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You tongues were all probably gone from having to bite them to stifle the laughing every time he walked by. 
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Hair plugs are worse. Trust me.
I had to train a technical bod from our New York distributer - good bloke, spoken to him on the phone loads of times. So he flew over and we meet for the product training ... And he had hair transplants.
All the hair on his head was in little identical clumps, in absolutely straight rows and columns, and while you're talking to him your eyes are continually rising up, and up in fascinated horror to the regular field of - presumably - butt hair all over his head ...
Bad command or file name. Bad, bad command! Sit! Stay! Staaaay...
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Yes. They look like the doll from Toy Story.
We're philosophical about power outages here. A.C. come, A.C. go.
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I worked with a person once who was having to parse XML. Person would scream every time the schema (we used DTDs) changed. Now, I would think screaming is normal because the schema should not change after development started (at least not much). So I kept my head down and ignored it.
Well, this person screamed much worse and never stopped. The person would scream from one day to the next - even until the next schema change happened, at which time the person claimed the code had just started working again due to the previous change. One day this person left the company. A second person who was working with this person was now responsible for the code...
The second person came to me and asked if it was right... I looked at the code and the first person was parsing the entire LARGE XML structure manually as a string. Nothing worked and it was bug ridden. I looked at the 2nd person funny, who never raised the alarm while working with the 1st person. Both had degrees from prestigious universities - but could not ask anyone else in the company how to parse XML. We were using MS products of course, which have built in libraries for doing such things.
That is my XML story...
Lesson 1... be humble and ask for help. Ten minutes of help could have saved weeks of screaming 
Lesson 2... if your employees scream too much... you should code review their work before it is too late 
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Great story.
I guess we find that XML horror stories abound. 
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Much the same way that Jeremy Clarkson's "Sports Train" is faster than a regular train. 
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PIEBALDconsult wrote: Jeremy Clarkson's "Sports Train"
Had to look that one up. Great stuff.
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raddevus wrote: The problem is that in your code your "XML" is actually just a string that you reference via indexes.
I'm sure, that one who sees XML as a string will fall over escaped chars in an entity... Take some time to create the proper data and you will see miracles... 
Skipper: We'll fix it.
Alex: Fix it? How you gonna fix this?
Skipper: Grit, spit and a whole lotta duct tape.
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So you have an issue with programming methodolgies that can affect the product, timelines, people's sanity and probably profitability and instead of sitting down to dig into the issue he tells you to get back to work?
The problem isn't ExpertDev. The problem is the manager.
cheers
Chris Maunder
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Chris Maunder wrote: The problem is the manager.
Nailed it!!
Very astute of you. You noticed the subtext of the story. I actually told the manager that it was crazy because of all the reasons you mentioned and he said,
Quote: "[Contractor] is smart enough that I'm sure he is doing the right thing."
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raddevus wrote: "[Contractor] is smart enough that I'm sure he is doing the right thing."
In Manager speak - "I'ts costing me a fortune for this guy, don't tell me he's no good'
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The manager was also saying:
"Look, it doesn't really matter, because by the time anyone finds out that it's not great code it won't matter because then those people will just have to deal with it anyways. But, if you make noise, upper level management will think something is wrong in my group and then they might start looking more closely at me and my life is good right now. And that's what matters...my life being easy."
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Manager- thing with no skills and a belief system that replaces reality.
Leadership equals wrecked ship.
If you think you are leading my look behind you. You are alone.
If you think I am leading you, You are lost.
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raddevus wrote: a C# developer who pooh-poohs Java without ever having tried it
When the C# developer has tried Java he will still pooh-pooh it though 
Erik's blog on the expert beginner was in The Insider a while back.
The problem is that the more you know the better you know what you don't know.
That's why the good people are modest, while the people who know just a little bit shout the hardest.
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Sander Rossel wrote: The problem is that the more you know the better you know what you don't know.That's why the good people are modest, while the people who know just a little bit shout the hardest.
Two great truths.
Too bad the whole world doesn't know them better.
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I replaced such an 'expert' who had written a book. He spent 3 months delivering sod all, so they got me in, and I delivered it in 2 weeks.
Experts, f*** em.
Oh, and then there was the USB expert. What a twat. Thought a transaction error was to do with the transaction translator needed to run full speed device on high speed hubs!
He delivered sh*t for months till I lost patience and put my own code in the driver.
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To be fair some of the Microsoft classes can be difficult to use.
After a few months battling my way through problem with the configuration classes, I really regretted my decision to use those MS classes.
In future, I might roll my own or find an alternative. My point being, is that we all will have bad experiences that influence our future decisions. In time, you may forget what those reasons were and just stick to the libraries and patterns you're familiar with.
Arguing over performance was the wrong argument to have. You should have really dug into the statement 'weren't any good.
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True story...
When I was a system engineer with Sperry-UNIVAC back in the day, one of the account reps told us a story about an IT manager that he swore was true.
A client IT director was complaining about the slowness of printing reports from one of our small mainframe machines. As most of these directors did not want to spend the monies to upgrade to the far faster printers, this particular account rep suggested that the director put the disk drive units on their third floor, the mainframe unit on the second and the printer on the first. This way the electrons would be going down and as a result, much faster to the printer.
About a month later when the account rep visited the account for a regular checkup-call he found the director immersed in blue-prints for the reconstruction of the IT department. Asked what the director was doing he told the account rep that he had gotten permission to start rebuilding the IT areas to implement the account rep's previous month's suggestion for faster printing...
Our profession is just littered with stories of such stupidity, which are more often than not completely true. The reason for this is that the quality of technical management in our field tends to be quite low despite all the hype about how they consistently try to hire the best and brightest. In short, most such management are irrational, incompetents who barely have the ability to reason beyond what the company expects of them.
They in turn hire buffoons who the original poster of this thread described.
Rational, technical personnel who understand this perpetuation of irrationality in our field slowly go insane over the many years we attempt to deal with such people in during our career.
It is no wonder that our profession is such a mess?
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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Steve Naidamast wrote: This way the electrons would be going down and as a result, much faster to the printer.
Totally speechless on that one! I've seen a lot of stupidity over the 25 years of my career, but that one is epic.
Great story and a fantastic summary of the IT industry (at least 90%), unfortunately.
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I will never forget the expression of the account rep's face when he told us that story. He said the day that he went into that company and found out what was going on he was incredulous to the point of shock that someone could be so stupid as to actually believe what he had told them...
Steve Naidamast
Sr. Software Engineer
Black Falcon Software, Inc.
blackfalconsoftware@outlook.com
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I wandered around on his blog too. It does have a lot of interesting articles.
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I think what you describe here can be hypothetically (partially) explained by the "Dunning-Kruger" research: [^]; however, I suspect there are other dimensions to the dynamic of your interactions, as well, such as: maintenance of "face" by the nominally senior role-holder who feels challenged by you, technically.
Without more information on context, like where, when, public/private, who else was present, etc., useless to speculate more.
cheers, Bill
«There is a spectrum, from "clearly desirable behaviour," to "possibly dodgy behavior that still makes some sense," to "clearly undesirable behavior." We try to make the latter into warnings or, better, errors. But stuff that is in the middle category you don’t want to restrict unless there is a clear way to work around it.» Eric Lippert, May 14, 2008
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