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Flamer's Corner / Craziest thing you've ever seen (at work)?
« on: June 30, 2007, 12:12:53 PM »
Alternate title: Make milifist feel better about his job.
What is the craziest thing you have ever seen at work? Absurd code? Wacky policies? Anything to reaffirm my belief that other people have to deal with workplace insanity.
I'll start with my job to give a baseline.
I work as a web developer in a small subsidiary of a huge heartless corporation. We develop websites for a specific industry. These are hosted solutions that the clients sign multi-year contracts for service.
The insanity:
The core of our sites is a set of 10+ year-old C programs that generate the html that is sent to the browser. The basic page layouts are stored in an Oracle db. The C programs connect to the db, read the layouts, pulls in the specific data the is placed in the layouts, and then generates html tables to format everything.
Wrapped around the C programs is a mess of php, java, perl, javascript, and shell scripts. Our sites all use frame sets. They rely heavily on javascript for code functionality (including security), and our main menu is a java applet.
We typical host only two-three accounts per webserver. However, all of the accounts essentially connect to a single Oracle db server. And, all of the servers are running SCO UnixWare.
And if all of that weren't bad enough, we offer an offline version of our sites (each site is customized for each client). The offline version is basically a copy of the online version hosted an XAMPP. Which means that virtually anyone can see all of our source code (minus the C garbage).
No one involved in the creation of the C programs still works at the company, however we have a couple of old, ardent, C coders that insist php is too inefficient. So it is unlikely to be any changes anytime soon.
Make me fell better, top that for insanity. Please.
On the upside though, my boss is hot! Even if she is a bit like one of those touchy-feelly, go team! type managers...
What is the craziest thing you have ever seen at work? Absurd code? Wacky policies? Anything to reaffirm my belief that other people have to deal with workplace insanity.
I'll start with my job to give a baseline.
I work as a web developer in a small subsidiary of a huge heartless corporation. We develop websites for a specific industry. These are hosted solutions that the clients sign multi-year contracts for service.
The insanity:
The core of our sites is a set of 10+ year-old C programs that generate the html that is sent to the browser. The basic page layouts are stored in an Oracle db. The C programs connect to the db, read the layouts, pulls in the specific data the is placed in the layouts, and then generates html tables to format everything.
Wrapped around the C programs is a mess of php, java, perl, javascript, and shell scripts. Our sites all use frame sets. They rely heavily on javascript for code functionality (including security), and our main menu is a java applet.
We typical host only two-three accounts per webserver. However, all of the accounts essentially connect to a single Oracle db server. And, all of the servers are running SCO UnixWare.
And if all of that weren't bad enough, we offer an offline version of our sites (each site is customized for each client). The offline version is basically a copy of the online version hosted an XAMPP. Which means that virtually anyone can see all of our source code (minus the C garbage).
No one involved in the creation of the C programs still works at the company, however we have a couple of old, ardent, C coders that insist php is too inefficient. So it is unlikely to be any changes anytime soon.
Make me fell better, top that for insanity. Please.
On the upside though, my boss is hot! Even if she is a bit like one of those touchy-feelly, go team! type managers...
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