I’m a programmer. In 2010 I had a boss come up to me and tell me we should start using APIs. He had just read an article about how APIs were the next big thing. Fortunately he had a short attention span and soon wandered off and never mentioned APIs again, and I was able to get back to work on the awesome Blackberry app I was writing.
Where can you take a $3 Uber? If I took an Uber to my next door neighbor’s house it would be more than $3.
I had a boss years ago and I knew everything about his financial situation because he had hired me to trade S&P500 futures with/for him. He had about $20 million in stock, a beach house in South Carolina worth a couple million, and he owned a temp agency that paid him about $40,000 a month, so he was certainly rich by any normal human standards. But he had moved from San Francisco and was friends with a bunch of venture capital types who were all worth more than a couple of hundred million dollars, and it was obvious that his (relative) poverty absolutely burned him to his core. This was why he imagined that day-trading futures was going to be his key to the really big time - he could never see that the brokerages we dealt with were just scamming him.
I cared for it when I could get a filling lunch there for $2.50. That was in 1990.
Should’ve swapped the death’s head for United Healthcare in the second panel.
My weirdest Amazon experience was when I went to Lowe’s and bought a drill bit and a pair of cabinet door hinges, and just looked at cabinet pulls for a minute or two - didn’t buy any or even pick any up. That night, Amazon recommended for me drill bits, cabinet door hinges … and cabinet pulls. I’m assuming that I got linked to in-store footage from Lowe’s, which is creepy but certainly not suprising.
My favorite quote from this movie was “first rule of leadership, princess: everything is your fault!”
I started out with Visual Basic using the Variant type all the time, and even though I was usually just working on one-person projects it was a fucking disaster. You don’t even have to collaborate to see the virtues of strong typing.
It happened because the programmer changed the API from a call that accepted integer values between 0 and 32767 (minimum and maximum wheel speeds) to one that accepted float values between 0.0 and 1.0. A very reasonable change to make, but he quick-fixed all the compiler errors that this produced by casting the passed integer parameters all through his code to float and then clamping the values between 0.0 and 1.0. The result was that formerly low-speed parameters (like 5000 and 6000, for example, which should have produced something like a 20 mph ball with topspin) were instead cast and clamped to 1.0 - maximum speed on both throwing wheels and the aforesaid 125 mph knuckleball. He rewrote his tests to check that passed params were indeed between 0.0 and 1.0, which was pointless since all input was clamped to that range anyway. And there was no way to really test for a “dangerous” throw anyway since the machine was required to be capable of this sort of thing if that’s what the coach using it wanted.
the code they’re testing has painful hardwired dependencies on expensive external resources
I’ve told this story elsewhere, but I had a coworker who wrote an app to remote-control a baseball-throwing machine from a PDA (running WinCE). These machines cost upwards of $50K so he only very rarely had physical access to one. He loved to write tests, which did him no good when his code fired a 125 mph knuckleball a foot over a 10-year-old kid’s head. This resulted in the only occasion in my career when I had to physically restrain a client from punching a colleague.
Nah, it’s a fad.