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."

The classic Bill Gates

[tantalic]

"640K ought to be enough for anybody"

Of course there are disputes as to whether this was actually said or not, or the context...but certainly one of the funniest and most famous tech boasts.

Re:The classic Bill Gates

[jkirby]

He did say it. I had the actual interview for years; with a picture of Bill and an IBM model 80

Re:My uptime is....

[oo_waratah]

You can restart the service and still keep your uptime and provide the testing you require. However it is true that a complete down and up would be good to do when everyone is prepared to sort out the mess and the least impact on your business. Warm swaps would be a good idea if it is that critical.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[norkakn]

wow.. that is horrid code.

want to learn verilog? the crap we get to do makes gotos look classy.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[dynamic_cast]

I explain what it is if they say they don't know what I mean. I am not trying to be cruel. I just want to see if they can solve a SIMPLE problem.

Most can't.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[battjt]

Upon graduation, you need to know the fundimentals of CS. Part of what you need to know is the terminology. A singly linked list is not an advanced topic, neither is hastable, balanced binary tree, stack, heap, queue or anyother CS201 data structure.

Yet, I've had to describe what a hashtable is and how to use it to multiple professional programers in a couple different companies.

Data structes are the tools of CS. If a building contractor showed up the first day to work and couldn't hand me a framing hammer, I'd let him go too.

Joe

Re:The classic Bill Gates

[mbourgon]

It's interesting, yes. I went looking through my stash for the video. I'm reminded of the "that'd be up the butt, Bob" story on The Newlywed Game. They had a special a year or two ago, and the host of The Newlywed Game said that he had told people for years that it never happened, it was an urban legend, etc... and then his people found the tape. The question was "where's the weirdest place you've had sex". Hispanic couple, the wife said "in the ass". (The husband's was "in the car")

Not that that really proves a damn thing (except that one urban legend is true), but it's a cool story.

Re:"Expert Programmer"

[some guy I know]

Expecting a person to remember, in a high stress situation, the terminology you learned in school tests the trivia.

"singly-linked list" is not some obscure specialized computer term. Anyone who doesn't even know what a singly-linked list is has no business writing software (except maybe some financial software or web pages (if you consider HTML et al to be "software")).

Here is my solution, written in LISP. Since the OP didn't specify where on the list to add the item, I will add it to the front.

(push item-to-be-added my-list)

Two simple anecdotes

[daem0n1x]

Some years ago, my boss had a meeting with a colleague of mine about a new product. In the end he asked him how much time he needed to develop that. The guy answered "two weeks". It took him a year. We still use the "two weeks" joke to refer to never-ending projects.

Once, I was talking with my boss about how stupid some blue-collar people are when they refuse to use helmets or safety-goggles at work, just to play macho. Then I said a stupid joke about macho IT workers: "True men don't make backups". It was intended to be a joke, but some weeks later we lost our entire codebase because the server disks fried. The server was managed by a different department. The guys that were in charge of nursing it didn't have any backup, in spite of THAT being THEIR job. I think my boss still shivers when he remembers that joke. I'll keep it as a motto, and never trust anyone to backup my work.

Re:I AM AN EXPERT IN C++

[Daleks]

As a joke a friend of mine and I started pronouncing C# as "see pound." My friend had a job interview and he kept calling it "see pound," and only realized this a few hours after the interview. Oops? No job for him.