That’s not the scary part, it’s a fortune 500 international company whose customers could die if the product didn’t work…

They did it with ps3 also although in research to make sure I was no mis-remembering I found out I was wrong. It was 33rd fastest super computer not #1.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster

I heard at one point in time the fastest super computer in the world was a cluster of 900 ps3. It was cheaper then buying a single computer and in the beginning of the ps3 era you could easily format and run Linux on them.

I once married a nice piece of meat… It was a mis-steak

This isn’t everyone but it’s partially the Peter principal… Basically people get promoted till they are incompetent.

Let’s say you run a manufacturing plant. You have a team of 10 people but 1 is far better. They are quicker and cause less mistakes so you decide to promote them to team lead.

They are a good team lead. They share knowledge and help out in between so you promote them supervisor.

They are a decent supervisor, monitoring the workers, good communication etc. You promote them to manager.

They suck as a manager. Can’t keep track of inventory, quality is slipping, quantity produced per day is dropping. You can’t really demote them that’s not really a thing in most companies. You can either stick with a crappy manager or fire them. Either way you lost your best operator. To make it worse they have “manager” on their resume now so a lot more likely to get another manager position at a different company where they will also suck.

To really blow your mind… Even bacteria do it to a certain extent… https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quorum_sensing

That’s not even code grief…

Two examples that were far worse:

1. My last company wanted software developers. They offered to send me to code boot camp and give me a promotion. The boot camp was primarily python. I complete and get the promotion. New manager tells me the code base I’ll work on is actually c… Umm ok. New manager retires a week later. I spend a few weeks basically teaching myself c. New manager is assigned. He tells me I should basically assist the senior Dev, ok no problem. Find out the code base is actually c#… Should be doable it’s c based atleast. It’s c# framework 4.8 based on winforns… No one in the building had heard of a unit test…the code was released to production on December of '23. Oh and yeah the senior Dev then announced he was retiring. There are no other c# programmers on the team.

2. I told this story before recently. On a separate c# code base the “login” function had hard coded credentials in the source, which checked if they existed in a local sql database table with one entry(the hard coded values) and then verified the returned value for “password” was >= than 5. It then logged you in. Didn’t check if the password was correct or even the correct length just that the return of the select statement was greater than or equal to 5 characters… Just for fun remember that false is 5 characters 😂

Like I said on the response it’s like six on one hand half a dozen on the other just with poor math skills

Yeah I get that but it’s has some meaning. Like it could be the number of some sport star or a reference to some show with a hero team with 67 in the name or could be even darker like with the number 88…

Ah like “six on one hand and half a dozen on the other” but purposely with bad math?

I’m getting old, what is 6/7?

I actually find the opposite is true. I don’t mean it’s bad but you get much better results with some basic starting point.

For example at my last company we had a database which for a VERY small example had a table with device serial, test type, test result(pass/fail), and an ID to another table. For each test in the other table there was a series of rows with that id which had all the details of test. For example unit 123 might be circuit board with 5 test points testing voltages at various points, all tested at one test station.

So you would go into table 1, select all lines with serial 123 and test type “electrical test”, copy the test ID, go into table 2 and select all results for that ID.

One day my boss sent me a list of 500 serials and told me to pull all the details and present it in a table.

Doing that manually would be hours. So people with some sql knowledge might recognize you could use a sub query. Problem being the list sent to me was just a table copied and sent over teams. Would probably take atleast half an hour to copy that into ssms and correct all the formatting to be valid sql.

I wrote a script that pulled the details for 1 serial using a sub query and pivot the results , copied that and the list of serials into chatgpt and asked it to modify the query to include all the serials in the table in correct sql format. It worked great( I got results for 500 unique serials and a test of a random 10 of them got the same results). It took maybe 5 minutes.

Now trying to get chatgpt to do that from scratch would be painful but with some idea of structure of data, an idea of what I wanted to do and an example to follow it worked wonderfully.

I want to make a joke about semicolon vs semi in your colon but I respect people regardless of their sexual preferences

I forgot a semi-colon in my script… Never did it try to introduce me to God

Technically it’s after 4pm yesterday where ever you are…

Look, can I ask a favor? Can you take that, package it, and put it on npm so I can use it in my project?

Well you gotta admit a place with bluegrass isn’t paradise… It’s probably Kentucky!

Honestly it works. The act of vocalizing your thoughts sometimes gives you answers. Doesn’t need to be a toddler, the classic is a rubber duck I knew someone who had an action figure of iron man. He would tell people he struggled with a problem he would just ask Tony stark.

I don’t know, the number of problems I figured out quickly by describing the logic to a toddler…

Why does the headline have nothing to do with content?