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Your Worst IT Workshop?
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Wednesday December 19, @03:09PM
from the horror-stories-from-the-front dept.
from the horror-stories-from-the-front dept.
suntory writes "I am a lecturer at a Spanish university. This week had to attend a workshop on 'Advanced HTML and CSS' for the university staff. Some of the ideas that the presenter (a fellow lecturer) shared with us: IE is the only browser that follows standards; frames and tables are the best way to organize your website; you can view the source for most CSS, Javascript and HTML files, so you can freely copy and paste what you feel like — the Internet is free you know; same applies for images, if you can see them in Google Images Search, then you can use them for your projects. Of course, the workshop turned out to be a complete disaster and a waste of time. So I was wondering what other similar experiences you have had, and what was your worst IT workshop?"
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Your Worst IT Workshop?
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Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Yet.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Interesting)
I actually remember hitting the Google.stanford.edu implementation a few times. My ISP had a BBS that I used to connect with because I didn't have the Internet connection kit yet. That's what they called the early web browsers. They packaged the browser and some Compuserve 3 month trial thing and called it a kit. (windows still didn't have one stock at that time) The big search thing back then was aggregates like BigFoot where they presented you with what you wanted instead of doing a web search.
Those where the days when the E-commerce buz meant a business having a single page web presence and a few email addresses they had to check on dial up. It was more like a page in the phone book but without a fancy way of finding entries. But that was when outlook did the mailbox thing and you could basically use it as a fetchmail server and an interoffice messaging system without needing exchange.
Yea, Good times. the days when C: enter
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Wonder where they all went.
HTH
John
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
The low_uid is primarily a nocturnal poster, but can sometimes be coaxed into daytime efforts by a higher_uid making 'old man of the forest' claims.
</david_attenborough>
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
oops . . .
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Insightful)
(1) Most low-uid people have become lurkers. They read a lot but post little. I know this applies to me.
(2) Nobody really looks at the uid of posters until a uid-war starts, so nobody notices the low-uid people unless there is a uid-war.
I suspect it's actually a combination of the two.
What have I done since I joined slashdot? Changed universities, changed a few jobs, changed a few girlfriends, changed a few psychiatrists, and also changed a few passwords.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
WHAZZUP
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Bender: "What are you doing with that?"
Lrrr: "You're going to kill this innocent Slashdotter?"
Ranger: "Of course not! I'm just gonna tranquilize him so I can chop off his feet as proof he exists. Then dump him back in the wild. He'll do fine!"
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
Hmmm. Seventeen jobs since joining /. Perhaps there's a correlation? :-)
Re:Wow! (Score:5, Funny)
What to do then, I dunno.
Re:Wow! (Score:4, Funny)
My personal worst (Score:5, Funny)
I submitted an article on it a few months ago. They posted it to the front page 3 or 4 times. Just search for keywords: bestt editer
Re:My personal worst (Score:5, Funny)
So to get the slides, he opens a terminal, and types pine. A big list of all his email fills the screen. He starts looking for his lecture notes... at which point some guy noticed one of his emails had the subject "Enormous Pussy". The prof stammered and said it wasn't what it sounded like, that's just a big cat one of his friends has, and his friend likes to send email with provocative subjects.
At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility.
The lecture itself was great.
Re:My personal worst (Score:4, Funny)
At which point someone else saw an email called "Giant Beaver", destroying the prof's credibility.
What? Why is everyone looking at me?
Speaking of university... (Score:5, Interesting)
I took the advanced C++ class at my university the first quarter after they made the class transition from Pascal. I had prior work experience as a C++ programmer, so I figured it would be an easy A. Boy, was I wrong!
The professor was like 80 years old. He must have been around before they developed the one in binary and only had zeros. That in itself isn't so bad, except that he didn't bother to even crack the book to teach C++. He'd give examples and try to work problems on the whiteboard in some kind of pseudo language that wasn't Pascal, definitely wasn't C++, and that hopelessly confused the students who didn't have a really good grasp of the language. Oh, it gets better, though.
His TA, the girl who graded our labs, knew even less. We had a lab where we had to implement a complex number class, ho hum. The instructions stated that we had to develop methods to do things like add, subtract, multiply, divide, etc. complex numbers, but they didn't explicitly state what we had to call our functions.
Any C++ programmer worth anything would know that the obvious thing to do is to overload the +, -, *, and / operators so that they could accept complex number arguments and return the appropriate result. I spent a few hours working on it, churned out my class, and when I got the lab back, she had failed me!
I asked why she gave me an F, and she explained that I was supposed to implement the functions using names like add, subtract, etc. I told her that that was nowhere in the instructions for the lab, and she admitted that it was okay to use other function names, but operator overloading was a no-no. Of course, I asked why, and her answer—I kid you not—was that because if you overloaded the operators, other programmers wouldn't be able to tell the difference between your class and built-in types. I argued vehemently that that was the point of operator overloading, that it was an extremely common practice in C++, but she wouldn't be convinced.
It was toward the end of the semester, so I took the lab to my professor and explained to him what was going on. I even took a C++ best practices book with me to show what I was talking about and to prove that I'm not some crackpot stupid student trying to eek out a few extra points. The professor proceeded to explain to me that the university had just informed him that they were letting him go after the semester, that they were firing him. (His words exactly, not mine.) He said that if I had a problem with my grade, I needed to take it up with the TA, because he wasn't going to override anything she said.
In all the programming classes I took at the university, that was the only one in which I got a B, and I was absolutely furious. Not so much because of the negligible impact to my GPA, but because it's the only time I've ever gotten a grade that I truly felt like I didn't deserve, and it was all because of an idiot professor who didn't give a damn about anything (gee, I wonder why they fired him) and a TA who didn't know crap about the subject that she was grading us on.
It's too bad, too. All of my other experiences at the university were relatively pleasant, and I'm a life member of the alumni association today. But that one incident still sticks in my mind as the height of stupidity. I wish now that I had had the balls to escalate it to the dean or maybe even higher. I can't help but wonder how many students failed or otherwise did miserably in that class because of him, and I can't help but wonder if any of them gave up computer science because of that bad experience. God, I hope not.
Re:Speaking of university... (Score:4, Funny)
As this was part of the final project, of course I failed the subject...
The Ironic part was, my solution turned out to be be THE ONLY way to do some complex data mining in MySQL 3.something for my first IT job. Imagine the lulz that were had by my boss when he found out that the solution that got the CFO off his back was also responsible for me failing databases 1001...
oh the humanity
Re:Speaking of university... (Score:5, Interesting)
My intro CS "professor" was absolute crap. I was a freshman with no programming experience beyond BASIC when I was 10 years old. I routinely had to correct him, nearly daily in fact. Not because I wanted to be a smartass, but because I could see the puzzled looks of my classmates as he contradicted himself constantly.
At first, I thought it was just a language barrier (he was Indian), but as I grew more skilled in the subject I realized he was just talking out his ass all the time. This led my and some fellow students to do some detective work on his credentials... where did he get his degree? We eventually figured out he was a big fat liar!
He claimed to have taught at various universities (I remember Georgia Tech off the top of my head). None of them had heard of him. His Ph.D. turned out to be a mail-in degree from an online school. That was, thankfully, his last semester. Unfortunately, I fear he just got a job somewhere else doing the same thing.
Re:Speaking of university... (Score:5, Interesting)
My freshman instructor in CS50, the first class you take in CS, was a special guest instructor that year.
I shit you not, I was taught C by none other than Brian Kernighan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Kernighan [wikipedia.org]
Hint: He's the "K" in "AWK". He helped Ken Thompson and Dennis Ritchie invent UNIX at Bell Labs. He co-authored "The C Programming Language", the very first book on programming in C, and widely considered by most to be the bible of modern programming.
He was extremely fun and engaging, and I felt honored to be in the presence of one of the forefathers of modern computing.
Re:My personal worst (Score:4, Funny)
I got you beat: (Score:5, Funny)
I swear to God, the first words from the presenters mouth: "That Exchange thing Microsoft is building is no threat to us, and here is why....."
Re:I got you beat: (Score:4, Interesting)
I was at camp Microsoft in 1997 meeting with the Exchange team as well as the early Microsoft Transaction server teams and I am happy to say that I got to meet some really brilliant people. Truely gifted software engineers and developers that impressed me completely. My host was Jeff Raikes and he made sure that the Lotus Notes team people were very well taken care of at a five star golf resort. It was pretty cool to meet a real software billionaire that got up every morning to go to work for another billionaire. He asked for input and he got it, straight from people that lived and breated Notes for years. I was one of those people that had to guts to tell him that Exchange was crippled in many ways despite the lavish hotel. I ended up with a few Microsoft people sitting with me on the plane and we all worked over a business issue and they went off to code it all up in Exchange. I did it in Notes in two days flat.
So, to make a long story short, I defend the Notes process because it works very well. Today and yesterday going back years. I think that IBM has dumped their business units that can not longer show profit ( like PCs anymore ) and they are sticking with technologies that have real serious value longterm. I see Lotus is still in there and Notes just keeps on going and going. I stand by my words that in the event of a complete atomic meltdown there will be cockroaches, UNIX, Lotus Notes and Cher. Not necessarily in that order
I'm sorry, but I think you were saying that Exchange was potential competition way back then. It wasn't. Still isn't. In my opinion.
Securing Voice over Internet Protocol (Score:3, Interesting)
Then once I got there it was a week of "If you encrypt your traffic," (thusly losing the ability to QoS that traffic), "you only need to firewall your management boxes and vlan off all of your VoIP endpoints!" Cue the rest of the class firewalling off their management boxes from everyone else (including themselves) *sigh*
Re:Securing Voice over Internet Protocol (Score:4, Interesting)
Vendor Name? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Vendor Name? (Score:4, Informative)
I was a co-facilitator at one... (Score:5, Interesting)
That was not quite as spectacular as the time a prof at the college hooked up two PC's via serial cables, one of them being on an AV cart (and plugged into it) - seems the cart was wired wrong, when he fired those up there was an small explosion, a fair bit of smoke and some actual pieces of the serial card from one of the pc's strewn about the case.
Ah, the good old days - I worked on Tandy machines that had fully exposed power supplies, took one apart once (the PC not the power supply!) and wondered what the whirring sound was, thing was still running
Oh that I could go back to the day of swapping floppy disks to run stuff.
Re:Blah... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'm attending a course on web design in my college this semester.
The TA that's giving the lectures:
However, two years ago I took a course given by a guy who told a friend of mine "Stop surfing the internet! Or else you won't know how to use Internet Explorer!" (yeah, it loses a bit in translation).
He could spend two hours explaining how to navigate to a bloody webpage from IE 6. And then how to add a crappy link to whatever IE calls bookmarks.
And when I said "could", I mean "did".
Repeatedly.
By the FSM's noodly appendage, I wish I was making this crap up.
Let's go the other way (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been to OOPSLA a couple of times. Very enjoyable and informative. More recently, I just attended a "No Fluff, Just Stuff" conferences in Atlanta. Lots of good information, especially on Groovy and Grails.
It was an AskSlashdot (Score:4, Funny)
Not the worst for *me*... (Score:5, Funny)
**Whoosh**! The woman instantly tears into the instructor's hard drive like in one of those hacker movies and starts moving and deleting files! The instructor dived for her own laptop and yanked the Ethernet cable. I'm still not all sure what really happened there.
Re:Not the worst for *me*... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not the worst for *me*... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Not the worst for *me*... (Score:4, Insightful)
Those who can do more, teach.
Re:IDIOT (Score:5, Funny)
int main()
stands for initialize. No amount of arguing with the instructor could convince him that it was declaring the return type of the main function as an integer. As it happens the instructor was also head of the computer science department. I spent the rest of that semester teaching the entire class after the instructor left because I felt bad for them. They all agreed I did a much better job than the instructor. I would have gotten a job as a teacher there, but they couldn't afford my rate.
Re:IDIOT (Score:4, Insightful)
Hey, you had it great.
A teacher does not by definition know everything; very often, teachers are wrong about stuff, too.
A teacher who can stand being corrected is nearly a treasure to be cherished these days.
Some of the teachers I've had have been patently wrong on come counts, blatantly unknowledgeable on others, yet would not accept any kind of correction, criticism or comment.
I got my revenge by getting a high grade and writing a poor evaluation.
Now if only those evaluations really meant something...
I Don't Get IT Workshops, You Insensitive Clod! (Score:5, Funny)
HTML, CSS and Websites (Score:5, Insightful)
If I went to a Web seminar like the one described in the story, and it didn't mention building sites on top of a CMS, I'd question the presenter and the company that paid for me to go. There is no reason that your average person needs to know HTML or CSS, as those should be handed over to DESIGNERS, people skilled with making things look good. If you want to see what it looks like when everyday people do design just go over to MySpace (akkkk).
Just my $.02 (actual value subject to market forces)
Re:HTML, CSS and Websites (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:no, your a wannabe.. who never learned to code (Score:5, Insightful)
WebGUI has some support for dynamic content, but I'm not familiar enough with it to know how much (I'm thinking of the thing where it takes a SQL query and turns it into a table or whatever). But what the guy you were talking to meant, is that if you put a PHP script into the WebGUI edit box and save it, it just spits the PHP back when you request the page (static content) instead of *executing* it (dynamic content).
I'm actually dealing with some pages right now where the content needs to be dynamically generated, but the original author wanted it integrated with WebGUI. So what does he do? He writes a ColdFusion
InterOp (Score:4, Funny)
Re:InterOp (Score:5, Funny)
Here in aerospace, we're not allowed to accept even a freaking mouse pad from a parts supplier.
Which is probably best, because I'd totally be whoring myself out for meals and gadgets and, if the salesperson was a cute woman, whatever I thought I could get before getting slapped.
"Yeah, sell me some FPGAs, bitch. Yeah, you like it when I talk like that, don't you? Tell me those gate counts again, you dirty, dirty girl."
I know. I need help.
Re:InterOp (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds to me like you just need $1000 and 24 hours in Vegas. ;)
maybe no tworst but... (Score:3, Interesting)
It was, if I rememeber right, "Advanced perl CGI scripting", or the moral equivalent thereof. The point was... CGI, PERL, and Advanced.
It began with a 3 minute speech about how thats what the tutorial used to be, but people kept signing up who barely, if at all, understood perl, and didn't know jack about CGI... so the tutorial had been severely dumbed down.
After the morning session it became clear that I was going to learn nothing, and so I took the afternoon to find some better way to waste my time, since my employer wasn't getting any value out of sending me to that tutorial in any case, may as well get some value out of the time.
Again, was too bad, it looked like it could have been cool, and the presenter certainly knew his stuff and could have given a better course. Its just well... lets just say, it looked like I was among the minority who left.
-Steve
Re:maybe not bratwurst but... (Score:4, Interesting)
Got similar from the "Intro to C++" professor I had. "I'm now showing you an array, which the school doesn't want me to teach," he said. When queried why, it turns out that the morons that the "guidance counselors indicated had high computer aptitude" couldn't wrap their heads around a basic, simple array. We had OUR education dumbed down 'cause of some kid that shouldn't have been in the class to begin with.
Oh you're telling me. In Ontario, Canada about 4 years ago we were using PII-400s with 4GB hard drives and 64MB of RAM to install Windows NT Server 4 as part of our Advanced Operating Systems course component. Suffice to say it took all class to format/install the OS. Then the instructor informs us that the next class's itinerary included formatting and re-installing NT so we could become more familiar with the installation routine.
A few of us who were expecting to delve into Linux, Windows XP, domains, etc. at the time asked if we could divert and do some other activities or atleast explore the NT server we'd already installed and he told us no, he couldn't set up individual lesson plans for select groups so we'd have to follow with the rest of the class. So we all developed mysterious illnesses the next day.
This class was an advanced component covering operating systems in an industry grade (and "industry developed") three year program and it listed no pre-requisites. Some of the people in our course couldn't even type letalone operate a modern PC - forget servers, switches, routers or the like - a word processor was fascinating and the rest of us had to suffer for it.
Our Telephony course had a mid-term required 30 page (double spaced) report due on the history, present, and future of telephony (one could easily write 300 pages but I digress). So here I am busting my hump, dissapointed in myself for only managing 26 or 27 pages, which I hole punch and hand in in a nicely coloured duo-tang on the prescribed day and what do I see from my classmates? 2, 3 and 4 page reports with a staple at the top corner, pictures galore (lots of photos of Alexander Bell, pictures of old telephones, new telephones) and due to the overwhelming complaints of the students the teacher had to give these people 'A' grades. So 4 pages double spaced with extra wide margins and 25% images with huge headers printed with 30 point font get an 'A' which completely invalidated my 27 page hand-in.
n.b. Our final exam in that class was open book in absurdia. Anything you could bring in on paper was allowed. If you could wheel a filing cabinet into the exam room it was permitted. The failure rate was more than 60% until the students whined.
Haven't been to many, but (Score:4, Insightful)
back in the Tivoli days I got sent to a 2-day class on how to use it. It was about totally worthless.
I found out the next week that the class had cost $750, and I actually went into the CEO's office and suggested to him that next time they want me to know something, they pay me the $750 and I'd purchase and read the appropriate book. He wasn't especially amused.
sometimes training is not done for the training (Score:5, Insightful)
You are of course correct, but if you speak with some business people you will be surprised why some businesses (and even individuals) take courses and enroll their staff to workshops and training sessions. Sometimes training is done not in order to actually learn something, but only because of various external requirements (eg legal, or requirements imposed or recommended by professional bodies), obscure accounting motives, publicity or advertising reasons ("we spent a million in staff training last year!"), hierarchical or careerist reasons ("manager: I will enroll my staff in extensive training so that my boss can't use their lack of skills as an excuse to fire me for hiring incompetent employees" or even "I, as the training manager, must make everyone attend training sessions because it's good for making me more important within the company"), or sometimes even irrational psychological reasons ("if we lose, it won't be because we didn't try hard but because out training was useless, so it's the trainer's problem not ours"). Yea I know all this is completely anti-productive and irrational, but I have actually seen all this being done in dysfunctional companies (sometimes even required by external agencies or bodies).
the fool - or the fool that follows him? (Score:5, Interesting)
Most of the bad talks were situations where I was asked to sub for someone - or an area where I "WANTED" to be an expert - but really wasn't.
Many times, after a talk, I find that something I said was just plain wrong - it happens - to everyone - even the best speakers out there.
They key is, as an attendee, to not sit around and waste time listening to a bad speaker. I just quietly walk out, picking up an evaluation form in the process, and making sure the instructor gets my feedback.
As an occasional bad speaker - the best thing an audience member can do for me is to let me know if I have gotten it wrong! In the end, the only way tp turn a bad speaker into a good one - is through feedback - even if it is "YOU SUCK!"
Re:Fistfight (Score:5, Funny)
I had just returned from my Peace Corps stint in Ghana, and I was suffering from highly virulent dysentery. During lunch I discovered my containment garments had a rip in the seat.
> I finally told him to shut the hell up or we could go outside and I would kick his butt
As soon as I saw you had symptoms, I decided it was too late to try and convince you.
But you really should seek professional help. Sounds like you haven't gotten over it yet.
Not my worst, but one of my best... (Score:5, Funny)
5 minutes later, by accident, he clicks on the link, triggering a cascade of pop-ups with naked men in front of the class, which was laughing it's lungs out...
Perl class (Score:5, Funny)
So this total propeller head who's teaching the class says "Perl is the easiest language to learn - very natural and logical syntax"
HP (Score:5, Funny)
Guy got really mad and started pretty much yelling at people, saying that 64 bit has twice as many bits and is therefore half as fast as 32 bit computing.
People didn't even bother laughing at him. Everyone just looked at him like he was an idiot.
Re:HP (Score:4, Funny)
SOA (Score:3, Interesting)
Question for the submitter (Score:4, Insightful)
PLC class (Score:5, Funny)
Next day he said, well, we're finished with the PLC stuff (actually we were finished with some really really bird's eye view of Ladder diagrams), now we'll see some SCADA. So the guy start showing this REALLY CRAPPY 16-bit app, and he showed ONE BY ONE every single widget (buttons, bar graphs, even some motors that changed colors to show when the output was running). And the library was H U G E. THOUSANDS of widgets. And he showed them "oh, look at how many of them there are! Just see how flexible this program is! See! We even have traffic lights! Buttons! Little trucks, big trucks, cars...".
I went outside and came back in 1 hour, and the guy was STILL SHOWING the fucking widgets and how to place and connect them. Needless to say, I didn't stay.
What's a double? (Score:4, Funny)
"Advanced" Email Workshop (Score:4, Interesting)
So I waltz into the computer labs one sunny August afternoon, ready for my "advanced" workshop fun. And what awaited me was the most painful IT experience of my life as the instructor walked us through the "advanced" complexities of logging in, clicking on subjects to read messages, clicking on buttons to reply or delete. We didn't even get to Reply All, CC or BCC, let alone folder, filters or the rest of the software options I'd expected them to cover.
I asked why this was considered to be at an advanced level. The woman running the workshop said that this was as much as anyone needed to know about the system, really. That's when I tuned out and starting making some ASCII art to pass the time.
Topic: How Wonderful We Are (Score:4, Funny)
Needless to say, the talk contained no useful information at all.
C course at a TAFE in Sydney, Australia (Score:3, Interesting)