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So this story is from my University days. I was in the 6th semester back then, studying CS.
My University website was pretty shitty. Basically it was one of those old ass website that said "Best viewed in IE8". Anyway, I was snooping about the website, trying to find some news regarding an event.
I logged into my account, and randomly browsed into the leave request portal. This was a basic HTML form where students could apply for leaves from the classes and see the status of the leaves, if they have been granted or not. I noticed that the link to the request portal from the student login welcome page was actually something like http://univ.com/student/index.php/..., here 1234567 was my student ID. Yep, it was hardcore into the page, and sent as a GET request on being clicked. That was their idea of authentication I guess. I change the student ID to someone else's, and it let me login as that person.
Long story short, I wrote a little python script to login as every person from the starting of student IDs, till the end, then submit a leave request with a random dumb reason like "can't come, at the strip club" or "going for sex change operation". What I did not know was that when a request is submitted, a text message is also sent to the student's guardians phone number. I ran the script.
That day, over 1000 parents received text messages from the University saying that their kids have applied for a leave from random date to random date for some retarded reason. It was a blast. Students were talking about how someone had "Hacked" into the system.4 -
Fuck post-it notes.
Oh look, another product manager found his inner child and plastered a wall with a colored arts and crafts project.
Don't misunderstand me, I'm abso-fucking-lutely in favor of connecting with your deep childish nature -- but then at least enter the meeting room like a boss, armed with some creative ideas, really get to work with some fingerpaint, modelling clay, glitter, molly, acid blotters and grape juice for the whole party.
Not only was that project poorly thought out. Not only does the assortment of colored squares contribute nothing to the clarification of ideas. The issue is also that by Monday morning, the meeting room will look like a strip club after an escalated party, floor littered with 60 little neon pink and green slips reeking of desperation, cheap glue and failure.
Now your whole project is on the floor.
OH DIGITAL WHITEBOARD YOU SAY. NOW WE HAVE 10 MANAGERS FIGHTING DIGITALLY OVER VIRTUAL POST-ITS, ON A CLOUD SERVICE COSTING $500/MONTH.
Product managers, just go fuck yourself, I don't care about your kindergarten bullshit processes.
Call me when you manage to pull a workable idea out of your ass, and just draw an SVG diagram with Inkscape, or write your brainfarts into a nicely organized Markdown file.1 -
I tried writing this rant before, but I was (and still am) in too good of a mood so it was lengthy, meandering, and over-specific. so I'll summarize(ish).
summary:
* miscommunication
* working weekends
* incompetence and/or screwy integrations
summary of the summary:
* I can't fix someone else's mess if you don't talk to me!
Summary^3: #TODO: learn telepathy
Shortened rant:
Bossman at work signed up a very lucrative client by promising them something he couldn't deliver because he misunderstood and miscommunicated scope -- anti-fraud, if you've been following my rants.
Their signup (all four...) are screwy and cause issues and nobody knows why. I didn't write the code, have barely even glanced through it, and it uses a third-party (Clover) that's rather screwy.
Bossman has been asking me to do various things concerning the merchant, but has never been around to provide specifics, so I'm left to guess. I've done my best, but due to the aforementioned screwiness, I really have no idea what's going on. I just sort of muddled my way through.
Bossman also asked me, super late on Friday night (after 8:30pm), to rename one of the merchants because there are two with the same name (with different Clover creds, etc.) and that's just confusing. I didn't see the message because late and tired, and he didn't follow up or text/call me until two days later (today, Sunday). I also thought these were strictly for diagnosing and were de-listed. I had no idea the merchant was live and people were actually purchasing things for it. Had I known this I would have freaked out and demanded specifics on Thursday/Friday because wtf? debugging in production? with broken merchants? selling things for real money? scary bad? hello?
Anyway, I didn't see his message until he texted me about it at like 5pm today while I was about 2 hours from my computer. He's understandably frustrated, and I totally don't blame him, but fuck, miscommunication is a serious problem in this company, and that's amazing because it's so freaking small.
But the short version is that I'm likely going to get blamed for all this, Clover screwiness included. Bossman and I set up a call for 10am tomorrow and I'm positive he's going to try pinning it on me. Totally not going to let him, but his social is lv16+ while mine's like. 2 or 3. 😕 I'll see how it goes.
Really though, I should read @rutee07's book and just roast these fuckers.3 -
I just had a boys-out night with my son. Went to some restaurant, found a parking spot in a confusing parking lot (half is more expensive than the other half of the lot, not sure which fee applies to the middle row... confusing), started paying for parking with the app (pays every 15 minutes until stopped).
Went inside, ordered a pizza, some ice cream. Chatting, playing, eating, having fun,... An SMS comes: "You have outstanding fines" and a link to the gov taxes' website.
wtf.. I must have parked in the wrong spot. FUCK! Oh well, it should not be a large fine anyways, it's just for parking....
Click on the link, login with my bank/SmartID creds. Another SmartID dialog pops up asking for a PIN2.
What? PIN1 is for authentication, PIN2 is for Authorization. What am I authorizing...?
Reading through the Auth message: "Paying 2473€ for Boris SomeLastname".
what.....?
Thank God my muscle memory did not kick in and I did not enter that PIN2.
And thank God I know what PIN1 and PIN2 are for.
It would've been one expensive boys-out evening... Even a strip club would've been cheaper.
Stay sharp, guys!
P.S. Later I checked the URL. It used all the right keywords, and it was registered as an .info domain. It was somewhat off, but gov websites trying to be lean do sometimes use some weird ass domains.15 -
It really grinds my gears when new hires just start adding themselves to every fucking slack channel and then start crapping up the channel history with irrelevant chatter.
Business Analysts and Project Managers do not need to be in #developers sending mock-ups to a UI/UX designer for one team, or posting an xkcd strip you found on the internet because you "got it" and you think you are proving that you are one of us by posting it there. This channel isn't a fucking club, its where ALL developers at this company across all teams share tools and practices for us to maintain consistency and best practices and to improve our craft, or to give a heads-up about vulnerabilities.
There is a specific channel for your role, and your project. You don't need to be everywhere and in every conversation. And for fuck's sake, PLEASE stop @someone adding people to these channels just because you think you saw something in there posted by someone else that they should see. You can just fucking share that message directly with that person, or in another channel.8
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