Write Some ****ing Code

[regexcellent]

That lambda syntax is far worse than any of the abortions I've seen from perl's $_ variable.

[loinburger]

At my last job I was told to write the World's Worst Code. The grand idea was to let users upload youtube videos from our site (at the time they could only link to existing videos). Management's terrible idea was to have users upload a video to our servers, after which we'd upload the video to the company's youtube account. I explained that this meant that users would be able to upload copyrighted porn to our youtube account, which would get us banned in short order. Management said that would never happen, because Magic. I found a post on the youtube api blog that said that management's idea was terrible (in addition to users uploading copyrighted porn, they would also exceed our account's quota if the site was popular enough); in addition, the blog said that youtube provides a front end solution that lets users upload videos to their account from our website (bypassing the intermediate upload to our servers), after which the uploaded video would be put in an admin queue on our account so that an admin could review videos and add them to the appropriate playlist(s), meaning that if users uploaded copyrighted porn then their account would be dinged, not ours. Management responded by ignoring the quota issue, and saying that the copyrighted porn issue wasn't a problem because we'd pay people to monitor our account 24/7 to remove copyrighted porn before youtube could ding us. I objected that the admins wouldn't be able to recognize copyrighted material - management said "well, they'll just have to try really hard."

Part of the reason that management was being so idiotic was that one of the managers had written some proof-of-concept Ruby code a few years ago that implemented the terrible youtube upload idea, and he didn't want his work to go to waste (apparently being unfamiliar with the concept of a sunk cost). This included stipulating that I use version 2 of the youtube upload api instead of version 3, because he used version 2 a few years ago. The other part of the reason was that management had this retarded idea that the company would own content that users uploaded to our account; I explained that this was hilariously wrong, but was ignored.

Fortunately, the manager who wrote the proof of concept code was too stupid to figure out how to renew our youtube OAuth tokens that had expired sometime after he wrote his proof of concept code, so the terrible code never went into production.

In hindsight, I'm surprised it took the company this long to go bankrupt. On that note, they're now laying people off. If they'd laid off the incompetent people months ago in order to be able to afford to pay the competent ones then maybe the company could have stayed afloat, but at this point the competent people have all quit.

[Aeson]

You could have just used RedTube and not had to worry about the porn issue.

[loinburger]

Then some joker would have uploaded a non-pornographic video and gotten us booted from RedTube

[loinburger]

We're putting together a lawsuit against the board members of the company I just quit, allegedly they broke some labor laws - I don't know the specifics, nor do I want to know the specifics since they'll just aggravate me. All I've been doing is documenting my email and code submissions in case the board tries to claim something like that they don't owe me two months' salary because I quit at the exact same time that the company stopped paying everybody's salaries; when the time comes I'll sign something that says "yeah, the company screwed me over, please add my name to the lawsuit and give me a hundred bucks if we win."

[loinburger]

Suit's been filed, the lawyers figured out a way to add the CEO and CTO as defendants - they've got money, whereas I doubt there's any money in the corporation. The CTO is asking for more time to pay our salaries, but I don't know where he expects the money to come from - if they weren't able to get a loan/investors three months ago then they're not going to be able to get a loan/investors now.

[Hauldren Collider]

The implosion of your ex-employer has a surreal beauty to it. I understand it's very frustrating for you and I empathize and sympathize but you can't deny it's a little hilarious.

[loinburger]

Yeah, nobody (except maybe the executives) would have predicted this a few months ago. All of a sudden we just went broke.

[loinburger]

It also appears that the executives are still in denial about the company's implosion, even after being sued.

[Hauldren Collider]

You have to run a business like it'll survive right up until the very moment that it drops dead.

[loinburger]

One thing that this has taught me is to be more diligent in my job search. It used to be "apply to jobs that look interesting and that I'm qualified for, if I hear back from them then see if they're a good fit." Now it's "if I hear back from them then do a bit of research to see if they're still going to be in business next year." For example, I applied to an online bank - the job sounded interesting and I was qualified for it. When I heard back from then about an interview I looked into them some more and discovered that within the past year they'd been bought by a Spanish bank, and Spain now has a reputation of having terrible banks, so I turned them down for the interview.

[Hauldren Collider]

IIRC Capital One is the closest thing to an online-only bank that really exists. (It has branches but most of its customers are strictly online)

[Lorizael]

ING was doing the online only banking thing before Capital One.

[Lorizael]

Oh, right. ING in the US is Capital One.

[My Wife Hates CIV]

ABAP is pretty much all I do now... a little C (only 16 bit) for unix stuff... QBASIC still good for Novell (shell command). it's unreal how much they pay for these skills.... and all I do is hang at home and maintain the buzz and post here