyone knows it".

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkcd-substitutions...

literallyaduck• 5 years ago

Maybe they shouldn't have allowed plugin installation. Seems like a security risk.

drited• 5 years ago

Yeah they're almost inviting a breach:

>Are you interested in building hyper-scale database services in my butt?

jancsika• 5 years ago

Just imagine if there was an equally popular extension to translate "butt" back to "cloud." You could blow stacks of managers with infinite loops that Abbott and Costello-level rhetoric:

Manager One: The posting is littered with references to "my butt." This is unacceptable.

Manager Two: But isn't that's what the position is for?

Manager One: Um, NO... this position for development in cloud. The posting keeps referring to "my butt"

Manager Two: Naturally.

Etc.

czbond• 5 years ago

Reminds me of all those early career programs you write where the disgruntled comments are first curse words, then the output is. Then you forget to remove them when showing people who care.

fencepost• 5 years ago

I love that "This is a hands on position" that requires deep expertise.

einpoklum• 5 years ago

It will also teach you to be "curious" and "build trust".

unixhero3• 5 years ago

Pure clown gold

adrr• 5 years ago

Funny thing is that this job posting is now being distributed everywhere for free.

chris_wot• 5 years ago

"Come, join us in reinventing database systems for my butt!"

Nearly choked on my coffee...

__MatrixMan__• 5 years ago

I've been using this plugin for years as a way to say "you left your computer unlocked". I wish there was a way to know if this was a similar case, or if it was installed voluntarily.

lisper• 5 years ago

I'm not sure which is funnier, the original ad, or the mental image conjured up in my mind by the phrase "cloud-to-butt plugin" before I figured out what was actually going on here.

hn_throwaway_99• 5 years ago

No matter how sophisticated or "professional" we may think we are, we all giggle like 3rd graders when we see something like this :)

jamesbvaughan• 5 years ago

To add to the stories from this plugin:

Years ago, I had this installed on the family computer and my sister was writing a school report on weather in Google Docs. The plugin as it existed then did not affect the document as she was editing it, but it _did_ manage to sneak its way in when she printed it out to turn in, without her noticing.

Needless to say, her teacher was not amused and I ended up going to see him to explain how that was not her fault.

qx98j• 5 years ago

le so random XD

Cloud-to-butt plugin used in Amazon Job Posting?

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