Funniest IT Related Boasts You've Heard?

Karma asks: "The other day I saw a Slashdot comment which read, '[Projects] don't start getting interesting until you are dealing with Staff Years to develop them. Anything under that and you can actually keep the full design in your head'. An immodest boast, but not too funny. This made me wonder, in the macho worlds of IT and developers, what are the funniest and silliest boasts or bragging claims you've made, or heard? Tell us how they came back to haunt the overconfident."

My Roommate

[NotoriousQ]

Yeah, I can write a raytracer in a single day. /He did. It was a looooong day.

Re:My Roommate

[NotoriousQ]

Guess that should have been:

Yeah, I can get a first post.
Drat.

Debug? Me?

[drkich]

We have a person at our work place that once boasted that he did not have to debug his programs, they just worked. And he was completely serious. Of course what we did not tell him, but we should have, is that we found a bug in his program.

Not quite

[Otter]

Does Eric Raymond's famous "Reflections On Sudden Wealth" essay after the VA Linux IPO count as a boast? I certainly got a few laughs out of the aftermath.

Not quite a boast but -- a low-level admin at my wife's old workplace sent out this (paraphrased) email:

"I'm leaving this job to start my own network consulting firm. I'm feeling a lot of emotions right now, and here's a song that really captures them."

And he attaches a 5 meg MP3 file and sends it to hundreds of people, completely sinking their mail server.

Heh

[itwerx]

Best one I've heard was from a newly-minted and very pro-MS CIO who claimed (right after Win2K first came out) that Active Directory was a much better solution for their company network (thousands of employees and dozens of offices) than the existing Novell Netware/NDS.
They went through half a dozen consulting firms before firing the CIO and everyone else involved in the project...

Campus Network Services

[secondsun]

The Campus network services at a Jr. College I went to a few years ago: "Yes we do know our ass from a router."

This of course was after a quick nmap found everything running telnet. Which was also running without a password. Turn dhcp off on a few of those babies and somone has to work a Looonng night.

Documentation

[jazman_777]

"Good code is self-documenting."

I created the internet?

[Eneff]

(Yeah, I know.. he didn't really say it. It's funny. Laugh.)

Heard this one the other day...

[Anonimo Covarde]

"I started using Gentoo on the desktop and now I've rolled it out as a production server using some great technologies: ReiserFS, RAID-5, Gentoo patched kernel, Samba ... you name it."

I AM AN EXPERT IN C++

[Ars-Fartsica]

heard once per interview

Re:Design????

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure I see the reas...oh, waitaminute, I see it! Fortunately code is self documenting obviously implies that you're working on a COBOL system.

No one like klingons

[cuteseal]

Oldie but a goodie:

Top 12 Things A Klingon Programmer Would Say

12. Specifications are for the weak and timid!

11. This machine is a piece of GAGH! I need dual processors if I am to do battle with this code!

10. You cannot really appreciate Dilbert unless you've read it in the original Klingon.

9. Indentation?! -- I will show you how to indent when I indent your skull!

8. What is this talk of 'release'? Klingons do not make software 'releases'. Our software 'escapes' leaving a bloody trail of designers and quality assurance people in its wake.

7. Klingon function calls do not have 'parameters' -- they have 'arguments' -- and they ALWAYS WIN THEM.

6. Debugging? Klingons do not debug. Our software does not coddle the weak.

5. I have challenged the entire quality assurance team to a Bat-Leth contest. They will not concern us again.

4. A TRUE Klingon Warrior does not comment his code!

3. By filing this SPR you have challenged the honor of my family. Prepare to die!

2. You question the worthiness of my code? I should kill you where you stand!

1. Our users will know fear and cower before our software. Ship it! Ship it, and let them flee like the dogs they are!

Re:Debug? Me?

[hoggoth]

He was right. HE didn't have to debug his programs. He had you for that.

TPS reports

[St. Arbirix]

I've never missed a cover sheet on my TPS reports!

This project will be on time.

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats a good one.

Computer Game Shop

[jebiester]

The funniest boast I ever heard was a guy at a computer game shop. I was looking at the games and this guy started talking to me. After chatting about games for a bit, he started telling me about how he had obtained the full Windows 2000 source code, made some changes, and compiled a special version that played his games better.

My favorite Resume blunder...

[firebeaker]

15 years Java experience... when Java's not that old. I've seen a number of cases like those on resumes, using technology for longer than it was around for.

In the case of Java, no, they weren't working for Sun while it was being developed.

Boast?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

"I've been posting on Slashdot since before there was moderation, or even user accounts. No man, it's true! I even have a low, three-digit UID, to prove it. I swear, man!"

Windows 2000 admin wanted

[Zoko Siman]

Must have at least 5 years expirence.

How about Vulcan Programmers?

[BottleCup]

The Vulcan computer science directory has determined that the existence of programming bugs is impossible.

Re:Boast?

[MacJedi]

woot!

Re:Computer Game Shop

[karnal]

That sounds similar to something my friends heard at our local computer shop.

They were there, looking at the not-so-bargain basement prices (back when computer shows were all the rage, these guys didn't have squat on pricing...) and overheard a conversation:

Customer: So is this video card pretty decent? It's kind of expensive...

Sales Droid: Oh yea, that's the best one out there. That card doesn't work using triangles - it works on THE PIXEL level.

Customer: Ahhh.

Friends: Let's get out of here....

24/7 support

[jerde]

I overheard a salesdroid touting that their support line offered 24/7 support, Monday-Friday 8am to 8pm.

said in a meeting

[heliocentric]

Higher up boss was complaining why the project wasn't being done the wau he just suddenly came up with.

Low-level boss, who had fought to do it that way for months and was shot down by this higher up boss only to do it the current way, says, "I can't beging to think about doing it the right way until I finish doing it the wrong way... poorly."

It'll be done on time!

[Banner]

2) We don't need to test it!
3) Requirements? What are those?
4) We're a level 5 organization!
5) We'll save money using window's Outlook
6) Extreme Programming
7) Cleanroom.

Re:My boasts

[cookd]

Strangely enought, it isn't.

ntoskrnl.exe is.

Kernel32.dll is the user-mode public interface to the basic kernel functionality.

Re:Debug? Me?

[Brandybuck]

One manager at my work boasted that his group's code didn't have any bugs in it. Whenever a bug was assigned to his group, he would reassign it elsewhere. Seriously! When challenged on it he would get very insulted.

Then one day a bug he reassigned got fixed. The root cause was code that the manager had written back in that distant two week period when he actually touched code. Rather than tell him who wrote it, the other managers talked about the "really lame" coding error. We he got all righteous about the bug as well, they told him he wrote it.

Re:Heard this one the other day...

[Brandybuck]

Bob: "With the magic of Gentoo, I'm already running KDE 3.4!"

Joe: "KDE 3.4 isn't out yet."

Bob: "Like I said, with the magic of Gentoo..."

a looooong day (was Re:My Roommate)

[ion++]

Yeah, I can write a raytracer in a single day. /He did. It was a looooong day.

Of course it was a long day. A day is 86400 seconds, and a short can only hold 65536. Duh.

cwd oh my

[fastduke]

I was told that I had to set up the server to include the cwd in the path so that students didn't have to always type ./a.out

Later I was asked if I hade done it and the conversation went something like this:

boss: did you get that done?
me: Yep, students group is all set up.
boss: only the students?
me: Well I figured the staff should know to change their own path.

The kid who knew "everything".

[Old.UNIX.Nut]

I had a 13 year old kid tell me "I know everything about computers". I grinned, and sold him a modem for his mom's computer.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[tsm_sf]

push (@linky, "item");
print "=p";

"I'm serious, dammit!"

000100 IDENTIFICATION DIVISION.
000200 PROGRAM-ID. SeriousSinglyLinky.
000300 AUTHOR. Some Sad Bastard.
000400
000500 ENVIRONMENT DIVISION.
000600
000700 CONFIGURATION SECTION.

ok, that joke stopped being fun pretty quickly...

itanium and Windows

[turgid]

itanium will kill the RISC server market.
itanium was the first mass-market 64-bit processor.
64-bit is not required on the desktop.
People are waiting for itanium before they move to 64-bit.
itanium is the fastest processor in the world.
itanium is the industry standard 64-bit architecture.
itanium is an open standard. Other 64-bit processors are proprietary.
Next year, itanium will be the biggest-selling 64-bit processor.
Windows NT is more advanced than UNIX.
Linux can't do everything Windows can.
Windows NT will kill UNIX.
Windows is faster than Linux.
Next year, everyone will be running itanium servers running 64-bit Windows.
Windows NT is portable.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[DarkDust]

I'm 15, self-taught, and I know what a singly linked list is. Since I assume I suck at C++/Programming in general, would it be fair to assume that most programmers wouldn't know everything that I know and more?

Well, I earn a living coding in the "semi"-embedded area and I tell you: most people that are allowed to code should never be let near a keyboard. Small example (this was found in the code of a GUI for an industrial robot !):

bool odd = false;
for(int s = myInteger; s > 0; s--)
{
if(!odd)
{
odd = true;
}
else
{
odd = false;
}
}

if(odd)
{
foo ();
}

(damn, Slashdot ignores the indention... sorry)

This short piece of code has such a high density of stupidity that I had to write it down... mind you, the guy who wrote this shit has a university degree in CS ! I got more examples of his code... and the sad thing is he's just the most obvious idiot. The other half a dozen people I have to work with in various other projects aren't that much better as well.

You really learn to appreciate coders and hackers when having to work with such people. My experience is this: people who studied CS and got some degree are good at designing applications, but suck at implementing them. Self-taught programmers/coders/hackers mostly suck at designing but shine at implementing.

Of course there are exceptions: my boss, whom I consider to be one of the brightest heads I've ever met, has studied CS in Germany and America and is excellent at both designing and implementing (though he sucks at documenting and has an ugly coding style ;-)

Re:Computer Game Shop

[Spy Hunter]

The guys at Best Buy are worse. They'll just spout off nonsense about anything if you ask them, trying to steer you toward the "premium" crap. Last time they tried to sell me the gold-plated USB cables, because "they give you better quality printouts from your printer." I wonder, do they get fed all that BS from the managers or do they make it up themselves?

Ignore parent post...

[big ben bullet]

Had an error when posting it... didn't know it came trough... posted another version [slashdot.org]

Mohammed Ali quote

[Chemisor]

"If you can do it, it ain't braggin"

Re:Boast?

[Sara Chan]

I've been posting on Slashdot since before there was moderation, or even user accounts.

Bahh, I have been posting on Slashdot [slashdot.org] since before there were computers or even the alphabet. Heck, it's even on my resumé.

Re:Heard this one the other day...

[tigersha]

Get real. I have an NT 4 machine which dates from 1995 in production and it never ever crashes. That machine has mucho better uptimes than any Linux servers I have. In fact, its my primary domain controller.

And my dad still runs a machine with 286 Xenix on it. Still works fine. In production.

Re:The classic Bill Gates

[AndrewHowe]

Isn't it strange that every single copy of "the actual interview" has disappeared? Maybe they were stolen by Bill's army of leprechaun minions. Or maybe, just maybe, he didn't say it.

A short?

[dscho]

A short can hold values from -32768 to 32767. You meant an unsigned short day.

Re:How about Vulcan Programmers?

[gowen]

Vulcan computer scientists are the only plausible explanation for the design of Ada95.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

> C#.

You can't pay me enough.

Nice boast. ;-)

VPN connections

[svindler]

I used to be responsible for a number of Shiva LANRover dialin boxes.
When Shiva started to sell their VPN boxes, a guy from Shiva came and presented them to me, my boss and a few others.
The most important feature about the Shiva VPN boxes was that they where the only one in the market that could actually talk to boxes from other vendors...

"Job Security"

[BadluckShleprock]

I worked for a company that had never even considered doing peer review before an Indian (not the Native American type) was overheard bragging about how for the last two years, he had written all of his variable names in Hindi and that they wouldn't dare fire him now. He was half right. They didn't fire him at that point, but for the next six months, he had to go to daily meetings with his three tiers of bosses to show the work he had done in translating the variable names back to English.

Problem solved, right? Not really. While he was translating some files to English, he was also busy translating others to Hindi. Right before he was put back on a project, his new "work" had been discovered because, again, he was overheard bragging about how they would never fire him. This time they cut his pay by $20 an hour for the duration of the repairs, locked him out of the version control software to prevent any more damage, and the day after he finished, there was a total peer review of every file he had ever worked on. Once the day long meeting was over, he was asked to stand up in front of everyone and told by the VP of engineering that he was fired.

The bad thing is that the company still doesn't believe in peer reviews, but it's a good company to work for because it is almost impossible to get fired.

Re:I AM AN EXPERT IN C++

[lobsterGun]

One better.

The resume says "six years C++". The meat pronounces it "six years Cee Tee Tee"

D. McBride

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux contains SCO source code!

Seen on a BBS in 1994/1995:

[Lifewolf]

"After I graduate, I'm going to college as a computer engineering major. I'm going to make a computer where the whole Internet is in hardware so it's faster."

Offsite Backup

[Tackhead]

"Good thing we put the failover server and the offsite backup in Tower Two!"
- Some Dude, 1 WTC, 9/11/01

Re:cwd oh my

[T-Ranger]

That reminds me of a story my brother tells. He works as a software developer in a branch office; prety much evertone in his office is either a programmer, project manager, tech support of technical sales people. Not all of them geeks, but all heavy computer users.

The company hired on a new business manager/director of sales (whatever) for this office, good business/sales experience, but not technical sales.

Weekly meeting:

Boss: Oh yes. Head office has deployed the intranet. You all must change your homepage to our internal website. Herman (local network admin) is away, but Bob can help you change your homepage if you need assistance.
Andrew: On the other hand, you are working at a software developement company; if you cant change your home page, you should pack up and go home now.
Boss: *deer in the headlights look*

Best Buy BS

[green pizza]

The guys at Best Buy are worse. They'll just spout off nonsense
The best example of this was when Best Buy was selling the original blue iMac. I thought I had heard it all until I overheard a sales goon tell a potential customer, "Bill Gates had a virus on his network, the only way he could remove it was by adding an iMac".

Wow.

Re:COOL!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Glad to meet you.

"Chips and Dips", anyone? I think I first came for the Windowmaker dock apps.

I stayed for "duck pins".

Easy...

[DAldredge]

Slashdot: News for Nerds, Stuff That Matters.

Error handling in VB

[DragonHawk]

"Additional note: He wrote a VB6 app that had to do alot of file access"

Well, that's one error right there.... ;-)

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the best one I've seen in a while

I have hands on experience networking all of the Operating Systems mentioned above together into a single cohesive environment. Network creation from installation of hardware and cabling thou to day to day mangement are also among my skills.

For those who didn't get it - thou may be a great way to say THOUGH, but you don't use it on a resume, and WTF is MANGEMENT (Mange-ment)?? Oh, yes, this doofus mean MANAGEMENT.

This guy wouldn't get hired anywhere with this resume - too many spelling mistakes... remotly,Ojective,extensize,Netwoking,IMB PC,safty,equiptemnt and personell....
This needs to go Here [resumania.com] so other people than my collegues can say "which four year old wrote THAT!"

Re:Heard this one the other day...

[SlightlyMadman]

A windows box that hasn't been patched since 1995, you say? Wow, I'm impressed! Hey, could you give me the IP so I can, you know, check it out and ... um ... admire it?

Re:cwd oh my

[Watcher]

I always love the "the company intranet website must be your home page" policy. They did this at my last company, and it had three, simultanious, results:
1) Everyone who couldn't change their homepage because of permissions bitched about having the intranet site as their homepage because it was heavy with activex controls and bogged their system down for 30 seconds before they could even look at the company site, let alone get out on the internet (which was locked down heavily with a websense server that was beloved by all).

2) All of us in development promptly hacked up registry files to reset the homepage back to something that wasn't annoying and didn't take 30 seconds to load. We had actual work to do, damn it, and after a brief flurry of activity on the site in the first week, it was rarely updated more than once a quarter. Some company news section, huh?

3) IS began to bitch and complain about how so much internal bandwidth was being wasted on people going to the site and how they obviously must not be doing any real work if they're opening their browsers so much. Uh, all of our products were either browser based activex for the intranet products, or web based. Brilliant.

It worked well.

Re:COOL!

[Anonymous Coward]

I worship the ground you walk on and the poop you leave.

Re:Boast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh yeah? Well I'm the original Anonymous Coward!

Production before beta!

[wandazulu]

I interviewed a guy back in '96 I think for a VB job. The company that recommended him even flew him out from his current job in Iowa to NJ to talk to us. I was impressed...his resume was 4 pages long and talked about all the technologies he had worked on. One got the impression that this was a VB/SQL Server guru, who would be everything and more that we needed.

When I met him, he was visibly nervous, and I figured it was just the usual interview stress plus he had just flown in a snowstorm. As we were trying to get out of there ourselves (it turned out to be a *huge* snowstorm), we got down to business, and I asked him a couple of difficult VB questions that would have been winners if he could answer. Well, he couldn't.

Okay, so ask a few easier questions. Nada. I drop it down to *extremely* easy questions (max value of int in VB3, how to do arrays, etc.). Zip. My partner asked a *very* simple sql question ("how do you update a table?") and he came up blank.

Now I'm starting to really *read* his resume, instead of skimming it, and I came upon this little gem: He had put into production some huge program written in VB 4 back in 1995 (not a typo, as it also mentioned being 32-bit). I excused myself for a second, got my beta copy of VB 4 dated 1996 and returned. I dropped the disc on the table and said, in effect, that he had lied on his resume, that there was no way he could have done this and here's the proof.

He was silent and said "Please don't make me go back to Iowa." I then was able to use the famous bartender line of "Well, you don't have to go home, but you can't stay here."

That was the only person I've ever interviewed that had to be escorted out by security.

Re: Boast?

[Frizzle Fry]

Whoah! Follow the first link there. Then, follow the link from the story to the "hacked" page that was put up on slashdot and... it looks just like today's front page! I bet at the time, the idea of a front page full of ads and worthless stories seemed like a funny joke to the hackers. Little did they know...

Re:Excessive uptime on Windows 95

[cbr2702]

Over a year? Pretty unlikely. Windows 95 crashes after no more than 49.7 days. See this [com.com]. But a cdrom over dial-up is reasonable; I dowloaded all 7 disks of debian woody that way.

Where do I start ?

[MeerCat]

"We've written a client-server database system" was a MS Access application with the MDB file on a network drive - and they couldn't understand why running the app over the WAN didn't work very well.

"I've done lots of network programming" (meant that the compiler was installed on his PC's hard disk but the source code files were on a shared drive, so everytime he compiled he thought he was doing network programming)

"When you write data to a socket, TCP/IP guarantees the data will be delivered" (hmmm, and they were going to write a global trading system that's now done over $20 trillion of trades).

"We've written the most sophisticated database in existence and so you can't see the source because you'd steal our secrets" (turns out they didn't know what indices were, the whole thing had no indices on any table, and the code was crap, oh, and it was Access 2)

"Our encryption is unbreakable" (data was encoded using the string OVER_THE_TOP_ENCRYPTION which was present as plaintext in the EXE - was later changed to CUSTARDCREAMS, still present as plaintext)

"The performance test of this software running on a 4-CPU Sun machine on a 100BaseT network was invalidated because we detected a rogue packet on the network (was actually a single UDP broadcast packet of about 800 bytes every 15 minutes) and that was chewing up all the cpu time as the network stack thrashed trying to decide what to do with the data because no program was listening to that port" (that from the networking expert of the consultancy department of a global carrier)

"The smartest programmer in the world who we were going to lend you to replace 50 of your crap guys - he won't be coming over because he refuses to fly over water and we've just explained that New York is an ocean away from London" (seems he didn't know that)

"I'm such a great programmer that the code I've written here is unreadable by anyone except me - in fact if you looked at it you'd probably think it's shit code, but in fact it's just that I'm so smart" (erm, well, it was shit, and it didn't work)

Oh there are loads more, but just typing those in has made me depressed.

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[Anonymous Coward]

And the intelligent person would not have replied that resume evidently crafted by am illiterate 4 year old was their own... they would have just corrected the shit that was wrong, moved on and not removed all doubt that they were an idiot.

Re:COOL!

[SlamMan]

Double digits? How'd you sign up, with punch cards?

Re:Documentation

[E_elven]

inc bx ; because bx needs to be one higher