Robert G sends us a WTF from the outside, but I think we can come up with some hypotheses about what actually happened. Robert was traveling by train. For complicated train reasons, the car he was seated on was not actually scheduled to continue with the train he was booked to ride, the replacement can missed its scheduled arrival, and the result was that Robert was left at a station needing to rebook his travel. Now, given that this is in a region of the world with a fairly robust train network, this represented a hiccup of thirty minutes in a many hour trip. Not a particularly big deal. But…
Our submitter Tim C. is back as his bureaucratic nightmare continues. Read Part 1 here. After I'd thrown the WTF Exchange (WTFX) for a loop, they managed to eventually right the ship. But then I faced another hurdle: I had run out of disk space. The software was not live, we were still developing the customer-specific customisations, but I was a bit stuck without a few more gigabytes. , via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:WD_Blue_Hard_Disk_Drive_connected_to_Laptop_via_USB-C.jpg"> The exchange went something like this: "Hey Margritte, I need more disk space."…
Our submitter Tim C. shares his tale of an especially brutal culture clash: I had co-founded a software startup doing stock market surveillance. In the early 2000s, the WTF Exchange (WTFX) was a major customer of ours. We were one part of a major project of theirs, a complete overhaul of their trading engine and IT systems. Compared to our other clients, WTFX was quite bureaucratic. There seemed to be a strong focus on the process, rather than the mission or the result. They were even explicit about this, telling us, "The process is the deliverable." I believe they made that explicit in…
On July 10 2026, a life insurance company called TruStage had a "cybersecurity incident". According to an update posted five days later, when they revealed the incident, they are "continuing to work carefully and urgently to understand the facts, and the company will communicate appropriately as its understanding of the situation evolves." This work, according to their outage page (last updated on September 11th, at the time of this writing), is continuing. Every major business function is listed as "partially available". They have some text explaining that they can't simply turn the system…
I'm not a DNS person, in that I appreciate that it exists but am not up on the inner workings. It solves a lot of problems with dark magic I don't fully understand, and fortunately don't need to. But Lucio noticed something that I do think is interesting, within the scope of the CAA record type. The CAA record started with RFC6844, which was obsoleted by RFC8659. Both RFCs lay out the same core idea: you can add a CAA record to your DNS entries to say, "hey, this domain over here is allowed to issue certificates for me". That's the sort of thing that enables LetsEncrypt to hand out certs, and…
From our anonymous submitter: Having reached the end of the road at a company increasingly swallowed up companies further east which you'd never believe were still afloat, I found myself headhunted for certain specialty software skills. I was reaching the final few years of my expected working span, so I jumped at the chance. The money was (to me at that time) spectacularly good, so I jumped into it. , via Wikimedia Commons" href="https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Time_Is_Life,_1080%C3%971920,_154.35_KB.jpg"> It started when my first day was spent by me being sent home for the weeks it…
Rachel joined a new team which was proudly "metrics driven". When she first met with her boss, Zane, he explained his thinking. "We need to be data-driven to make good decisions, right? We're a manufacturing company. We make widgets. At the end of the day, we need to make the most widgets for the lowest cost of goods sold. So we track that, and that feeds into every decision." The team oversaw an automated production line, which meant the software was a mix of robotics, embedded firmware, high-level web based monitoring tools, and thickets of dreaded PLC code. And because you can't build an…
All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?! With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the World Cup being hosted there, in came the opportunity for local agencies to invest in modernization, with pretty much a blank check to get new services, so long as it was deployed before the end of the World Cup. And so the sales people did what they did best, and went around trying to upsell…
The opposite of meritocracy is kakistocracy: the worst and least-qualified are the ones who rise to the top. Get real familiar with that word, dear readers. I think you'll need it. If anyone can back me up on this, it's our submitter, Jared B: I am a teacher by profession, and worked for a year at an ed-tech company founded by a mechanical engineering professor, Harry. Harry had spent a great deal of time in the 90's developing a C interpreter (yes, you read that right). 30 years later, he remained convinced that his interpreter was the technology of the future, and had founded a company that…
Today's submitter John F. was migrating data from a Microsoft platform to a Microsoft platform, using Microsoft tools. Absolutely nothing could go wrong, right? Right? A few years ago, I was working on a migration. We had sold part of our business, and so we had to extract a whole bunch of customer documents and metadata to provide to the buyer. The documents were stored in SharePoint on-premises, so the first step was extracting the metadata and storing it in a SQL Server database. A colleague had used Microsoft's ETL tool SSIS to get the process started, and it generated a database schema.…
Developing software can't simply be done with a text editor and a compiler. There are a variety of other tools we have to bring to bear that support our efforts and keep the team organized, like say, source control. There are certain tools we all have to use that I would argue, nobody has actually make a version that's any good. Build tooling is one of my go-to examples: there are no good build systems, only build systems that are good enough for this task. Another is ticket/task management. In fact, I'd go so far as to say, there are no good ticket management tools. Amongst the not good…
"You submitted a pull request." Indika was, in fact, reviewing the comments she'd gotten on that very same pull request, when her boss, Bill, walked up behind her. What she didn't understand is why Bill said it like it was an accusation. "Yes?" she replied. "Okay, well, we don't do that here. You're new, so I'll let it slide, but please review the developer guide." Well, Indika had reviewed the developer guide, or at least thought she had. As it turned out, there was the official, company wide developer guide. That's the one she'd read. But Bill maintained his own, for his team. He hadn't…
I moved some things around on my calendar. 4:00 PM today is open. Please come to the executive floor. -Leila For a while I was stunned, staring at the email in front of me. I’d just told my boss I was quitting, refusing a promotion into my recently-deceased mentor Aggie’s shoes. Now, the new head of Human Resources wanted to see me. Me? A Tech Support drone with one foot out the door? Well, she didn’t know that yet, did she? Something in me feared where this might lead. But, Leila had stuck her neck out to rescue me from CEO Gibbs. She seemed like she cared about making things better. I…
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