Today - what you've done

[Malcador]

13 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

I've had more than a couple interviews early in my career where I was just grilled on keyboard shortcuts. I thought it was a weird thing but then I've also had them ask me completely random questions that weren't job related as well. I'm guessing they saw/read/heard of some of the off the wall questions that Google was asking and they decided to do the same.

Just as long as they don't ask you why you're not helping that turtle on its back.

[Gromnir]

7 minutes ago, ShadySands said:

I've had more than a couple interviews early in my career where I was just grilled on keyboard shortcuts. I thought it was a weird thing but then I've also had them ask me completely random questions that weren't job related as well. I'm guessing they saw/read/heard of some of the off the wall questions that Google was asking and they decided to do the same.

we always asked applicants we were interviewing at least one oddball question complete unrelated to job qualifications. literal asked somebody, "if you were a type of pasta, what type of pasta would you be? why?"

interviews revealed to us what the applicant thought we wanted to hear from them rather than anything 'bout who they were. sure, we would ask obscure technical questions which would tell us if an applicant were genuine qualified, but were tougher to figure out if we were being shined on 'bout character and personality.

the stoopid questions which would not have been something they prepared for a thousand times were often more illuminating 'bout who we were interviewing even if it seemed like such were just Gromnir being a jerk.

...

don't think we ever used google for such unrelated questions. woulda' kinda defeat the point if it were something which would come up frequent in an internet search.

oh, and our favorite answer to a stoopid Gromnir interview question were as follows: "that is the single dumbest question anybody has asked me in my entire life. ever." honest thought we would get such more frequent but it only happened once.

hired.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[Guard Dog]

Today is is cold as hell. Frost covering everything. Sounds like a good day to binge watch Stranger Things  but unfortunately work intrudes. As soon as the coffee is done I'm heading over to Brownsville then to Martin to check the roads and fences on my properties out that way. I wasn't going to bring the pups because it's pretty cold but I'll be gone too long not to. They are, of course, excited about the prospect. 

[Hurlshort]

My wife is out of town this weekend, so I am responsible for taking my daughter to her dance competition. It is amazing watching your kid grow into this amazing graceful and focused athlete.

[Nepenthe]

I'm currently in the ~past six months vs. today mode...

So for the past six months, I've been slowly learning how to do 3d character art. Started with daz studio, now slowly taking the next step with Marvelous Designer et al to do some more Cyberpunk-y gear for my characters. Steep learning curve as I have no background for this kind of stuff whatsoever, but I've been enjoying it so far. Too bad most of the software costs so much I can't afford it (cough, zbrush) even with lawyer salaries, so I have to use stuff apparently designed by aliens (Blender) which lacks some newbie-friendly features (IMM brushes). Sigh.

Edited February 9, 2020 by Nepenthe

[Guard Dog]

Hey Nep! Good to see you back around.

[Guard Dog]

On 2/7/2020 at 5:04 PM, Gromnir said:

we always asked applicants we were interviewing at least one oddball question complete unrelated to job qualifications. literal asked somebody, "if you were a type of pasta, what type of pasta would you be? why?"

interviews revealed to us what the applicant thought we wanted to hear from them rather than anything 'bout who they were. sure, we would ask obscure technical questions which would tell us if an applicant were genuine qualified, but were tougher to figure out if we were being shined on 'bout character and personality.

the stoopid questions which would not have been something they prepared for a thousand times were often more illuminating 'bout who we were interviewing even if it seemed like such were just Gromnir being a jerk.

...

don't think we ever used google for such unrelated questions. woulda' kinda defeat the point if it were something which would come up frequent in an internet search.

oh, and our favorite answer to a stoopid Gromnir interview question were as follows: "that is the single dumbest question anybody has asked me in my entire life. ever." honest thought we would get such more frequent but it only happened once.

hired.

HA! Good Fun!

 

Someone once asked me in an interview what my weakest trait was. I told him I don't suffer fools well. I didn't get the job. I choose to think the fools there were afraid of me! 

[Maedhros]

Recently got a new job. Now I can walk 15 minutes to my new workplace, as opposed to a one hour drive with the bus. I wish I was asked what my favorite pasta was though. I detest generic job interviews, and feel like they (often) say something about the person interviewing you. I rejected a job offer recently because I got a bad feeling on the boss lady, it felt like she had just googled "job interview questions", and asked the ten first ones she found. She came across as really dull, and in my experience places with dull/bad leaders also have similar work environments.

[Amentep]

I got asked what animal I'd be in an interview.

Blanked on the entirety of fauna both known and speculative when the question was asked.  Eventually stumbled upon 'albatross'.  Was asked if I picked that because it soared for hours at sea.  Answered no, I literally couldn't think of any animals until Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner popped into my head.  Probably not the best answer, but it was the truth.

Didn't get what I was interviewing for, obviously.

[Skazz]

17 minutes ago, Amentep said:

Eventually stumbled upon 'albatross'.  Was asked if I picked that because it soared for hours at sea.  Answered no, I literally couldn't think of any animals until Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner popped into my head.

"Actually, it's because I enjoy being shot at with a crossbow."

[Azdeus]

I think I have an effect on people I'm angry at.

Foreign drivers at work are scared of me, because of the yelling I do when I get pissed off, but I chaulked it up to the fact they were afraid to lose their jobs or that they'd have to pay repairs out of their own pocket. Turns out it's something else. On friday the crapenters working on my sis's house right next to mine, borrowed some electricity by unplugging my timer for the engine heater, and that night it was -7C and my car ofcourse was caked in ice and I gave them a royal dressing-down that most of the neighbours told me they heard. On the afternoon the workers left just in about the time that they'd heard my car approaching, didn't think much of it, it was friday afterall.

This morning it turns out they'd left their little hut connected to the same extention-cord I use for my engine heater, so the fuse had blown, and I reacted... appropriately.

Today they left one hour before I got home. XD

[Skazz]

^ Were they Poles, by any chance?

[Azdeus]

14 minutes ago, Skazz said:

^ Were they Poles, by any chance?

No, Swedes - the drivers are a mix of eastern europeans though. I respect the Poles more, the ones at work are generally more serious than the others.

Atleast the guys I went of on was a Swede, the others might've been Poles for all I know.

Edited February 10, 2020 by Azdeus

[Hurlshort]

3 hours ago, Amentep said:

I got asked what animal I'd be in an interview.

Blanked on the entirety of fauna both known and speculative when the question was asked.  Eventually stumbled upon 'albatross'.  Was asked if I picked that because it soared for hours at sea.  Answered no, I literally couldn't think of any animals until Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner popped into my head.  Probably not the best answer, but it was the truth.

Didn't get what I was interviewing for, obviously.

Yeah, that might beat vulture for worst bird choice.

[Amentep]

Dodo?

[Skazz]

Toucans.

[Malcador]

I'd have said Larry Bird. Although I'd be older, I'd have a bit more money.

[Gromnir]

5 hours ago, Amentep said:

I got asked what animal I'd be in an interview.

Blanked on the entirety of fauna both known and speculative when the question was asked.  Eventually stumbled upon 'albatross'.  Was asked if I picked that because it soared for hours at sea.  Answered no, I literally couldn't think of any animals until Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner popped into my head.  Probably not the best answer, but it was the truth.

Didn't get what I was interviewing for, obviously.

the animal thing is actual kinda common. wanna work for google and get asked the animal question? will get 1/4 people answering "the google bugdroid." 

HA! Good Fun!

[Gorth]

My gut answer would be 'cat'. I get to keep humans as pets, I like fish... and the internet worships me

[Guard Dog]

6 hours ago, Amentep said:

I got asked what animal I'd be in an interview.

Blanked on the entirety of fauna both known and speculative when the question was asked.  Eventually stumbled upon 'albatross'.  Was asked if I picked that because it soared for hours at sea.  Answered no, I literally couldn't think of any animals until Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner popped into my head.  Probably not the best answer, but it was the truth.

Didn't get what I was interviewing for, obviously.

You wouldn't want to have  been THAT albatross anyway. It didn't turn out too well for her. 

[Gromnir]

honest, we woulda' thought amentep's answer were a reflexive given.

HA! Good Fun!

[Amentep]

If I'd thought of Manimal I'd have probably said that!

[majestic]

Time to vent.

We've spent the past nine months at work upgrading our ERP system and our customizations to the next major release. For compliance and quality assurance reasons (or whatever the reasons behind certifications are, screw that crap, seriously) - had to migrate to newer server operating systems and the old version wasn't officially supported running on the newer OS version.

I'm not generally a violent person, but the people responsible for this major release need to be put out of their misery for their own benefit and those of everyone else's life they might ruin by working on some other project. And by put out of their misery I mean locked up at Guantanamo and waterboarded every day until they hang themselves with rope made by their own hairs.

Here are some of the fun things that happened. I'm not entirely sure anyone that isn't Malcador is going to appreciate the sheer insanity, so feel free to skip ahead, I'll just leave them in a spoiler tag:

 

• The underlying table structure changed to much the supplier wrote tens of thousands of lines of upgrade scripts. Some of which were SQL statements that for no real reason depend on each other but execute within their own little transaction, querying tables that you might not even have in your database because not having licensed a module means not seeing the tables of that module in the ORM but they don't exist in the database itself. Cue SQL statement error, the transaction rollback only works for the statement that failed, but it is in the middle of a five thousand lines of code upgrade insanity that's being cobbled together but insane spaghetti terror code that is so obtuse that not even a five year old bipolar autist on crack could come up with.
• Endless looping in a batch job simply because someone decided to loop from 1 to maxof (int64) + 1 or a secondary break condition, causing a wrap around instead of an exception if the secondary break condition is never met.
• Gathering a set of data with records that need to be fixed for tables where changes to the framework mean possible unique index violations, only to miss adding the counter variable and never finding the records properly.
• Not having a working fix code for unique index violations even if the data gathering would have worked (well no wonder they never found that particular problem during testing).
• Supplying you with an upgrade pre-processing project that you supposedly should simply add to your production environment and follow the points on the checklist step by step. Except actually importing the project breaks item #9 on the list which you need to do before importing the project in the first place. It even says so in the manual. At the very end.
• Project contains a large number of batch jobs that have no error handling. If one fails you have no option to only repeat those that failed or are waiting on dependencies. We had to fix that ourselves after trashing our testing environment. Because the upgrade jobs also don't check if their work is done already. Remember, you're supposed to run these nuggets of good programming on your live environment. Since they take a good while to complete the official instruction is doing that while the users go about their daily business.
• Needlessly changed the way the file framework classes deal with garbage collection and file handle release. Meaning if you followed the guidelines of the previous version you're now left with error free code that only releases opened files once the running thread has finished executing. Good fun if you want to do something with the file you've just written. Oh, and nah, don't think you'll be getting decent error message out of it. It simply tells you the file is missing.
• Updating a record within a transaction with optimistic locking enabled now invalidates the record cursor you've gotten from the ORM. Worked fine before, doesn't cause any warnings but fun runtime errors you've probably tried to dealt with by catching the exceptions (good luck finding that). Meaning you need to potentially reread records that can't possibly have been updated in the meantime just because.

But none of these are nearly as bad as the last one. Kept me awake for days chasing ghosts.

The system consists of a client and a server component. There's one sort of code you write and it can run in the client or on the server - server side code gets optimized for execution time (the difference is ridiculous honestly, server side code execution is faster by a factor of a thousand). The server thread also handles batch processing.

So here's the fun part. In the client - and up until now server side - array assignments were by value. Meaning if you had one array and assigned another one to it it simply copied the values of the second array onto the first. A lot of the time we simply reset array variables by having an empty array variable. That worked fine. Also because arrays on the client are always set to their detault zero value (empty strings for strings, 0 for integers, 0.0 for floating points, 01.01.1900 for dates, etc.)

In fact it still works fine client side.

Except for some retarded reason that someone needs to pay for in this particular version array assignments in the server thread are handled by reference. They... just copy the pointer over. And as if that wasn't bad enough if you don't actually assign zero values to your entire array you have unallocated pointers flying around that don't even cause any compiler warning, or proper null pointer exceptions because they're not always null.

We save telephone numbers in array fields, for instance. So by "resetting" our phone numbers with an empty array while running in the server thread we got a mixture of:

• Phone numbers for all concerned parties being the same, which was the best case scenario, the "reset" simply made every array point to the same space in memory.
• Garbage from random memory areas being written into the database.
• Strange intermittent null pointer exceptions (not entirely sure what causes those).
• Hard crashes due to access violations.

Fun to debug, because obviously the moment you debug something it starts behaving like it should. Can't debug server side code without it defaulting to client side behaviour.

Gah.

Edited February 10, 2020 by majestic
added spoiler tag

[Gorth]

19 minutes ago, majestic said:

Here are some of the fun things that happened.

  Reveal hidden contents

• The underlying table structure changed to much the supplier wrote tens of thousands of lines of upgrade scripts. Some of which were SQL statements that for no real reason depend on each other but execute within their own little transaction, querying tables that you might not even have in your database because not having licensed a module means not seeing the tables of that module in the ORM but they don't exist in the database itself. Cue SQL statement error, the transaction rollback only works for the statement that failed, but it is in the middle of a five thousand lines of code upgrade insanity that's being cobbled together but insane spaghetti terror code that is so obtuse that not even a five year old bipolar autist on crack could come up with.
• Endless looping in a batch job simply because someone decided to loop from 1 to maxof (int64) + 1 or a secondary break condition, causing a wrap around instead of an exception if the secondary break condition is never met.
• Gathering a set of data with records that need to be fixed for tables where changes to the framework mean possible unique index violations, only to miss adding the counter variable and never finding the records properly.
• Not having a working fix code for unique index violations even if the data gathering would have worked (well no wonder they never found that particular problem during testing).
• Supplying you with an upgrade pre-processing project that you supposedly should simply add to your production environment and follow the points on the checklist step by step. Except actually importing the project breaks item #9 on the list which you need to do before importing the project in the first place. It even says so in the manual. At the very end.
• Project contains a large number of batch jobs that have no error handling. If one fails you have no option to only repeat those that failed or are waiting on dependencies. We had to fix that ourselves after trashing our testing environment. Because the upgrade jobs also don't check if their work is done already. Remember, you're supposed to run these nuggets of good programming on your live environment. Since they take a good while to complete the official instruction is doing that while the users go about their daily business.
• Needlessly changed the way the file framework classes deal with garbage collection and file handle release. Meaning if you followed the guidelines of the previous version you're now left with error free code that only releases opened files once the running thread has finished executing. Good fun if you want to do something with the file you've just written. Oh, and nah, don't think you'll be getting decent error message out of it. It simply tells you the file is missing.
• Updating a record within a transaction with optimistic locking enabled now invalidates the record cursor you've gotten from the ORM. Worked fine before, doesn't cause any warnings but fun runtime errors you've probably tried to dealt with by catching the exceptions (good luck finding that). Meaning you need to potentially reread records that can't possibly have been updated in the meantime just because.

But none of these are nearly as bad as the last one. Kept me awake for days chasing ghosts.

The system consists of a client and a server component. There's one sort of code you write and it can run in the client or on the server - server side code gets optimized for execution time (the difference is ridiculous honestly, server side code execution is faster by a factor of a thousand). The server thread also handles batch processing.

So here's the fun part. In the client - and up until now server side - array assignments were by value. Meaning if you had one array and assigned another one to it it simply copied the values of the second array onto the first. A lot of the time we simply reset array variables by having an empty array variable. That worked fine. Also because arrays on the client are always set to their detault zero value (empty strings for strings, 0 for integers, 0.0 for floating points, 01.01.1900 for dates, etc.)

In fact it still works fine client side.

Except for some retarded reason that someone needs to pay for in this particular version array assignments in the server thread are handled by reference. They... just copy the pointer over. And as if that wasn't bad enough if you don't actually assign zero values to your entire array you have unallocated pointers flying around that don't even cause any compiler warning, or proper null pointer exceptions because they're not always null.

We save telephone numbers in array fields, for instance. So by "resetting" our phone numbers with an empty array while running in the server thread we got a mixture of:

• Phone numbers for all concerned parties being the same, which was the best case scenario, the "reset" simply made every array point to the same space in memory.
• Garbage from random memory areas being written into the database.
• Strange intermittent null pointer exceptions (not entirely sure what causes those).
• Hard crashes due to access violations.

Fun to debug, because obviously the moment you debug something it starts behaving like it should. Can't debug server side code without it defaulting to client side behaviour.

Gah.

Ouch... feel your pain mate. I do ERP systems for a living (no, not Erotic Role Play, I wish) and recognize some of the things in your laundry list of misery.

 

Worst upgrade I did took 5 days and 5 nights for the SQL scripts to finish the data conversion. Mind you, their old system was probably 10 years past it's "best by date"

 

tl;dr; the upgraded system worked like a charm once completed, but we did three complete test upgrade runs to get a feel for the timing and then scheduled the work over a weekend plus the days before and after where it would be least inconvenient for their operations.

 

[Malcador]

I am beginning to hate SaaS as I've been reduced to a cron job. Worst of all is people who have no authority bossing me around.  Next person who says "That'll be great, thanks!", is going to get punched by me once I find airfare.