Developers, what are some of the craziest things you seen or heard about?

That's when you know the problem is out of your hands

 

I guess this guys well read in quantum physics

You'd probably have a better career taking this stuff into books and on stage. Plenty other people have!

 

We prefer Quantum Mechanics, and I suppose one of the field theories of QFT could be applicable in "IT"s pseudo-world

 

Here's something that suits quite well on topic

 

LOL, my Project Manager posted that outside her office last week. So true! (i dunno about the programmer part....but i digress )

 

Funny you should mention that, since it apparently watched enough Discovery Channel to make a few connections without knowing what it's talking about. Anytime I brought up physics-related issues with small objects and high frequencies causing unstable or near-singular matrices, the conversations would carry on in strange ways...
For example --
It : "But isn't that a good thing? Because it means we can have black holes in the game. That would be just terrific what with Hitler creating black holes and stuff."
Me : "D'oohhhh... Shoot my monkey... Not... that... kind of singularity."
It : "Oooh... but... then --"
Me : "And how did Hitler come into the picture?"
It : "Well, that doesn't matter... so it's like a quantum singularity, then?"
Me : "Do you even know what that is?"
It : "Sure, it's like the single things and the quantums become the thing."
Me : "Ummm... right... that's exactly it. But that's not what I'm talking about either. And no, there's no connections here to 'quantums' and Hitler."
It : "Ooooohhhh... 'Quantum Hitler'... I like it, I like it."
Me : *sigh*~ "Oh, boy..."
It : "It sounds all futuristic, but it's like blending the old with the new. Like a flying Harley-Davidson."
Me : "Yes, that's exactly what 'Quantum Hitler' is... a flying Harley. How about you write up a design doc about that and post it on the server so everyone can see it?"
It : "Great. I'll do that right now."
Me : "Yes... and I'll get back to work."

And yes, that is where the handle "ShootMyMonkey" came from, though this example wasn't the first time I'd uttered it at that job (though I'd never used it until I had that job). I'll give the creature some credit, though... I wouldn't have expected it to have the brain power to connect "singular" with black holes.

Also, it very frequently tried to pretend it knew how to code (supposedly to try and get on the good side of us programmers) by finding various code and scripts on the web and printing them out claiming that he wrote them. The best part is not only is it painfully obvious that the creature doesn't understand any of the concepts used in the source (e.g. bitmasks, arrays... types), but it doesn't even bother to change any of the comments, including the names of the original authors. So there will be code from some random guys, and even some people whose names we're all aware of.

Example case --
Me : "You wrote this?"
It : "Yeah."
Me : "You...?"
It : "You bet."
Me : "So why does it say 'Daniel Vollmer' right there?"
It : "Oh, that's just an alias I use when I put code online."
Me : "And I guess that goes as well for those other cases with the names 'Mark Kilgard' and 'Dave Kylie' and 'Thomas Pytel' on them"
It : "Yep."
Me : "Uh huh... And the reason for all these aliases?"
It : "Well, you know, it's just so when these things show up online, y'know... If I used my real name... everybody would think 'Oh, this big millionaire is wasting his time writing code like a common citizen' and all."
Me : "..............................."
It : "I even use multiple ones so people think it's more than one person, y'know. I don't ... y'know... ... want them to get the wrong idea ... y'know? "
Me : "Okay, why are you winking? That's creepy..."

 

How did it get to be a millionaire?

 

The creature made a lot of outlandish claims about starting from nothing, but based on some of the things that it seems to feel are worth bragging about, some of the stories told via other family members, and the fact that it never got its stories straight, and the fact that some of its stories are actually impossible (e.g. washing plates and silverware at McDonald's -- which somehow later became IHOP)... Everybody is actually more than certain that the creature inherited its wealth.

Also realize that the very nature of its construction company is such that they underbid a project to get the contract, and when they exceed the figures, they make it look as though it was the city's mistake on the original spec, and thereby sue the city for far more than the difference in cost making it sound as if things have to be done over again when they really don't. Pretty much something that I'd think every construction company does every so often.

What I really love about all the attempts the creature makes to pretend it can code is that it will often look at our code and ask really stupid questions like...
"I think you guys should just straight up and write the code rather than wasting so much time changing the font colors."
"So why do you guys spend all this time writing the code for these function thingies and then voiding it in the end?"
"How can you void a multiplication? Is that like for blonde girl math?"

 

It's scary. I wonder where such things come from and how many there are in the world? I've heard of incompetant management, but a totally inhuman, alien consciousness is a new one on me,

 

I dont know if I should be scared, but Im getting addicted to that creature-stories. Great Thread.

More, more, more

 

Now I know where they found the role model for "The Office".

During my working life I've been working with two guys that truelly qualified as psychopats, but no one this extreme.
One had some serious complex for being very short, he could pull stories about how females were attracted to him that just made you frown, he could even bet that he could get certain girls to bed when we were out at a restaurant, always failing of course. No self-critisism whatsoever in work or private life. He eventually got sacked.
The other guy was a workaholic entrepreneur that went into some kind hybris mode from time to time, when he thought he could achieve anything and spending plenty of money!!! Every second year he spend some time at a mental hospital, then being normal for some time and then going into hybris mode again. I managed one year at that company, it's a miracle the company still exists, he got some qualities after all I have to admit that.

It's strange that these guys end up in management, but maybe it makes it easier somehow?

Please keep those stories coming ShootMyMonkey!!!!

 

Thinking to myself....

Why do these guys make Zombie and Alien games ? It seems they (it) can make a best-selling game-programmer game, plus a book and a movie too. Get Stephen King to write the foreword.

 

I think I left out the most famous of all the stories -- the one that seems to have spread to several studios. The Octagon story!!

Now do realize that the creature claims to have a B.S. in Civil Engineering from SUNY. Well, when we got to a point of hiring a lot more artists, the programmers got pushed out into a second office attached to the old one, and the concept artists got pushed out into a non-functional kitchen attached to the programmer office (which itself happened to have a door leading directly into the ladies restroom for the office building on that floor). Well, this second office just happened to have 5 walls. The creature, thinking that it is rather peculiar for a room to have 5 walls, and decided to comment...

It : "Oh... 5 walls... so it's a... uh... sectagon... no, wait a... uh... octagon."
Physics Guy : "A pentagon..."
It : "No, not like the defense thing, I mean the shape."
Physics Guy : "Yeah, it's called a pentagon."
It : "Right, right, the building is, but I'm talking about the having 5 sides."
Physics Guy : "Yeah, it's because it has 5 sides that it's called a pentagon."
It : "That's just a name. The shape is something else -- like the way 3 sides is called a trigon."
AI Guy : "He means that the name of the shape is pentagon. An octagon is 8 sides."
It : "Guys, I have a civil engineering degree. I know what an octagon is..."
AI Guy : "Yeah, it's a stop sign... 8 sides."
It : "A stop sign doesn't have any sides. It's polygonal."
Me : "Huh?!? Octagon is rooted in 'okto' from the Greek... for 8!! And I won't even get started on 'trigon'"
It : "Yes, but this is English! Do you speek'a de Ennnglish??"
AI Guy : "The point is that 5 is 'penta' as in pentagon"
It : "Look. I've got the civil engineering degree, and I'm a millionaire. You guys are nothing more than programmers. If anyone here is qualified to say what an octagon is, it's me."
.
.
.
This went on for about 20 minutes and started to include the artists as well, until finally, the creature, after being proven wrong, threatened to fire everybody and start the project over because it was our job to "blindly agree that an octagon has five sides if I say it does."

A couple of hours later, it just steps in and in the middle of all the keyboard-clacking sounds, it says "So did you know that green is the opposite of purple?"
After a few seconds of silence, I asked the creature, "Well, in what representation? Additive, Subtractive, YUV, Lab?"
Got a blank stare and after a few seconds, it walked away and started printing out porn.

As I went out into the main office for another cup of coffee, I told a few of the senior art boys about the "green opposite of purple" quote... The art director fell out of his chair laughing on the spot, and our lead character artist explained the source. He happened to be working on the texture for one of the alien characters, and happened to be using a purple+green color scheme, and when the creature commented on the choice of color scheme, he replied that they'd show up clearly against each other since green and purple were complementary.

 

Ok, I can't stand it any longer... ROFLMAO
Bro,
You oughta do a book about this shit. There's enough material for at least the "The Hilarity of the Games Industry" VOL. 1, 2 and 3

 

Same here. I am having such a good laugh. Don't just do a book though. Make a game developer adventure game, from interview to making a "Halo-killer"

You seem to have very rich content. I think even a simple, dodgy~ Flash-based game would work. Get Mr. It to autograph the CD and book though. Otherwise I won't buy.

 

Every time one of these little stories occurred, I kept a word-for-word record while I could still remember every word that was uttered. There are plenty of others that didn't involve me or I wasn't around for them, so I have to depend on someone else's memory for those, but again, since they all knew I was keeping track, they would tell me right away while it was still fresh in their minds, maintaining the creature's thick Lebanese accent through it and everything. Things like these are so insane, they stick in my mind vividly enough that after this many years, I can still remember the gestures on people's faces through those moments.

Yeah, as I mentioned, a bunch have talked to me about a webcomic, which I'm seriously considering, but the hard part is the free time.

 

Bleh, forget the comic go "fiction" with the disclaimer: "According to the games industry what you are about to read...never happened."

 

All right, all right... I guess people are waiting for another story...

Might as well tell you guys about before the creature hired any of us. As you've probably guessed by now, the creature is a being of excessive ego and assumes that its wealth is the mark of its capability to do anything. So in the very beginning, it believed that it could make a game on its own without any programming or art staff. Considering that its only knowledge of the game industry at this point was that fact that it had played Return to Castle Wolfenstein, and heard how much money it made. The creature at this point figured -- "Hey, that's easy money! I could do this!" and decided to try and make one, and then realized within 10 minutes that it had no clue what it was doing.

Anyway, the creature decided to go around and pitch its idea to publishers before even hiring anybody. So here's the original game design before any of the rest of us got our hands on it and actually turned it into something with a mild measure of creativity.

You are a 14-year old kid in the distant future. You come home, and after finishing your homework, you decide to crank out a few hours of gameplay in your holodeck. Yes... you have a holodeck in your home. Anyway, there are a number of programs ready to go waiting for you to use, and because it's a holodeck, it allows you to simulate all sorts of games in all sorts of settings. This will range from a WWII setting, to fighting dinosaurs, to a dogfight in spacecraft, a modern-day war on the ground with "energy" weapons...

And then, for the final level, you get to have some real fun by combining all the programs into one jumble -- where you run around on the surface of the sun fighting a boss character, who happens to be Hitler riding atop a T-Rex, which has photon torpedo launchers on either side of its head.

The creature pitched this idea to Microsoft, apparently stressing the importance of the "holodeck" construct and how immeasurably valuable it is to include Hitler in the game... and got the following response from the rep on the phone...
"Your ideas are incoherent, trite, cliche, derivative, they directly rip off other games and movies, and they flat out suck. In fact, we would gladly PAY you not to ever call back."

How do I know this? Well that leads into another story. This involves the fact that the creature had lying around, a pirated copy of the Xbox XDK. The creature thinking that this was actually a legal copy (in spite of the fact that the caption read "contains official leaked documentation"), it meant that we could develop on Xbox. After several weeks of explaining to it that even if it was a legal copy, this alone only meant we had the software -- we didn't have any devkits, and the red tape involved in Xbox development meant signing up as a registered developer and going through formal submission processes and so on.

Well, it decided that I should look into Xbox developer registration, so even though I knew it would be a pointless effort, I did it anyway. Of course, the rep on the phone asked me some questions about the company and the track record and so on... after a little while, the MS rep realized what company I was working for and then uttered in a terrified tone, "Oh my god, you work for that construction guy, don't you? Oooohhhh, no, no, no-ooooo..." And then he proceeded to tell me the whole story of the prior submission.

 

This is a great thread, I approve!

 

ShootMyMonkey, curious as to why you are calling that guy "creature"?