Poll: Top ten programmer excuses

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2005

Developer's Top 10 replies when code doesn't work...

Which one have you heard the most? I've heard variants of all of 'em, but #6 takes the cake!

Daz · Nov 2005

What about the all time classic 'it works on my machine' ?!

notman · Nov 2005

lol, man, I hear these all the time. I work for a brake company and the hardware and software groups argue all the time. One of the things I always here is, "It must be the hardware." The 'it works on my machine' comes up a lot also.

cholden · Nov 2005

"did you get latest version?"

oXYnary · Nov 2005

or the classic
"Your using it wrong"

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2005

Hahha, heard all those too!

I gotta say I've heard "it works on my machine" quite a few times.

MoP · Nov 2005

Yeah, my top three are:

"It was working yesterday!"
"It works on my machine..."
"It's never done that before..."

monster · Nov 2005

USER ERROR!

AstroZombie · Nov 2005

"Reboot"

Nilium · Nov 2005

As a programmer, I've used each and every one of those. Except #3. That one I can't quite fit into anything...

blankslatejoe · Nov 2005

my favorite was "oh, you're using old tech. we washed our hands of that hours ago."

Mark Dygert · Nov 2005

"thats not a bug, its a feature"

KDR_11k · Nov 2005

"You can just use [complicated workaround that only applies to special cases of what you want to do] instead". That's common on the Blender boards. Want to merge two edgeloops? "Oh, just scale them to 0 on one axis"...

Paul Jaquays · Nov 2005

Where was "Did you check to see if your executable file was read-only?"

... This happened with amazing regularity. Some programmer would do a build and forget to set the exe file to read-only. A writable file isn't copied over in updates.

Rick Stirling · Nov 2005

These days the terminology is "Did you get latest?"

Yes.

"Well, it it works on mine."

It's fucked here.

"And you got latest?"

Yes

"Send me an example file"

Sent

"Hmm...works here...did you get latest?"

YES.

"I'll come round"

.....

"It might be your graphics card..."

...

"Try it now."

Yup, thats working, thanks. What was up?

"Oh, I forgot to check something in"

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2005

LOL!

Yeah.

Rick Stirling · Nov 2005

On Firefox Mac, the poll numbers show, but every bar is exactly the same at 1 or 0. On Safari Mac, it looks great. I dunno if its my Mac or firefox that is the problem.

Nerd Groupie · Nov 2005

You must have the wrong version.

It's never done that before.

That's weird...

Not only are those the ones I hear the most, but the ones I use the most.

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2005

Yeah Rick, weird here too... Firefox PC shows all the red bars at the same short length, but IE PC shows actual bar length.

MoP · Nov 2005

Rick, must be Firefox, because the bars are all 0 or 1 regardless of percentage on my PC, running Firefox. It looks fine in Internet Explorer.

edit: You win this time, Ericwick! *shakes fist*

Rick Stirling · Nov 2005

I just came back to the thread, the bars were fine. I refeshed...and back to tiny.

PaK · Nov 2005

"it's not ouyr fault, max is a turd"

Whenever programmers on my team get an opprtunity to bash max, they take it. it's like it's the 1930's and Max is a minority or something.

-R

Irritant · Nov 2005

I wonder what the coders of FireFox's excuses are for the bars being fucked up? LOL.

As a programmer, I can honestly say 90% of all bugs are caused by stupid end users

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2005

There are some more gems in the comments section of the original page.

hawken · Nov 2005

I always used to get "why do you want it to do that?"

MoP · Nov 2005

Haha, hawken, that's a very good one...

FatAssasin · Nov 2005

Since I'm always messing with tools in ways they weren't meant to be used, I sometimes hear, "How'd you get it to do that?"

Rhinokey · Nov 2005

hmm since its related to this thread and i don't feel like starting a new one, whats some of the coolest/weirdest bugs you've gotten from work produced by your coders,

curently on the switch to max 8 and getting our in house tools for warhammer working, with it , our art tools package has started forming some unique and curious bugs,

my favorite so far, is you have your material eddito open and workign in the games custom shader material, then poof.. al of the info for it disapeers, and the pops up as a rollout in your max command pannel, its still workable, but anoying since you can only see half of its width since the comand panel colums are so narrow,

brian ad a more extreme version of this, where the material info replaced ALL his normal command pannel info.

Eric Chadwick · Nov 2005

Weird. Well we've had nothing quite like that, but we did have a bug awhile back where all the materials would be renamed in capital letters everytime we exported. No biggie, just a little annoying, and made me wonder what else had been changed in the scene.

Jeff Parrott · Nov 2005

Not really just programmers but, "Can you check X in for 5 mins?". Because it seems everyone in the world has a skewed opinion of what 5 mins is including myself. My 5 mins is actually about 20 mins.

TelekineticFrog · Nov 2005

[ QUOTE ]
"it's not ouyr fault, max is a turd"

Whenever programmers on my team get an opprtunity to bash max, they take it. it's like it's the 1930's and Max is a minority or something.

-R

[/ QUOTE ]

OMG! I am so with you on that one. It strikes me considerably because I had a run in just yesterday evening with a programmer who instead of trying a solution I provided, proceeded to bash Max for at least 20-30 minutes. It can be extremely frustrating. I had one time last project where I came into work and sat down to load up a model I was working on to find that all of my data had been deleted from Perforce...not just that model but every model, texture and animation I did for that project up to that point. I nearly started to cry because I was the only one in the office that morning at the time. Turns out a contracted programmer in Germany via VPN had decided to completely restructure the directory tree in Perforce and had moved all of my files offline until he got the new structure completed. Needless to say nobody in the office but our director of technology knew he was doing this and he conveniently wasn't in the office.

I got my work back but it was very disheartening to see all your work go poof over night and not know why. Oh and the time difference with him being in Germany and me being on the East Coast of the US doesn't help. Not cool at all.

MoP · Nov 2005

Argh! TelekeneticFrog, that's really, really sucky!

thomasp · Nov 2005

sounds like you have the wrong flavour of coders. i know that type who likes to bash the program of choice instead of providing a solution.
however at one of my last gigs they had a very capable team of coders and when i had some issues with a rather complex skinning/export job (you know how ugly that can get, no?) i didn't hear the usual "ah, well, no idea what's happening, try it again with less influences/bones/whatever" but more of an "that's not your problem, let us handle it". and voila - next day when i came into work, everything was solved...

danr · Nov 2005

most common response here to a nasty fuckup :

"wow, cool!"

Frank · Nov 2005

I most often get "It works on my machine," which prompts me to go to his office (there's one programmer that says this most often) and repro it in front of him. He usually says something like "Oh, okay, I know what that is," after that.

On our last project I would demonstrate a bug for a different programmer to which he would say "That's impossible." I'd usually respond "Okay, but..." and point to the screen.

Frank the Avenger

notman · Nov 2005

I loved visiting with our programmer and asking him about an issue he was having with his program. I'd ask him, "Can you just do ____?" He would always respond with, "That wouldn't work." Me, "Why not?" Response, "It just wouldn't."
I'd go back to my desk, look up the code, the write it in excel's macro editor (Since we were programming in VB). Then I would present him with the code, "Here, try this." Response, "WOW! That works." Usually it would be one or two lines of code to accomplish what he already had a page of code attempting to do. You'd think he'd listen to me the next time, but sure enough... "That won't work."

Unfortunately, since I was hired to do electronics, my boss wouldn't let me do any coding. Even when we were slow. Guess it's better for me to sit at my desk staring at the walls, than to create useful programs.

hawken · Nov 2005

[ QUOTE ]
Guess it's better for me to sit at my desk staring at the walls, than to create useful programs.

[/ QUOTE ]

you are not alone.

Poll: Top ten programmer excuses

Replies