See title, but I am asking from a technical perspective, not
Take my 40 year old virgin niece on a date or you're fired.
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21If she's a 40 year old virgin, she's probably also an employee. Wouldn't that be against policy?– Tim PostSep 9, 2010 at 18:23
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51can you return her unopened next morning?– Mawg says reinstate MonicaSep 10, 2010 at 1:49
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14Go read clientsfromhell.net– Pierre-Alain VigeantSep 10, 2010 at 20:11
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2This whole Q+As is like Dilbert, but in real life.– AgosSep 10, 2010 at 22:40
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9Ah, the mods strike again against clear community interest (70 up-votes!). Sigh. You know, maybe if so many very popular questions are against rules, maybe rules need changing?– JamesMay 13, 2011 at 21:48
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64 Answers
To market Neal Stephenson's sci-fi thriller Snow Crash, I was asked to write a "benign" computer virus. It would "benignly" pretend to take over the user's computer and replace the screen with snow, a.k.a., a "snow crash." After a minute or so of snow, the snow would fade out and be replaced by an advertisement for the book. This would be "benign," you see. The virus would spread through normal means, but nobody would mind because after taking over their computer "you'd just get a fun ad and then be relieved that nothing bad happened to your computer."
I was actually told to do this at a major worldwide corporation. I had to write a memo explaining all the laws this would break and all 17 bad things that could happen if they really made me implement this.
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44Holy balls. That's the most perfect example of the "It's only evil if other people do it -- if WE do it it MUST be all right!" mindset I've heard in a while. Sep 10, 2010 at 14:15
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10Meh. It wouldn't have been any worse than the book itself... ;) Sep 10, 2010 at 16:37
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14That's awesome. We can sell it in a bundle with my 'benign' keylogger that serves up ads when users visit competitors sites, and we'll be rich.– µBioSep 10, 2010 at 17:21
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8@Neil G: 1. have something blatantly illegal done for you 2. profit! 3. blame employee when you get caught 4. more profit!!! (this worked for the Sony rootkit, IIRC) Sep 13, 2010 at 16:10
"This DLL you wrote is only 17kb. Can you add some code to make it bigger? The client is paying us a lot of money, and we want them to get their money's worth."
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31HP printer drivers MUST do this. They're the only company who seems to think that 400 MB installs are normal for simple printers. Now, what key combination starts the flight sim?– JYeltonDec 27, 2010 at 17:50
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8You call that crazy/stupid/silly? One client was doing this on a regular basis, because their customer was measuring progress by the size of the release files they got.– fooJan 14, 2011 at 19:28
Use Visual SourceSafe.
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17@Rob - I'm not so sure. Having nothing, at least you know your source is "unprotected". VSS gives the illusion of protection whilst actually making things worse. It's a false sense of security of the worst kind.– CraigTPOct 12, 2010 at 14:13
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5I'm with Rob. It does beat having nothing. Although I no longer use it. Over my career, I've probably used it for a decade in total and never had any major data loss. @CraigTP, it may be unreliable, but it isn't 100% unreliable as you seem to be implying. A VSS installation that is backed up frequently (and a long tail of backups are kept) is indeed better than nothing.– JohnFxNov 15, 2010 at 17:09
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"You know this enormous 20-year-old Cobol program that contains piles and piles of hard-coded business rules that more or less defines our company? Would you mind converting it to .NET?"
Yikes.
We go live in a few weeks.
Wish me luck..
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46Do you have a Paypal donate button somewhere? I'd like to buy you some aspirin.– Tim PostSep 9, 2010 at 18:38
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5If you accomplish it you'll be a programming God, and also lucky to get a "thanks" Sep 10, 2010 at 22:08
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15Thank you for your support everyone. And just to let you know, we are now live! Sep 21, 2010 at 14:19
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25The worst part of this is that if you do it really really well, you'll get almost no credit. "Yup, it works exactly the same as it did before."– TylerDec 11, 2010 at 18:56
My brother and I were working on a multimedia heavy-website for a very famous rock star many years ago.
When the client saw the site he noticed some compression artifacts on some of the JPEGs and asked what was wrong with them. We explained that images need compression for bandwidth purposes and that the images were currently compressed at about 80% quality. He was offended and said something to the effect of
I haven't gotten to where I am today by doing things at 80%, set it to 100%.
We tried to explain how it would affect users, but he would have none of it. It resulted in the slowest "virtual world" website ever. This actually happened.
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20"All these computers and digital gadgets are no good, they just fill your head with numbers and that can't be good for you." - boston.com/ae/specials/culturedesk/2010/07/…– EvanSep 11, 2010 at 1:03
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26John. It really was him. Trust me, if I wanted to dress fancy or play the electric guitar like a wizard, he would be the first person I would go to. But not for web design best practices. Nov 19, 2010 at 2:16
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5At first I was reading it as wanting 100% compression, not 100% image quality! Jan 14, 2011 at 8:09
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4"I haven't gotten to where I am today by doing things at 80%, set it to 100%." That's actually an AWESOME quote. The person who said it is Prince right? not some manager or something?– ZivMay 14, 2011 at 13:36
We need to delay the site launch by two weeks because Mercury is in retrograde and it's a bad time to start new things.
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ha ha ha ... this is one of the coolest thing I have ever seen .. +1 to Gsto and Jeff. Sep 17, 2010 at 6:53
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51If you were writing software for a space probe, this might make sense. Nov 1, 2010 at 5:32
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Obviously after reading some business magazine on an airplane about how XML was the hot new technology (this was circa 2002), one of our executives asked me if our application used XML, when I said no he asked me if we could add it.
Now, I'm not talking about a feature to import/export files in XML format, he simply wanted it to be part of the architecture for no reason other than it was popular at the moment and would lend credibility to our app.
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5I had the same thing in 1998 - except the article was on Oracle, and our app was essentially a workflow diagram editor. We ported the file format we were outputting from disk to a table and took a dependency on Oracle licenses. Made version control very difficult as well. Sep 10, 2010 at 20:45
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3Oh boy. I had the exact same thing (at around the same time) and it was also regarding XML. What was it about XML that made the execs start drooling?– CraigTPOct 12, 2010 at 14:16
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6@CraigTP I think it's the 'X'. It's dramatic and appealing. Jul 13, 2011 at 20:26
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3Looking back I should have just appeased by saying. Even better, our web app uses HTML which has a whole extra letter in the acronym and the code is like a specialized version of XML that meets our exact business need!– JohnFxJul 13, 2011 at 20:42
"Right now, the usernames are required to be unique, and the passwords are not. Could we make it the other way around?"
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1ha.. I made the mistake once where both the username and password needed to be unique. short lived mistake thankfully Sep 22, 2010 at 22:16
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3As I recall it was something to do with a client sharing email addresses at a company. Emails and usernames were 1:1, so the idea was to create multiple accounts with the same username and use the passwords to differentiate them. Nov 23, 2010 at 15:30
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In that case, they might as well drop the usernames entirely and look up the account based on the (unique!) password. Sheesh... did they tell you anything else about why they wanted it that way?– fooJan 14, 2011 at 19:32
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10@Craig Walker Amazon used to have this. I created one account with my yahoo email address, and then another account using a different password with the same email address. I don't know when they fixed this, but depending on the password I used, I'd get a different account.– YahelJul 7, 2011 at 4:58
About 7 years ago I worked at a bespoke software shop that decided to sell one of its products. It was an end-to-end operations suite for some industry. Well, this industry wasn't known for being super technological, so somehow we ended up providing third-party technical support for their servers and IT infrastructure instead of farming it out to independent small business IT consultants.
One day, a customer's server encountered disk corruption. The server we had sold them was configured with an Adaptec RAID controller, set up for a RAID 1 mirror. Their application database was toast. They hadn't performed backups in months. The backups they had performed were unusable. They ended up losing 8 months of data. They hired an IT consultant to handle this investigative work.
Phone calls ensued, and the sales manager (known for promising impossible features) apparently told them it would be taken care of, and wrote it up in a contract.
The sales manager promised the customer that we would ensure that the application database and any other application-related files would never be replicated by RAID controllers if the files were considered to be corrupt. No configuration should be necessary either. Yep. We were told to deliver this functionality in 2 weeks, or the customer would fire us.
So the program manager -- who had some large enterprise CRM products, and other serious development successes, under his belt -- and I had a meeting with the COO, and the sales manager. The program manager was detailing how insane, impossible, and insanely impossible this was. The sales manager (military background) would simply scream in his face (literally!), "I don't care! How hard can it be to make the RAID thing not RAID?! Their data would be fine on the other drive if the RAID thing hadn't screwed it up!"
At the end of that meeting, the program manager quit with a zero-day notice. So I was now tasked with this. Over the next week, I petitioned both Adaptec and LSI Logic to provide an engineer for a conference call, simply to laugh in the face of the sales manager.
Ultimately, they obliged, and held up their end of the bargain. And they went into detail how ridiculously unfeasible it was. The guy from LSI was particularly harsh - he didn't sugar coat anything.
I didn't have to implement the feature. One I did have to implement was a custom security scheme requested by a customer, that would allow them to toggle any of the application's controls - on a control by control basis - as visible, disabled, enabled, read-only, or read-write. In theory, there were 146,000 combinations. And if you accidentally screwed up by say... disabling a control group, you'd have inadvertent side effects. Needless to say, when I was given the ultimatum that it had to be implemented, I also quit with a zero-day notice.
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+1for "quit with zero-day notice", because sometimes you just have to leave, and some people never get that and keep muddling on.– sbiSep 13, 2010 at 11:56
They asked me to search a Commercial Product that could find and fix source code bugs automagically.
Still searching..since 2001 :).
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5Why can't you use an open source product to do this task? Do they just love spending money? After all, it'll be expensive! :) Sep 10, 2010 at 0:37
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3Imagine if a client doesn't need a developer to develop his application. He himself can write anything and debugger will solve it automagically. Let me google it, Ill let u know if I find anything like this :-) Sep 17, 2010 at 7:00
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7I actually have such a tool. The problem is that it takes several weeks or months depending on the problem at hand, tremendous amounts of interaction with your team, lots of coffee, and is very expensive. Nov 22, 2010 at 18:11
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2@Michael send me two copies please, I need to getting job done. Nov 22, 2010 at 20:17
I once had a client specification that literally called for code capable of traveling backwards in time.
My employer harvested data for the client, and we were to deliver it in file format X at ten-minute intervals between 9 AM and 5 PM, save for the final delivery, which was in format Y (just X with a different footer). I did just that ... and they freaked. We were collecting low-volume data, and really only had one or two data points to deliver on any given day.
"QUIT SPAMMING US WITH EMPTY FILES!!!" they cried. "FIVE K'S EVERY TEN MINUTES ENCLOGULATES OUR BANDTUBES!"
Okay. So, my code checked every ten minutes, and only delivered if there was anything to deliver. Fair enough.
"BUT THE LAST FILE MUST BE IN FORMAT Y!!!" they screamed. "MODERN TECHNOLOGY CONFUSES AND ANGERS US! FIX IT OR WE WILL BEAT YOU WITH A MASTODON FEMUR!*"
(* -- It is possible I'm misremembering portions of the conversation.)
"So, I'm only to deliver the file if there's fresh data to deliver."
"YES."
"And the final delivery for the day is supposed to be a different file format."
"YES."
"Except I have no way of knowing which file will be the last of the day until the end of the day."
"YES."
"So the only way for me to implement this is to write code that goes backwards in time at the end of the day to redo the format on what turned out to be the final delivery."
"COULD YOU HAVE IT REPORT SPORTS SCORES? WE SAW BACK TO THE FUTURE II. BIFF TANNEN MAKES US HAPPY."
I refused, in part because violating causality is an unethical programming practice, in part because CPAN.org didn't have a module that would let me do it. (I checked.) In the end, they allowed me to send a file in format Y at the end of the day, regardless of whether or not it had any actual data. I'm pretty sure their bandwidth survived the hit.
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+1for "violating causality is an unethical programming practice". Now there's a rule that needs more attention.– sbiSep 13, 2010 at 18:43 -
7And you didn't consider sending a file every day at 11:59:59 in format Y containing "This is the last file of the day"? Sep 13, 2010 at 19:38
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1You could've withheld the last piece of data for each delivery to roll it over to the next one. This way at the end of the day you will always have at least one piece to send in format Y. :)– FixpointOct 2, 2010 at 0:45
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Without any discernable cause, I was brought into a private meeting, and told not to check if my computer was being monitored - including, never ever checking my task manager for any reason. I asked if they were monitoring my computer, and was told (roughly) "this is just a preventative thing -- you know, our lawyer told us to tell the employees about this -- but you know, we can't really say -- but I'm not monitoring it now."
(nudge, I think they were monitoring my computer, just not while they were telling me not to look for any monitoring programs. In fact, a few weeks later, I came in early and literally watched the mouse moving around my screen as if by remote -- so I looked through the window of the CEO and saw him remotely clicking around on my computer from his laptop.)
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Sounds like a winner of a company... If you're still there, I'd say bolt. Sep 10, 2010 at 20:48
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221) Open up notepad 2) Type "hi boss" 3) ... 4) Profit! Also, a good surveillance program would hide itself from Task Manager. Sep 21, 2010 at 19:35
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Sounds illegal. I hope you got a lawyer.– user7433Nov 22, 2010 at 16:57
I once had a long "discussion" with a pointy-haired boss who insisted that we could store a 2 in a bit datatype because it was "only one digit."
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132You can definitely do this. As long as the variable is named "IsATwo"– JohnFxSep 10, 2010 at 14:37
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The stupidest thing I've been asked to do is probably a ground up rewrite of a very large project. It was about 350k lines, all C (with a little perl mixed in for 'helper' scripts) and worked well no matter what clients did to it.
Almost a year later, we had:
- Lots of functions that basically did the same thing as the old functions
- No real improvements in speed or functionality
- A slightly smaller memory footprint
- A much larger executable
- Annoyed clients
Basically, we accomplished nothing that sensible refactoring could not have accomplished. But my boss was happy, we got rid of the helper scripts.
I consider it to be the most egregious waste of time and existing code that I've ever seen.
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3It's a little dated but from the StackExchange leader: joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html– HansSep 10, 2010 at 2:51
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2Also in this you have learned alot ... to not repeat this kind of project in future Sep 17, 2010 at 6:55
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Client: We've been using your database software for a couple of years, developing our own applications with it, and calling you from time to time for help.
Me: Yes, we appreciate doing business with you.
Client: Yeah. Every time we call, you tell us how to use a new feature, or you help us debug our usage, or provide a workaround for some issue.
Me: Sure, we're always happy to be of assistance.
Client: Occasionally, your product has an actual bug in it, and your company fixes it and gives us a software update.
Me: We do our best.
Client: Well, what we need from you now is some assurance that we won't have any more issues.
Me: . . .
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28This is a true story. The client above was a manager at an company who developed air-traffic control software for logging flight data. The sole developer on the project (who had no one reviewing his code) called to report a "bug" frequently, but it turned out to be an error on his part 9 out of 10 times. He didn't know about his own errors because he refused to check error statuses returned by our API. Why? Because he said any error must indicate a bug, and our library should have no bugs. Sep 18, 2010 at 0:49
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2@Bill, sounds like you library should fail badly and loudly including the last 10 error codes returned to calling code.– user1249Nov 28, 2010 at 14:09
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1@NimChimpsky: Some of the client's "issues" were cases where they wanted the software to do something it was not designed to do, or when they made fat-finger mistakes (like misspelling SQL keywords). They reported these cases as "bugs". Aug 4, 2011 at 16:16
I have been asked to write in a presentation of our software to a major multinational potential customer that we used "spaghetti code" coding technique.
Of course, we're in Italy... sounds good.
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12Just so long as the spaghetti is made fresh... right?– user2358Sep 22, 2010 at 23:18
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Do some work for free.
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7I've been asked that too. "We've run out of funding, can you work unpaid for a couple weeks until we get some customers?"– µBioSep 15, 2010 at 20:46
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Changing my syntax highlighting colors to match the ones used in the version control system.
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We so had this... and a requirement that EVERY LINE be commented, in the 79th column, so that the code was down the left and comments on the right. And all of this was enforced by an IDE add-in.– Tevo DNov 30, 2011 at 13:55
Let's see:
Write programs in C++
- without the use of version control,
- no refactoring,
- no Boost,
- limited STL (I argued and won on this one),
- use unverified subcontractor libraries,
- without a memory profiler (to help fix subcontractor work),
- no unit testing,
- stick to 3 letter names for member function names,
- no test environment (VM not allowed either) just push to production
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When I first started, 2, I think. Now that I've been there a while I can say group A: 4 and group B: 8. Guess which one I'm trying to join and guess which one won't let me.– wheatiesSep 14, 2010 at 0:13
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15Clearly, your boss was of the opinion that 'Real' programmers program with a magnetized needle and a steady hand. ;)– briceSep 21, 2010 at 15:17
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10@brice Don't make me bust out the butterflies... Sep 21, 2010 at 19:36
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8No one can ever force you to work without version control. Use whatever you want (I'm an increasingly big fan of git, personally) on your own machine, and gradually other developers will follow along. Hopefully.– TylerDec 11, 2010 at 19:04
Can you take this 10-page report that I asked you to prepare as a word document and make it into a powerpoint presentation because I am really a visual thinker and won't actually read the written report I asked you to make?
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may be this is a way of ensuring that you are doing genuine work and all the important aspects are covered in all the steps and finally the most concise lucid idea is conveyed in the end.– Aditya PMar 10, 2011 at 15:02
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Ok, I want you to scan this picture of a house, when I come back, you should be able to show me the back portion of it.
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5Was there an address? I would have run out and taken a picture of the back of the house and showed it to him. Then explain how you have the ability to walk into a photo as if it were another dimension. The print your resume in case he doesn't laugh.– JeremyJan 14, 2011 at 18:01
"I don't like the way this Oracle database works. Why don't we just write our own database?"
(Admittedly, this was over 15 years ago, but still!)
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1Well, why not? Some people actually did this, and that's how we got OODBMS. Imagine Amazon or Google using Oracle as DB backend... and then think about what impact speed has on their business.– fooJan 14, 2011 at 19:43
I was asked to load articles from a competitor's website inside an iframe that would be inside our website's skin, making it look like it came from us.
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2Yes ! The same thing happened to me when I was in the training and I was asked to copy contents from various website and paste it into ours and make it look like the original article. I can't give the name of website here but it is still on the internet and grabing thounds of user evreyday.. Sep 17, 2010 at 7:14
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1Yep. Somebody wanted me to help them build their own version of Craigslist that did this at first until they got "their own content." I explained that I was pretty sure this was illegal by digital millenium act standards but they didn't think it would be a big thing. I didn't take that contract. Jan 19, 2013 at 17:01
For me, the craziest (and quite possibly, funnest) was
See this 10 million lines of code in (out-dated web technology)? Write a compiler to convert it to a working Asp.net site.
It never spit out a working version (of course, I tried to tell them it was impractical), but it was fun anyways.
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2@Donny V. haha, I wish. It was much, much, much crazier than that. Dynamic inline sql used server side to generate mass quantities of dynamic server side code, leading to giant buckets of javascript and html with embedded server side code, that executed sql queries that...– µBioSep 10, 2010 at 21:09
One major feature of an application our company developed was the ability to search large amounts of documents by the full-text of the document. A competitor made the following claim in a marketing presentation to one of our clients,
Our search technology is superior because it doesn't just search the text of the documents, it also searches the 'bits and bytes' of the actual file in binary form.
They gave a ridiculous example of how the decimal ascii repersentations of the words "boot" and "boat" were much less similar than the same words in binary form, when you compared the actual numeric digits in the representation. So searching based on the 1's and 0's more accurately reflected how similar those two words appeared visually, and thus improved recall.
Naturally I was tasked with researching this technique, which I assume was the result of a marketing guy completely misunderstanding a programmer somewhere, and drafting a response that we could include in our proposal.
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2I'm afraid I can think of a couple of search techniques that might (just) have made sense of the claim. Sep 13, 2010 at 19:34
Can you write a simple time entry and billing system for our new foreign office that uses a different language, currency and tax laws?
Small team of programmers, boss wants us to do a ticket reservation system for a small airline (in a very short timeframe, of course). Team says:
-- as you can imagine, we will need some testers for this project
Boss says:
-- don't worry, learn from the car industry. They recall cars from time to time: users will do the testing.
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I was a part of a mainframe support team that did shifts with other support teams in a data center. After the shift we would usually have a briefing with managers and the team of the next shift. One day our new director showed up and asked the question: "Why average CPU load during your shift was only 72%, while previous shift shows near 95%? I think if we try real hard, we could eventually achieve 100% CPU load!"
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1Sounds like a 6 month project in Hawaii...– user1249Nov 22, 2010 at 9:23
About 12 years ago when I was in college I worked on a data modelling application for Windows. The project was nearly complete after about 60,000 lines of Win32 code, you know, code targeting the Windows platform. Then the client said the application also needs to run "on the web". She had a hard time understanding how this one "minor little" requirements change could have such a big impact on the project. I started over from scratch in Java but ended up quiting the project before it was ever finished.
I was working on a big project in 1996 where we were scoring live sporting events. This conversation happened:
Boss: Go out to the venue for the next event.
Me: What do you need me to do.
Boss: Be there just in case.
Me: Just in case what?
Boss: In case the tech lead loses it. He's way too stressed out and I don't know what he might do.
Me: And if he loses it, what do you want me to do?
Boss: Just get him out of there so everyone else can continue working. I don't care how you do it.