Mildly Interesting

Cuts both ways however:

It's common to encounter, especially HR Portals, trying to enforce a 'valid' address. Trouble is it's often an American developer and they have no idea about other countries. Here in the UK they like to insist on a 'county ' field for postal address, despite it being over thirty years since postal addresses here even had counties (which didn't match the actual counties but anyway). The drop down list they like to give isn't a list of counties either, it's an out of date list of local authorities, which were never part of anyone's address.

I worked at a place once where we had to use an internally developed form to order supplies. Form checked user name against company active directory (fine) but also checked that surname+first initial was at least 6 characters. No idea why and very resistant to changing it but my surname is 4 characters and a lot of Chinese ones are only 2...

I'll share my story about stupid customers too. In our application we have the option to require an email address or not require an email address for new users based on the customer's preference. So naturally, we have/had a customer that set it to require an email address, but when they took information from their customers they did not actually require them to provide an email address. So for all their customers that didn't actually provide an email address they would enter something like [email protected]. Something to satisfy the field requirement without actually being an email address. No consistency mind you.

This worked fine until we started offering a SaaS version of our software and emails stated being sent from AWS servers. Needless to say, AWS doesn't like it when you have an undelivered rate of like 30% for your emails. It ended up locking a pod out of sending emails for a day which ending up affecting multiple customers of ours.

And naturally, the customer using the fake emails never said anything about it to us beforehand or indicated what type of workforce they actually wanted; which was, "we want our employers to be forced to ask for an email and if the email is required they can't accidently forget to ask because they won't be able to continue in the app until they enter something." Probably a bit more paraphrased at this point since it happened years ago.

We don't expect all entered email addresses to be valid, but come on.

At one job we had a digital form for new user requests. This existed for auditing purposes, but it also helped to collect all the necessary information for the change. I was always impressed at how people managed to fill it out wrong every single time.

For example, I would get a request to update someone's name and they would fail to include the former name or the new name or even enter their OWN name for one of the fields.

What I learned is no system is idiot proof, no form will ever be filled out perfectly, and everything will need manual intervention at some point.

Discussing a person at my org who struggles with the most basic thing: their password

“I don’t know what else to tell them other than that they’re not qualified to have this job.”

I bet it's something like the owner doesn't want to give the shift manager login privileges and just calls them when the price changes.

The manager says "ok but the tv doesn't show that". The owner (from a beach in hawaii) says "I'll do it".

They never do it.

So the manager has to do something.

They probably paid someone to make the menu graphics, and then didn't want to pay more to have them altered.

Me, making an application idiot proof.

Customer, hiring an even dumber idiot, because they can save a buck this way.

Which TMS you in bruh? That universe of data is bat shit crazy.

Dev here - this is something everybody who works with users has to come to grips with. It's like a cartoon where teachers in their break room say, "This place would be great if it weren't for all the students!" Truth is, we're here for them, and that's the job.

I built a fairly simple web form for my department that filtered into Google Sheets, just beyond what Google Forms could accomplish. I couldn't believe some of the ways they were able to break it.

Most people are fucking stupid. That's usually the answer I end up with.... It makes me sad.

My experience is that what we really do is make stupid easier, but hopefully also make it cost (us) less.

fuck up the address as much as possible so that it can’t be validated (unit number first

Officially the unit number should be first separated with a dash from the street number here in Canada.

people will prefix the value with “PRO#” or “#”

Sanitizing input afterwards is a good practice and trivial for these cases. For data with a known format like here, you should always strip for example spaces in any case.

Writing three lines of extra to allow more flexible input is easy and will make it much more user friendly. Far easier to make a software more intelligent than educate and train all users.

You know how it is; Brian was the guy who knew the password for the computer system, and he quit two years ago because the day manager wouldn't stop fucking with his schedule.

Or maybe they were marking up the official prices set by the franchise’s software, and pocketing the difference.

If this was independently owned, what likely happened is that the owner hired a company to do this, then lost the documentation of how to change it or just forgot how to do it. When it came time to change prices, they didn't know what to do, so they just taped prices on.

I mean I get it. Sometimes fixing that evap leak isn't worth it, especially given how much of a pain it can be to find the source. I've ignored my fair share of check engine lights.

But a lot of it can be ignorance and/or laziness too. I fixed an airbag light once simply by disconnecting and reconnecting the wires under the seats. Apparently a weight sensor was malfunctioning but it was just a bad connection due to oxidizing wires. Took 30 seconds to fix, and an additional 5 minutes to look up the technique for clearing the code. But I'm wiling to bet that your average driver wouldn't even think to investigate. A piece of electrical tape over the light is so much simpler.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddPQAJSm2cQ