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What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

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Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#131

Post by BizarroLand »

spookthesunset wrote: post #99
dghughes wrote: post #97

Not sure if this counts but I worked at a small casino and the servers managing the floor could barely function. The payment system was a mess too not just due to technical issues but also from "territorial" issues. The servers were IBM eServers servers old and out of date when they were purchased the warranty was extended multiple times. A Debain cluster for slot machine control, and a database server was also the d…

You did that job for 13 years? Looking back, what would you have done different?

Anything that doesn't involve the red stapler guy is not enough

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#133

Post by BizarroLand »

GNOMES wrote: post #68
stonemetal12 wrote: post #57

A small industrial automation shop, 40 total, 5 software people. The "IT department" was some kid who hadn't worked IT before. Spent most of his time learning how to manage exchange by messing around with our live locally hosted exchange server. Their controls were written in C. The development process was you checked a computer out of the warehouse, installed Windows, then some janky realtime OS addon, visual studio…

Good old sneaker net backups

Honestly, this sounds like the epitome of "If it looks stupid, but it works, it isn't stupid".

Custom IT system, planned out so that any scriptmonkey with enough bananas could figure it out, with robust and redundant backups? That's a dream. any MSP worth their salt would salivate over a contract with that setup.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#134

Post by petee »

My dad used to work at a cable company back in the day, one of his on-call jobs was to ensure the satellite dishes were clear of snow - this was accomplished by a broom duct taped to a 30' pole. It didnt take much snow to kill the signal so this was a critical tool.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#135

Post by danielodievich »

Back in early 2000s, when Avanade was started as a joint venture between Microsoft and Accenture, I was helping them get off the ground. They had a rented Regis office in downtown Seattle with bunches of trestle tables and people just doing all kinds of crazy things trying to bootstrap the company. I was tired of crappy wireless and brought with me a cheap 4 port 10/100 Netgear switch, some consumer grade piece of something that was just laying around. After a few days, someone commandeered this and a couple of my yellow cables and for about a month it ran their public web site from the server in the corner room, with big yellow stickies to not unplug the yellow cables. It was probably the most action this poor little switch ever had.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#136

Post by ethbr0 »

spookthesunset wrote: post #104
ethbr0 wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> instructions that were clearly invented in the typewriter era and then hoisted, kicking and screaming, into the digital age with nary a change Based on experience, any time I see a static number of fields of a specific type on a digital record, I assume it's because that's how many blanks there were on the preceding paper form.

You mean the paper form with 10 “blanks” for your address? Thereby ensuring the address would never fit in the space required?

I mean the paper form that assume no more than X things ever need to be in a record. I.e. ICD

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#138

Post by mickeyp »

ethbr0 wrote: post #90
mickeyp wrote: post #40

I have many stories. Here's a fun one. I worked for a company a long time ago that traded with companies all around the world. A lot of their customers were small businesses in rural Africa, South America, etc. and they in turn had local banks they used to facilitate payments to and from. A large number of these banks did not have a reliable internet connection, or if they did, they most assuredly didn't use it for p…

> instructions that were clearly invented in the typewriter era and then hoisted, kicking and screaming, into the digital age with nary a change Based on experience, any time I see a static number of fields of a specific type on a digital record, I assume it's because that's how many blanks there were on the preceding paper form.

It's also because COBOL and languages of that era had fixed widths for most of the "records" they had, for good reasons that many modern programmers are rediscovering every day...

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#139

Post by ethbr0 »

fghorow wrote: post #77
phonethrowaway wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Old isn't janky... hmm... to me janky means duct tape and bubble gum.

Kind of like Docker, you mean?

Someone: Operating systems are too complicated.

Docker: rebuilds virtualized operating system

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#140

Post by poulsbohemian »

dghughes wrote: post #97

Not sure if this counts but I worked at a small casino and the servers managing the floor could barely function. The payment system was a mess too not just due to technical issues but also from "territorial" issues. The servers were IBM eServers servers old and out of date when they were purchased the warranty was extended multiple times. A Debain cluster for slot machine control, and a database server was also the d…

>They ended up laying me off suddenly one day tow hours into my shift after 13 years no explanation.

This is really the key here we all need to remember... its good times right now, but it may not always be good times, so important to remember that regardless of how important our jobs might be in the moment, when the corporate winds change they won't even blink to can us. First time I got laid off I was in the middle of a production fix that was affecting the homepage of one of the busiest sites on the internet. Didn't matter for shit because my number along with that of thousands others got called.

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