What is Digg?67 Comments
- synystar, on 10/12/2007, -0/+27"I won't bill obviously." LOL. In that situation he shoulda just said "Sorry--I ***** up. $2500"
- zweben, on 10/12/2007, -2/+20"Gid"? "Can't spelled"?
Maybe you shouldn't be talking. - drmangrum, on 10/12/2007, -1/+14Shamelessly ripped from despair.com
Contracting. If your not part of the solution, there is a lot of money to be made prolonging the problem. - Miso117, on 10/12/2007, -0/+11I think I went to college with that guy!!! My junior year, in a programming class we had to code a tic-tac-toe game in C++ as a group final. We doled out the work in the group and met once a week to compile and run and see what needed more work. One of the kids in the group never really had much to turn in, he would look over all our code and say "Well I'm going to need to see the game working before I can code the scoring portion of the game until it s done"... Each week it was something else. We ended up having a working copy of the game and he still had nothing. He sent his code the night before it was due and in the comments of the code it said \i.dont.know. The code was like gibberish, sad really... He didn't even try. Then sent a group email telling us he would pay us each $100 to finish the code and say he worked on it as much as us all... One of the girls in the group met up with me and together we finished it that night. It took us an additional 6 hours and neither of us got any sleep. We went to the professor, cause the doucher really screwed us over. The professor of the class was really cool about it. He showed us the kids "portfolio" for each program and said each programming exercise he did either looked just like someone elses, sans comments, or looked like a baby mashed the keyboard and called it code. We got an A on the project. The professor told us we should take the $100 bucks from him for being such an a-hole. I loved that guy... We didn't take the money though, watching him get a big fat F was more of a reward.
- alekh, on 10/12/2007, -0/+7Incompetency attracts incompetency! The fact they did not check up on him regularly and seemed to think everything was okay (how???) does not look good for Mark B's company.
- bobbyi, on 10/12/2007, -2/+9"coding a ***** sudoku game by yourself really sucks."
Actually, that sounds like fun. - brownspank, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8It is "*****"; that's just some REAL bad handwriting.
- Psicosis, on 10/12/2007, -1/+8The note is what kills that entry, just funny as hell.
- luckyllama, on 10/12/2007, -1/+7I need to change jobs!
- duxxyuk, on 10/12/2007, -2/+8Superb ! For us _real_ contractors, that makes us so much _more_ employable !!. [ fume! ]
Thanks a lot whoever that contractor was. (what a fool)
How are the employers supposed to know the good guys from the bad ?
When will IT become a truly professional industry ??? - ProximaC, on 10/12/2007, -0/+6god damn... I think that guy worked for us for a month last summer....
- JanethD, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5The incompetent person is the one that hired the guy.
- MindStalker, on 10/12/2007, -1/+5dcode: Read junior year of college. In the US your first two years are liberal arts studies. So it was the first year of actual CS studies. This was most likely the second C++ class this guy took. He was still learning.
- ropers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+4I like the honesty of that note. For this one honest guy, there are a million dishonest incompetents out there who just obfuscate, waffle and use marketing-speak to somehow still get rewarded.
- bpapa, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Man the biggest thing I hated about college was getting stuck in lame groups like that. The worst for me was also a game. Me and 3 other guys decided to do a Bomberman clone. I didn't want to do that at all, but the vote was 3-1 so I went along with. After a short while, it was decided we would split into 2 groups of 2 in order to try and get a higher grade. Of course, I was stuck with the guy who REALLY wanted to do Bomberman and I had already started it. As we got down to one week left to go, I realized where we were at, and having gotten screwed in group work before, I decided I had to just put my nose to the grind ASAP and finish the damn thing by myself so that I wouldn't get caught the night before the project was due. But here I was, finishing on my own the game I didn't even want to do in the first place. I finished it on my own and got an A. My estranged partner got an Incomplete and had to spend his winter break finishing the game in order to get a C.
Bottom line is this - if you are doing group work in college, don't expect your partner to carry their weight. In fact, expect them to bail out (it actually happened to me more than half the time I did group work). Budget your time accordingly in case you wind up having to do it all yourself.
Oh, and if the person ***** you over is your friend, don't worry about telling them to go ***** themselves when they want credit for your work. After you finish college chances of you keeping in touch with everybody are pretty slim anyway. :P - raada, on 10/12/2007, -0/+3Usually you get a bill and not that note...Same result.
- digitalsin, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Yeah and you smell bad.
- Jerim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I see it differently. When I was first starting out I routinely worked with experienced people who would literally call you a dumb-ass to your face, no matter what question you asked. It is this sort of beratement that sent many newbie IT guys running, mid-project. It is on the company to establish an environment where a person feels comfortable enough to admit they need some help without major repercussions. The entire industry has become flooded with egotistical know-it-alls who believe that anyone who doesn't know everything is just useless and should work at McDonald's, and they won't think twice about saying it to their face and to their boss. Posturing yourself to appear better than your co-workers has become as much a part of the job as actually knowing what to do. It is that sort of work environment that tends to make workers panic and run. I don't see a contractor who was trying to rip anyone off. I see a contractor who needed some help but was too scared to ask.
- VAXcat, on 10/12/2007, -3/+5 Ha! From the viewpoint of the contractors of the world, the only unprofessional, unpardonable thing he did was not billing for his time!
- nofxjunkee, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3Best TDWTF in a while!
- Skinner72, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2Nothing about this story seems fake. I've worked with this same dude at all my jobs. I belive they are real.
- Jerim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@rot13ubercrypto
I was more just stating in general that sometimes an "idiot" is actually a bright person who is just too nervous do to the attitude of his their peers, and they come off looking like idiots. If you treated the person fairly and gave him a nurturing environment, then it was his own fault. But it isn't so much the "fear" of catching flak from co-workers, it is that they actually do catch flak, and tons of it. 99% of it which is uncalled for, just so some co-worker can look smarter than others. - mahdaeng, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2@bpapa
that's not just in college - that's in real life too
working in groups is almost always a problematic situation - dcode, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2It's no surprise there will always be bad contractors out there. And it's not just in the IT industry, but in any profession. Look at how many building contractors are incompetent. People who don't want to do the work, or can't do the work will try to rip you off.
- ZeAce, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I had a Scrabble project in Uni that was supposed to be a group of 4. My buddy in the class wasn't the greatest programmer, and the other two he pulled in weren't any better. When we sat down for the first meeting I looked across the table and said "I don't want to write a single word on a single report, I don't want to make a single poster, and I don't want to write any presentations. I'll do all the code and it will be done next week."
Everyone was happy :) - lunchbox12682, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I thought it was consulting?
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+2I agree. Totally fake.
"134 Ins: //hmmmm!!!!!"
Get real folks. Who does that? - durzagott, on 10/12/2007, -2/+4I don't think it's a misspelling. Probably just a way of writing the word in a less offensive way. I personally use "fuct".
- surfing, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3is it yours?
- bpapa, on 10/12/2007, -1/+3When I worked with "this guy" I could tell he felt bad about the whole thing on his second to last day and said something to me like "don't worry, i'm not going to count these hours" while he was ***** up a bunch of things.
I hated where I was working so I told him not to worry about it and bill as normal. :P
I kinda regretted it though when I had to spend all of the next week rewriting his code. - largobargo, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I am this type of guy. I drive a BMW 6 series and live in a 1.2 million dollar home. I never got why you guys try to work so hard when it's easier to BS your way through life. Currently, I'm billing $175/hr at a fortune 500 company and delegating all my work off on to two indian kids. Well my days almost over, time to make everyone think i've been busting my ass. I'll come up with some big fake problem I spent the whole day working on. :)
- RickySan65, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1"Well I'm going to need to see the game working before I can code the scoring portion of the game until it s done"
Aaanddd a manager is born..
/sarcasm - norcim, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I think most of us who majored in CS have a similar story. There are so many group projects and so many who change majors mid semester.
I survived by taking control of all the projects and making sure ALL work was up to date or I would complete it myself. I didn't mind doing most of the work because I liked it but it makes me wonder.... Do the incompetents outnumber us? - dupswapdrop, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1This is called bad luck. When your CEO is to dumb or, to spaced out to figure out how to hire and keep good people. oops bad luck. When they cut your pay and take back benefits and vacations and everyone quits, bad luck again.
Then they wonder where all the good employees have gone?
Off to self employment every one.
Oh when will they ever learn? - jonstafari, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1...and people wonder why contractors can be sketchy. not all, just some.... and yeah, i should change jobs.
- unknownsoldierX, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Are the stories on that site real, or just simply entertaining tales? I've only been reading it for the past couple months, but I've already read a few that seemed too far fetched.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1No evidence that this actually happened. Sounds like a cooked up story. And a silly scribbled note anyone over 7 could have written. Boring read too. Duh.
- elchupacabra, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I always view these types of stories with some healthy skepticism. The timeline reads that they gave this guy approximately 4 weeks to work on the job but in the end 3 people did the job over 1 weekend? Why would they allow this guy to work for 4 weeks without any type of real status update (other than a couple of emails) if it was a job that could be accomplished in 2 days by 3 people? People buy into these types of stories too easily.
- CraigB12, on 10/12/2007, -2/+3This happened to me in my freshman year in college. We had to write a sudoku game in Java with a partner for one of our first projects, but my partner ended up switching to business before the project started. The email he sent me was rather funny, but coding a ***** sudoku game by yourself really sucks.
- newbill123, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1UnknownSoldier: I've always assumed that the site starts each story with a spark of truth and then expounds with some hyperbole to make it a more intriguing read. The people writing the site's articles may not even be doing the exaggeration themselves; they may just be taken expanded tales around various company's watercoolers that have already been a bit sensationalized.
People will never let me forget the limburger cheese incident I was responsible for (fortunately not detailed on this site), but the incident itself has been greatly, horrendously exaggerated over the mild, incompetently concieved, revenge prank it actually was. When someone brings it up to me that they've heard about it today, I just have to nod and agree with all of the horrible things the story says I did in my younger, inexperienced days. People love a good story even if reality gets in the way of the truth sometimes. - hobbers, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1I'm not a CS major, but it happened to me in an engineering class. In my group of 4, 1 was in marching band and 2 were in ROTC, so guess who was always around to help? No one! I did nearly 3/4 of the project myself, including all status reports, model development, wind tunnel testing, etc. Fortunately they put some work in at the very end to get the final report done, because there was no way I would have finished it alone.
- mahdaeng, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1yeah - at least this clown had the decency not to charge the client
- norcim, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1@bpapa I have a near exact experience. The artist in the group changed majors and the other programmer double-talked his way the whole semester without a single line of code written. At demo time we got a few weeks extension due to the artist bailing out. I got rid of my dead weight by asking him to write the code to a small module. If he would have written that module, I would have allowed him to get an A on the project with me. Needless to say he didn't show up at demo time and he received an incomplete.
... I didn't want to that game either. - fifalover, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1He didn't even get the code right. Line 348 shows Subtract returning a DateTime when it really returns a TimeSpan. Geez.
[/sarcasm] - morcheeba, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1There are a wide variety of abilities in companies, and lots of competing goals. There are things that will take your lead programmers only a day or two to do, but if they're really busy working on something more important, it makes sense to have someone else do it -- even if it takes them a week.
- resplence, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1(Edit: Ok morcheeba beat me to my point with elegant simplicity.)
Lots of possibilities for that scenario. Just one:
- They were already working on something else;
- They either didn't, or thought they didn't, have the time to do what the contractor was hired to do, or;
- They reasoned it was worth it to hire someone else, more knowledgeable in the field than them, to do the job better then they would, in the given circumstances;This
- The fact that it was a job that "that could be accomplished in 2 days by 3 people" is actually a good reason to leave an assumed competent professional working "without any type of real status update (other than a couple of emails)";
- They thought what they were doing was gonna take 4 weeks to be accomplished, so;
- They wanted to have all stages ready around the same time - the end of the 4 weeks;
- After the incident, when they were through with their original tasks, all 3 of them worked their asses off to get the guy's job done.
You fail to see every case too easily. Anyway, it's not impossible. Just because there are a couple questions pending it doesn't mean it's fake. That's like saying everything an anonymous blogger is fake because we don't know their name. It could be fake, but I don't care and read it for entertainment purposes only. - Pictographer, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Honesty when it's too late isn't worth much. The time to be honest would have been as soon as he first realized that he didn't know how to get the job done. If he's too dishonest with himself to recognize his incompetence, then he's really screwed because he won't figure out what he needs to do to become competent.
- brownb2, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2He really shouldn't be doing computer science (or whatever) if he thinks Sudoko is a big deal and a PITA (actually it is fun working out a good algorithm to generate the numbers). He' s probably going to turn into one of these incompetent contractors who hates/is unable to do work... ;)
FWIW I hacked the core algorithms of one over a few weekends so I know what I'm talking about - I just never got it finished (should I admit that? ;) )
"coding a ***** sudoku game by yourself really sucks."
Actually, that sounds like fun. - inactive, on 10/12/2007, -1/+2I've also had some clients that COMPLETELY misrepresent the work your being asked to do. I went out on a hospital db optimization (I thought) and was actually restoring an entire application and underlying data after a move/expansion. If I had known beforehand I would have 1) charged more, and B) not scheduled another client right on the back end of it. As it was it took twice as long, lost the second job (looked bad doing it), and spent the whole time pissed at the client. No fun.
- inactive, on 10/12/2007, -0/+1Sounds very similar to a guy worked for us a few weeks back. I do give this guy credit for being smart enough to determine when his in over his head and flaming out with style.
-
Show 51 - 65 of 65 discussions
Digg is coming to a city (and computer) near you! Check out all the details on our 
© Digg Inc. 2009
— Content created and posted by Digg users is