Shanti’s Dispatches

First off - I love checking out the Daily WTF randomly when I get a chance.

For those unfamiliar with the site — the WTFs usually come from a new programmer entering a job and finding something that makes them go uhh….. what the f*ck??

Some of the WTFs on there are hilarious. A lesson can be learned from almost all of them.

The Josh Workaround breaks the traditional mold of the WTF. Normally the target is a previous programmer who wrote some shoddy code. The hero is a new hire who is thrust into the new situation, discovering the previous coder’s incompetence.

Breaking the WTF Mold

In the Josh Workaround, it was another set of coders and/or management who decided that Josh’sWorkaround was crap.

The new hire soon discovers though that Josh’s Workaround had indeed been addressing some real issues. The fault of the WTF lay not with Josh but whoever decided to take out his code, which was at least attempting to do something about the issues instead of blindly ignoring it.

What we can really learn from the WTF:

• Many coders out there would rather surf/read/participate in forums than actually be coding
• Many coders would rather critique than create (can you imagine how a code review would go with some of the arrogant, think they know-it-all, pricks that post on WTF threads?)
• Many coders love making arbitrary judgements about code without having all the facts in hand. (Oh, this code sucks? Did you stop to ask whether management give them 5 days to work on it or 30 minutes?)
• etc. etc.

Of course many other WTFs can simply be attributed to a mistake, too little experience/education, etc.

The constraint many participants in the WTF forums seem to forget:

And finally a comment from the thread that pretty much sums it up (not all WTF’ers are arrogant pricks):

That’s funny. Arrogant, self-righteous developers who think that their code is 100% perfect and bug free, when in fact it’s not. And to top it off, they forced someone who, from what we’re shown, knew what he was doing to leave the company due to their ignorance. Lovely. I’ve met my fair share of these kinds of buffoons. And for some reason they’re always the ones who stick around with the company.

You can bookmark this, digg this or check the cosmos