IT Bugbears

[pacharan]

What are the things that really piss you off from a technical point of view in your work?

Here are mine:

1. American Dates: They always bite my ass at some point in a project no matter how culture neutral I make my code.
   
2. MS office: For its inconsistency in window management. When you close the main window in Word, only the current document is closed. When you do it in Excel it wants to close all open workbooks.
   
   Also the constant switching between office 2007 and earlier versions is really confusing. Find it hard to find a menu item in any version these days.
   
3. XML Config Files: Just for the sheer needle in a haystack tediousness of them.

[TestMangler]

What are the things that really piss you off from a technical point of view in your work?

Here are mine:

1. American Dates: They always bite my ass at some point in a project no matter how culture neutral I make my code.
   
2. MS office: For its inconsistency in window management. When you close the main window in Word, only the current document is closed. When you do it in Excel it wants to close all open workbooks.
   
   Also the constant switching between office 2007 and earlier versions is really confusing. Find it hard to find a menu item in any version these days.
   
3. XML Config Files: Just for the sheer needle in a haystack tediousness of them.

Irony...........

[amcdonald]

Maintaining someone elses Perl code, if I can get a contract without admiting I'd done Perl I will

[pacharan]

Maintaining someone elses Perl code, if I can get a contract without admiting I'd done Perl I will

Scripting batch files is similarly tedious.

[swamp]

* Anything to do with dates and times.

* Anything to do with automated emails.

* Anything to do with dynamic switches (ie putting code in the database).


Just like how the film business has the "don't work with children or animals" rule.

[Sysman]

Scripting batch files is similarly tedious.

Given a decent scripting language, I quite enjoy doing that.

The trouble is that there are so frigging many of them, and some are lot worse than others.

[alreadypacked]

On one project I had a t-shirt printed

"Data migration and I'm out of here"

They got the hint when handing out the roles, contractor who got the role was let go 6 weeks into the project could not work with the permie in charge.

[Sysman]

Just like how the film business has the "don't work with children or animals" rule.

I like that.

• Yank dates. Digital/DEC never used them, thank goodness, and that was a Yank company.
• AM/PM times. It's one thing to have "user friendly" displays for the end user, but in performance stats packages??? You can't even do a simple sort on a text file with these.
• Times displayed in Yank time zones. Everyone should understand GMT - why should the rest of he world have to keep track of when DST kicks in and out somewhere in the US to interpret a time FFS?
• Excessive use of XML.
• Cruddy apps or routines which insist you have to read a whole file in to get at the contents of the first record.
• Cruddy apps or routines which insist you have to read a whole file in then write the whole file out just to modify the odd byte or two.
• A pet peeve at the moment - apps that assume you want the German version just because your computer is set to a German speaking time zone. I have to assume that some of these would fling Japanese at me if I were in Tokyo, and I can't read Japanese.
• Ditto with web apps who assume the local language based on your IP address.

I'm sure there's more...

P.S. Backup apps which won't let you run more than one operation at a time. There are times you want to do a restore while a backup is in progress, but the app in question won't let you.

[amcdonald]

Just like how the film business has the "don't work with children or animals" rule.

Don't work with children, animals, or service delivery managers (unless you're a midwife)

[SimonMac]

Users?