Funniest IT Related Boasts You've Heard? 490
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 (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My Roommate (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, I can get a first post.
Drat.
Boast? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Boast? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Boast? (Score:5, Insightful)
Besides, it's clear you don't have a three digit UID. Bagdad Bob says so.
--
Evan
Re: Boast? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Boast? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Boast? (Score:3, Interesting)
I wasn't coding that day. I was setting up Samba for a source repository, and running nmap on my own segements...
Re:Boast? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:COOL! (Score:3, Funny)
"Chips and Dips", anyone? I think I first came for the Windowmaker dock apps.
I stayed for "duck pins".
Re:COOL! (Score:5, Insightful)
-davidu
Re:COOL! (Score:4, Funny)
Re:COOL! (Score:4, Insightful)
meep! meep!
a looooong day (was Re:My Roommate) (Score:5, Funny)
Of course it was a long day. A day is 86400 seconds, and a short can only hold 65536. Duh.
Re:My Roommate (Score:4, Interesting)
Debug? Me? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Debug? Me? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Debug? Me? (Score:5, Funny)
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:Debug? Me? (Score:3, Interesting)
The problem is that so many bugs come from the interfaces between different program modules and (worse yet) systems.
Not quite (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re:Not quite (Score:2)
So did he do it in order to work up some potential customers for his new firm?
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
They went through half a dozen consulting firms before firing the CIO and everyone else involved in the project...
Campus Network Services (Score:5, Funny)
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.
The classic Bill Gates (Score:5, Informative)
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 (Score:2, Informative)
Re:The classic Bill Gates (Score:4, Informative)
Not that that really proves a damn thing (except that one urban legend is true), but it's a cool story.
Re:The classic Bill Gates (Score:4, Interesting)
Documentation (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Documentation (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Documentation (Score:3, Funny)
I created the internet? (Score:2, Funny)
Heard this one the other day... (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Heard this one the other day... (Score:2)
Re:Heard this one the other day... (Score:2)
Gentoo doesn't yet have production-level stability. In Debian, for example, you'll notice that all package versions stay the same in stable, and security patches are backported. For Gentoo, something that is "stable" means that it works okay on a particular platform, not that is stabilized for production purposes.
I have tried before to organize a project for stable Gentoo, but didn't get any real response. I guess they don't want to loose the ability to boast over recent versions of packages. =D
Re:Heard this one the other day... (Score:5, Funny)
Joe: "KDE 3.4 isn't out yet."
Bob: "Like I said, with the magic of Gentoo..."
Re:Heard this one the other day... (Score:5, Funny)
And my dad still runs a machine with 286 Xenix on it. Still works fine. In production.
Re:Heard this one the other day... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Heard this one the other day... (Score:3, Insightful)
I AM AN EXPERT IN C++ (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I AM AN EXPERT IN C++ (Score:5, Funny)
The resume says "six years C++". The meat pronounces it "six years Cee Tee Tee"
Re:I AM AN EXPERT IN C++ (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I AM AN EXPERT IN C++ (Score:3, Interesting)
(true story)
No one like klingons (Score:5, Funny)
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!
How about Vulcan Programmers? (Score:3, Funny)
TPS reports (Score:5, Funny)
This project will be on time. (Score:5, Funny)
Computer Game Shop (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Computer Game Shop (Score:5, Funny)
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....
Re:Computer Game Shop (Score:5, Funny)
Best Buy BS (Score:3, Funny)
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:Computer Game Shop (Score:2)
That can't be too hard, right? Right?
My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:4, Funny)
In the case of Java, no, they weren't working for Sun while it was being developed.
Re:My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:2)
I have seen worse in job adverts. They were advertising for 5+ years in technologies that had (at that time) been around 3 less than 3 years.
I think it was a case, though, of the boss asking the copywriter / secretary to chuck in the default advert with XYZ skill set. Oh well, they were rather embaressed when I rang up and pointed this out ;)
Re:My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:3, Interesting)
They are more common then you think, unfortunately.
Re:My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
You should get (Score: 6, Insightful) for that comment as today, November 2, 2004, millions of American voters go to the polls and select a candidate for the topmost job in the land based on exactly that same criterion.
Re:My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:My favorite Resume blunder... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Windows 2000 admin wanted (Score:2, Funny)
"Expert Programmer" (Score:3, Insightful)
1 out of 15 pass. It's pathetic.
Can you pass this test? Post a link to your resume, we are hiring in the East Bay, California. C#.
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes. But:
> C#.
You can't pay me enough.
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:5, Funny)
Nice boast. ;-)
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:2)
Does that count?
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:2)
{
int z = 0;
Node *start = first;
while(z next;
z++;
}
Node *addnode = (Node *)malloc(sizeof(Node));
addnode->next = first->next;
addnode->x = x;
first->next = addnode;
while(start->next != 0)
{
printf("X = %d\n", start->x);
start = start->next;
}
}
Copied and pasted from some program I made for my C101 class last year, I'd take the job and show you my resume, but I'm jus
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:2)
What is the most efficient way to check single linked list for self reference (pointing to a previous item)
Hmm, I know this one... *Takes copious amounts of time to invent an ugly way*
Define a function pointer
Well,
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:4, Funny)
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...
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:5, Insightful)
For many of the people I know, going to college for CS is about 2 things:
1) Learning basic programmatic workflow and practices
2) Being able to show the piece of paper
Unfortunately for alot of people hiring, #2 is most important. For employers who I have -respected- #1 is the most important and they can recognize that with #1 and a creative thinking brain that any coder can quickly pick up new languages and technologies.
And people who excel at creative programmatic thinking often are the types that remember concepts, not trivia (the idea of testing intelligence and not memory). Expecting a person to remember, in a high stress situation, the terminology you learned in school tests the trivia.
Forgetting terminology (versus forgetting -theory-) doesn't mean that they cheated in school, it only means they remembered stuff differently. How many of us remember more than one or two geometry theorems even a few months after passing our last geometry test?
It is sad, but there are a number of elitists out there who use tests like the one you are so proud of. Do you give any type of explanation if the interview-ee says "what do you mean by that?" or do you assume that they have failed at that point? If you assume failure at that point you are the problem, not them.
If on the other hand you give a brief example and wait to see if they catch on, then you should be able to see who is truly good by how quickly they can code and/or how efficient that code is.
A person doesn't need to know the terminology -before- they join a group to be useful to that group. They need to be able to quickly put your group's terminology into a working context and start expanding on it. Otherwise all you are doing is a form of secret handshake.
This is one of the reasons that the original IQ tests were considered to be biased. They measured vocabulary knowledge as a prerequisite to concepts. Newer tests try to be language independent, recognizing that cognitive ability is more important.
Or in shorter terms, I agree with the grandparent of this post, you made the kind of boast that the submitter was talking about.
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:3, Informative)
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 ha
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:"Expert Programmer" (Score:3, Funny)
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 !):
Re:Why are you using a linked list? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why would anyone ever use a linked list?
You want a specific example? Okay, the kernel process queues. These are linked lists that store information about which process is waiting on what: there's a queue for processes that are waiting for a CPU to become free, a queue for processes that are waiting for activity on a filehandle (for example, all the preforked web servers waiting on the accepting filehandle), etc.
They cause memory fragmentation
You can use a free list of processes, or have the processes
It's obvious (Score:2)
24/7 support (Score:3, Funny)
My uptime is.... (Score:4, Interesting)
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 uptime is.... (Score:3, Informative)
said in a meeting (Score:3, Funny)
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."
trust me (Score:2)
Well most of the time I am right anyway
It'll be done on time! (Score:3, Funny)
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:It'll be done on time! (Score:3, Insightful)
Massive lines of code reductions (Score:3, Interesting)
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:One table project (Score:3, Interesting)
cwd oh my (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Re:cwd oh my (Score:5, Funny)
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*
Re:cwd oh my (Score:3, Funny)
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 w
itanium and Windows (Score:3, Funny)
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.
Error Handling? (Score:3, Interesting)
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
Error handling in VB (Score:3, Funny)
Well, that's one error right there....
Mohammed Ali quote (Score:4, Funny)
"Job Security" (Score:5, Funny)
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.
From an Internal Desktop Support tech (Score:3, Interesting)
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...
I know every programming language (Score:4, Interesting)
Easy... (Score:4, Funny)
Production before beta! (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Two simple anecdotes (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Where do I start ? (Score:3, Funny)
"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:Design???? (Score:2, Funny)
Re:My boasts (Score:3, Funny)
ntoskrnl.exe is.
Kernel32.dll is the user-mode public interface to the basic kernel functionality.
Re:Excessive uptime on Windows 95 (Score:3, Funny)