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by gryphonshafer 3720 days ago
Just for the giggles, I love hearing wars stories of epic fails to questions like these. Paraphrased, here are some I've personally experienced:

q: If you could wave a magic wand and change anything about the company, what would it be? a: Get rid of all our customers.

q: How many hours did you work last week? a: All of them.

q: How many meetings were you in in the last few days, and how long did they last? a: Most of what I do is meetings.

q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard.

q: Describe your build / deploy process. a: I don't think we have time for that right now.

q: What do you use for a bug / task tracker? a: Email.

q: How would you gague your technical debt? a: What's "technical debt"?
2 comments
vonmoltke 3720 days ago
> q: What do you use for source control? a: We use $NAME but we forbid branching because merging is too hard.

Where I used to work, and the first place I wrote software full-time, we were not allowed to commit code to our system (Synergy) until after our code review. I ended up creating a parallel SVN repository so I could do incremental check-ins.

Don't get me started in merging...

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cableshaft 3719 days ago
I don't think we are supposed to either, but it's never been an issue for our company because there's always shelvesets with TFS, so you can shelve your work at different stages and retrieve it later.

If you're using a DVCS like git, though, that seems silly.

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hackaflocka 3720 days ago
Sadly, not surprising.

This is the state of most of the industry.

Mostly, only companies with cushy government contracts with unlimited time and expense accounts on their hands (think defense) don't want to fire their customers.

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vonmoltke 3720 days ago
Unlimited time-and-materials (T&M) contracts are a rare beast. There is almost always a cap that cannot be exceeded without a renegotiation

As for not wanting to fire the customers, upper management may not want to fire them, but those of us actually doing the work sure did. We hoped they would take their so-called "experts" with them.

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