

Tales from the WTF company, part I - drm237
http://szeryf.wordpress.com/2008/02/28/tales-from-the-wtf-company-part-i/

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angstrom
Perfect example of not asking the right questions during an interview. You can
usually find out if a place is this jacked without ever joining the payroll if
you know what to ask them. Interviews are a two way process. You're
interviewing them, just as they're interviewing you.

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gojomo
Ultimately, tales like this (and DailyWTF postings) are "junk food" for the
mind. Sure, they may give a smile and easy sense of smug superiority... but do
you learn anything?

Don't we already know there are a lot of bad workplaces, a lot of fubar'd
codebases, a lot of clueless-muddle-along programmers? Indeed, so many that
you could read a sad-funny tale every hour on the hour for the rest of you
natural life and not exhaust the FAIL?

But is that a good info-diet?

Or just cheap sugary click candy, fattening one's ego without any mental
nutrition?

~~~
TrevorJ
Also, you learn from the mistakes of others. A much less risky approach than
learning from your own.

~~~
gojomo
If there is a lesson, sure.

But the point of "WTF?!?" is that the stories include blatant, astonishing
incompetence.

I've never seen one end "but it turned out there was a genuinely good reason
for what made me think 'WTF?', so I learned something".

They're all, "<nelson>Ha-ha</nelson>, even a slightly competent programmer can
feel better than those poor saps!"

~~~
jcl
Sure, some stories are more enlightening than others, and there is a point of
diminishing returns. But I think the stories are pretty useful; they provide
anecdotal evidence for various development anti-patterns. They imbue an
appropriate sense of apprehension whenever someone says "Source control is too
complicated." or "Then we serialize the object to an XML text field..." or "A
testing environment would cost twice as much."

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rokhayakebe
she did you the biggest favor.

