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."

Re:Documentation

[jag164]

Unfortunately, this is true in some cases. I'd even say "Bad code is self documenting." The code base my nose is stuck in right now is a prime example. I'd rather this code base have no docs than the misleading and outdated docs it does have. Sigh.

My uptime is....

[EnronHaliburton2004]

I often hear Linux & Unix admins talking about their tremendous uptime. I regard these people as a little unwise and arrogant, more concerned with meaningless bragging numbers instead of focusing on the stability of the system.

Lately, I inherited [1] a surviving dotcom [2] with 20 unix computers. The

Of course, 2 months after the previous Unix admin quits, power goes out on a couple power strips at the AT&T Datacenter [3] and I need to restart the computers.

The OS comes up fine, but the init scripts for the Apache, Java App server, and misc. servers were all hosed, and I had to investigate each one and restart all of the important services on all machines. This turned a 5 minute downtime into a 2 hour downtime... AT 3 IN THE FUCKING MORNING!

Screw your uptime, test your startup scripts. Distaster recovery is more important.

[1] I was hired, then the parent company laid a bunch of people off. Fuck me!

[2] Not surviving any more! Fuck me!

[3] Top of the line reliability, yeah right.

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[EnronHaliburton2004]

Ah, but then maybe he was responding to one of those Job ads that is asking for 15+ years in Java experience!

They are more common then you think, unfortunately.

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[crazyphilman]

Yeah, my old boss used to give me resumes to vet. I used to see stuff like "ten years .Net experience!" At first I was shocked, but then I got out my red pen and started annotating. I'd use very descriptive terms: "Bullshit", "He's lying, it hasn't existed that long", "Does this company even exist?" and so forth. Nobody cared. They ignored my comments, hired the low bid, and never asked me to look at resumes again.

Since then I've realized that at some companies, resumes really ARE expected to be fiction, and they select the fiction they enjoy the most.

Massive lines of code reductions

[Tablizer]

I guy who just took an SQL intro class blurted out in the middle of a meeting, "Can't you take your system and rewrite it all in [just] SQL so that it is only a few lines?"

And then another time someone claimed that they could make something 1/2 the original code size by rewriting it in Lisp. I gave them a code example to try it on, but they made some vague excuses and changed the subject.

Somewhat related, the C2 wiki has an interesting "alarm-bell phrases" list to help detect when big claims are about to be stated:

http://www.c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlarmBellPhrases

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[crazyphilman]

I've given up on programming for a private company. There are plenty of jobs in civil service, academia, large public institutions... Many of those won't be programming jobs in the future, but at least they pay the bills.

The real last straw for me was the start of the recession, right around 2000, when I started seeing job offers that required several years experience in twenty technologies, some of which were mutually exclusive.

Let alone the fact (the FACT) that no one is capable of getting five years meaningful experience in all those technologies at a single company.

No, what really bothered me was this: Companies inflate their requirements for two primary reasons:

1. They want to make sure that NOBODY will qualify for the job so they can justify hiring an H1-B to fill it, instead of an American, or a Brit, or whatever.

2. They want to make sure that anyone they DO hire MUST have lied on the resume, so they can fire him whenever they want without paying unemployment benefits.

This wasn't what was going on where I used to work; that manager just didn't care, and didn't want to listen to my complaints. But you can be pretty sure that a lot of companies work this way.

Be careful with those resume fictions; they could bite you in the ass later, when you try to vest stock options or otherwise stand up for yourself.

When I was in college....

[Anonymous Coward]

There was a ten year old in my intro to CSE class who'd already written an ada compiler. That'll kill your self-esteem.

Rob Klausidaughton

[DJCF]

... I hacked the school network once. It's not exactly hard. I used a website I wrote in C++. My monitor's way faster than yours and my CPU's made my GeForce.

My Boss!

[Anonymous Coward]

I work for a Tin-Pot Telco which looks after a mere 100,000 telephone lines and a few thousand DSL customers.

My Boss is quoted to have said: "What, Why are http://www.cisco.com messing us around? We are their BIGGEST customer!"

You can imagine the looks that such a comment would stir up.

Error Handling?

[big ben bullet]

Me (code reviewing): Were are your error handlers? You didn't write any...

He: My programs don't have errors. I don't need no error handlers...

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

Point being?

[kristoferkarlsson]

I don't get it, is it supposed to be impossible to game under linux? If the gamer in question is basically just playing the few games that are actually ported to linux, it would not be difficult at all. And for Windows-only games, you can still run the games fine using WineX in many cases. I run Warcraft 3 just perfectly with WineX. I can not tell the difference from playing it under Windows. This is not a boast, I simply used WineX and it worked.

Or was it an attempt at +3 funny?

Re:Debug? Me?

[hey!]

It's easier than you might think to fall into this kind of trap. If you are strong at writing expressions and flow of control type statements, you may have a much lower defect rate for things like 'off by one' than many programmers. This can lead to an illusion of invincibility.

The problem is that so many bugs come from the interfaces between different program modules and (worse yet) systems.

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[Anonymous Brave Guy]

Slightly O/T, but for interest: there have been a couple of public reports recently from people who investigate CVs for potential employers here in the UK. Currently, they all put the proportion of CVs containing a seriously misleading (inflated) statement at around 1/3, and rising.

From an Internal Desktop Support tech

[InfinityWpi]

"Yeah, they tell me I've got the best response times in the entire company. Probably helps that some of them are negative -- brings down my average."

No, he didn't invent time travel... he actually got some problems fixed before the helpdesk called him and told him to go over and fix them. So he had dang-near-zero response time on a lot of calls... and yes, some that the central-helpdesk newbies put in as being done before being started, so he had negative times.

Pity the company got hit with fraud charges and I ha... erm, he had to move west...

Re:One table project

[T-Ranger]

Uh, so create a view for the moron and be done with it.

I know every programming language

[Tom7]

We once got an application from someone who claimed to know "every programming language" on his resume.

Re:My Roommate

[ggambett]

You can, in fact, write a simple raytracer in a couple of hours. Here's one of mine [mysterystudio.com].

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[ManxStef]

"Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." -- Douglas Adams

Re:My favorite Resume blunder...

[who what why]

Just a note from a Brit - we need H1Bs as well if we want to work in the states (and are perfectly capable of "taking an American's job". I did it myself!)

Just kidding. I was hired in early 2000 - back when people seemed to be recruiting in every bar in Austin...

Re:Boast?

[anewsome]

Well your slashdot uid is still not as low as mine. I got my account on day 1. Where were you?

Re:Boast?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

anewsome? awesome!

I wasn't coding that day. I was setting up Samba for a source repository, and running nmap on my own segements...

Re:The classic Bill Gates

[cyborch]

here [anythingmatters.com] is a transcript.

Re:I AM AN EXPERT IN C++

[the quick brown fox]

"I know them all... C, C+, C++"

(true story)

Re:Computer Game Shop

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone remember Tandy's computer stores? Computer City, I think they were called. Maybe they're still around, I don't know but the ones by me folded a couple years back.

I went in and bought a nice (i.e., expensive) joystick there. Took it home, opened the box ... and I found a scuffed up, shit-beaten-out-of-it joystick that looked like it had been run through a milling machine, complete with broken springs and by God it rattled. I might add that the box had been thoroughly shrink-wrapped, which just goes to show how much that means.

So I take this piece of twisted junk back to the store, and the "customer service" drone refuses to take it back. "You obviously abused it." He told me. "ABUSED IT", I cried, "I just bought it fifteen minutes ago! YOU SOLD IT TO ME!" "I'm sorry, sir." Well, at that point the manager hears the sound of a thoroughly PISSED OFF customer and wanders over to "help." I explain the situation, and I swear this guy tells me, "there's nothing we can do ... they come from the factory this way." That particular store went under less than a year later. I was surprised they held out even that long.