The Water Cooler

9:24 AM

Really? That sounds terrible

11:57 AM

@Magisch care to guess which company it was that gave me the stroke? You dodged a bullet on that one.

1:03 PM

Looks like the "automated my job" guy decided he doesn't want to listen to us. Just another person looking for someone to tell them what they're doing is okay.

@DavidK Everyone gets their comeuppance eventually

Although OP strikes me as not nice, I hope the company decides against pressing charges

Yeah, you want someone to learn their lesson, but you also don't want to wish ill on them and their family.

I don't want a single father to go to jail and get his kid put up for adoption over something so silly

Agreed

But guessing from how ruthless and vindictive some companies are, I can see it happening

1:14 PM

I'm also not a fan of his mini rant against SE in his update, but I'm not sure how to properly edit it

Probably expected reassurance and a pat on the back

Got some of the less nice things that could be a result of this instead.

I'm half surprised there hasn't been a flounce moment yet

@motosubatsu flounce moment?

when a poster doesn't like the responses and declares that they are leaving or want their account/question deleting etc

Ah, yeah, he basically did that in his Update to the question

1:40 PM

That updated really lowered my opinion of him

Q: Is there a limit to number of answers

yeah just read that and it is indeed a bit of a flounce

and I'd agree with you @angarg12 it doesn't paint a good picture of him particularly

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This question has 18 answers and counting. Is there a limit to number of answers. If not should there be a limit?

discussion

Q: How can I deal with troublesome Professional Engineer?

2:03 PM

@DavidK Perfect example of a flounce. This one did NOT like what she got as answers

115

I currently manage a team of quite a few engineers in Canada. Things normally run smoothly, but we've had a serious problem with a senior engineer as of late. This engineer is the sole engineer on our team with his Professional Engineer (P.Eng.) designation, and we depend on him to evaluate secu...

professionalism conflict unprofessional-behavior conflict-resolution

GRR

T-SQL View is somehow reporting 78455 instead of 78475 records

This view has 19 joins of various qualities and I have to debug it now

@Magisch welcome to the 8th circle of hell

@Magisch @RichardU I know that pain all too well... in fact I have a room on permanent reservation in that circle

@Magisch if you want a second pair of eyes I'm happy to assist

@motosubatsu Thanks for the offer but the tables are financial and privacy related data

@motosubatsu ever have to debug code written by someone who was fond of single character variables?

2:08 PM

and I have to track down the fault in the data and SQL

You can't do anything if I just give you the SQL query

I do this in SQL:

`select o.*, e.name, e.entrydate FROM orders AS o INNER JOIN employees AS e ON orders.representative_id = employees.entry`

@Magisch no worries :)

@RichardU yep... although it's a toss-up between that and long, obfuscated variable names as to which is more painful to deal with

@motosubatsu ah yes, the old "Let me write this so that I am the only one who understands it and therefore can't be fired" technique. It never ends well

@Magisch the SQL/DBA Nazi in me sees that and it makes my teeth itch

@RichardU Ever tried to debug an another-apprentice-project 200MB large ms access application that is so bad from coding style that the other devs have flat out refused to touch it

@motosubatsu curious, what's wrong about it?

@RichardU especially for the poor sod (often me!) who ends up having to deal with it going forward

2:13 PM

se.rit.edu/~tabeec/RIT_441/Resources_files/…

I'm a novice in TSQL so I may aswell start learning proper habits

How To Write Unmaintainable Code
Ensure a job for life ;-)

You see but I'm a lazy sob, so I write code that I don't have to re-analyze if I come back to it at some point

@Magisch I did muddle through, and reverse engineer something written in Excel that took 10 hours to process, and essentially bricked the machine that was running it.

Myself in 6 months is just about as knowledgeable about that code as some complete stranger

2:14 PM

1) you alias the table/views but then write the full name out in the joins 2) the * operator is fine in dev or quick scratchpad queries but is a big performance no-no in production code

@Magisch laziness is a virtue for programmers

@motosubatsu How would I alias the tables instead of in the FROM statement

@angarg12 that usually results in the program getting scrapped, the employee getting canned, and a new project coded by someone else

also and this one is a personal bugbear but I hate seeing inconsistent use of capitalisation in the SQL keywords

i.e. "select" and "INNER JOIN"

personally I'm an all-caps_for_the_sql_bits kinda guy

but then I am autistic and have mild OCD so you can probably ignore me on that one :)

@Magisch my main frustration with VBA is testing it is very, very cumbersome

2:17 PM

@Magisch it's not that you're aliasing them wrong - it's that you aren't using the alias where you can:

SELECT o.*, e.[name], e.entrydate FROM orders AS o INNER JOIN employees AS e ON o.representative_id = e.[entry]

@enderland the curse of VBA is that any idiot can use it, and does.

(is it wrong that formatting the query as I would actually made me feel better ?? I think I need help! :D)

@motosubatsu ah that

actually a typo

it just helps with readability

I usually do that

But I didn't want to post an actual query in here

2:19 PM

good man.. now I don't have to hunt you down and exact SQL justice :)

seeing as most of them encapsulate 20+ fields and 5+ joins each

Personal pet peeve for VBA: programmers who don't use "Option Explicit"

@RichardU I can't without option explicit

@RichardU amen to that! also applies for anything that's "classic" VB based

It just ignores errors and does stupid stuff instead if I don't put option explicit

makes stuff take 3 times as long as it should

I don't want the program to try and make sense of my typos, it should tell me I have a typo

2:20 PM

when I see some code without it I just know that the person who wrote it can't code

@Magisch yep. I had to troubleshoot code without option explicit. My first thing was to put it in, my second was to try to compile it, then figure out how the variables were being used.... MUST CONTROL FIST OF DEATH

> On Error Resume Next

@motosubatsu yep, if it's not there, you know you're in for a world of hurt

how do you even troubleshoot code without option explicit

It doesn't tell you anything

It just does crap with the code then

@enderland with the caveat that the person didn't immediately set a variable = to Err

2:22 PM

back when I could stomach answering VBA questions I often started answers with "if you had used option explicit this would have been a compile error"

Oh, a nasty thing about arrays in VBA is that if it's not initialized, it MIGHT return an error, or just return a lbound of -1. My check on arrays always checks for an error and lbound of -1

@enderland I was looking for a nice holiday job a while before something small to supplement my income

I had an interview with a friend of my aunt who makes VBA based software that scans court homepages and formats the legal decisions into something a publisher can release

His entire codebase was a mesh of word, access and excel applications all daisy chained together via calling each other

No option explicit, over 400.000 lines of code

@Magisch the only way to troubleshoot VBA if there's no option explicit is to either step through it, or go back to the old mainframe way, setting alerts in the code

He was the only guy with the faintest clue how it worked

I mean I don't knock it the guy was a highschool dropout intern for the publisher who started writing this early vba thing and now he's been doing it for 15 years and has kept earning the sweet sweet 150 eur/hr consultant money

and he's nearly irreplaceable.

Q: Is it unethical to quit a job soon after receiving my annual bonus?

@Magisch Generally those subhuman trolls that "code" that way take one of two approaches to "troubleshooting" 1) change random things until it works 2) add MOARR CODE!!!1! or possibly a combination of those two if they are extra "talented"

Masked Man

2:30 PM

Possibly hitting HNQ within the next 1 hour.

4

My current company has announced that the annual reviews will take place in the next 2 weeks. This means in the next 2 weeks, I'll most likely receive a bonus as it happens every year. I have received a job from another company, and they want me to start working for them at the end of July (abo...

ethics bonus

sorry... I've inherited a few shitty VB-related codebases over the years and it makes for a cranky moto

@motosubatsu I feel your pain

@MaskedMan I did that the last time I quit a job lol

I quit after about a 2 week company vacation, the bonus, and getting a years worth of health savings account contributions...

I actually quit a previous job pre-bonus but notice period was long and was still there when bonuses were determined - I honestly didn't expect to get it but my lovely boss made sure I got paid it, as she pointed out it was for the hard work I had done over the last 12 months, not for future work (that I obviously wouldn't be doing)

Masked Man

2:48 PM

@enderland I came close to doing that, it was an internal transfer though. I initiated it shortly before the annual appraisal. The grapevine told me that in such cases, the employee is given an "average" rating and can forget about the bonus. I did not care about that anyway, but eventually I got an "above average" rating and also the bonus.

@enderland Did they mind at all? Was the HR person miffed?

@Magisch well my boss was in a different country and a different office entirely lol so I have no idea ;)

I found the SQL script bug, btw

turns out someone misused the order processing instructions table to store improvement suggestions from employees and didn't tell anyone that they had to filter out all records that had a specific column set

@RichardU Fortunately for my company, I've been here long enough that I'm having to maintain legacy code that I originally wrote. Gives me a much better appreciation for how to write actually maintainable code.

ahh PEBKAC

3:02 PM

@Magisch user error, hit user and continue.

@enderland Rubberduck

@Kaz that didn't exist when I was actively doing VBA ;)

        Public Function IsAllocated(ByRef varArray As Variant) As Boolean
            '/ Given a Variant:
            '/ Check that it is an array
            '/ Check that it has assigned Bounds in at least the first dimension

            On Error GoTo CleanFail:
            IsAllocated = IsArray(varArray) And Not IsError(LBound(varArray, 1)) And LBound(varArray, 1) <= UBound(varArray, 1)
            On Error GoTo 0

        CleanExit:
            Exit Function

        CleanFail:
            On Error GoTo 0

@Kaz I hate using variants

I'd rather be clear with what I'm assigning to what

@Magisch I've had bad experiences mixing variant and non-variant VBA arrays.

And there are a few things I can do with a variant array that I can't do with a typed array.

So I have a coding rule that all arrays are variant arrays.

3:14 PM

I almost never use any variants

I use python. everything's a variant!

I'm explicit in every definition and maintain a pretty tight control about my typing because every time I do not something breaks

well except in JS because JS doesn't really do static typing

4:11 PM

@SoylentGray damn you for linking that private beta

SoylentGray

4:45 PM

@enderland In my defense there were 4 questions when I linked it

beside think of it for what it is a place we can trash i mean migrate all of those questions that the community thinks should be on topic but we know is not.

Oh crap thats one of those things I am supposed to think but not say huh?

Masked Man

Whoa! That repcap came out of nowhere. Took less than 2 hours, and it is my fastest repcap so far.

2 hours ago, by Masked Man

Possibly hitting HNQ within the next 1 hour.

SoylentGray

7:45 PM

yeah thinking we need a bigger HNQ penalty...

Or if they could just give us a way to protect from HNQ so we can prevent bad questions from ever getting on it