Are the posted questions getting worse?

  • Kiara (11/29/2011)


    Evil Kraig F (11/28/2011)


    Evil Kraig F (11/28/2011)


    That's just screaming someone hit the wrong dropdown option for title... but seriously, don't they do skillset matching anymore for email dumps?

    Title: Moving Target. Job Requirements: Be fast enough to not be shot at when you can't solve every IT problem in the company.

    *dies laughing* Oh, this was perfect. Yesterday morning, I had to settle down one of our managers who thought that the solution to our internet link between corporate and our co-lo facility was to park "an IT person" in the corporate office every weekend.

    Fortunately, I work with folks who listen...

    LOL. All I can now picture is the following conversation:

    Manager: "I need that report!"

    IT Guy: "Internet's down, ISP says ETR is 2 hours"

    Manager: "I can't wait that long on a Sunday afternoon!"

    IT Guy: "Ummm... Passenger Pigeons then?"


    - Craig Farrell

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  • Evil Kraig F (11/29/2011)


    Kiara (11/29/2011)


    Evil Kraig F (11/28/2011)


    Evil Kraig F (11/28/2011)


    That's just screaming someone hit the wrong dropdown option for title... but seriously, don't they do skillset matching anymore for email dumps?

    Title: Moving Target. Job Requirements: Be fast enough to not be shot at when you can't solve every IT problem in the company.

    *dies laughing* Oh, this was perfect. Yesterday morning, I had to settle down one of our managers who thought that the solution to our internet link between corporate and our co-lo facility was to park "an IT person" in the corporate office every weekend.

    Fortunately, I work with folks who listen...

    LOL. All I can now picture is the following conversation:

    Manager: "I need that report!"

    IT Guy: "Internet's down, ISP says ETR is 2 hours"

    Manager: "I can't wait that long on a Sunday afternoon!"

    IT Guy: "Ummm... Passenger Pigeons then?"

    That would be about correct, in this case... or "use a different internet connection" (aka it was the dedicated link only that was down - everyone else could reach the co-lo facility just fine, so a mi-fi or a trip to Panera Bread would work...)

    We do a lot of weekend work, so being unable to access our workorder system or email can be a problem - but it wasn't nearly as big an issue as a couple of people are turning it into. But when a user is feeling helpless, it *is* a big deal - and sometimes they'd just like to know that we're right there feeling helpless with them.

    Doesn't mean our team agreed to do so, however. 🙂

    -Ki

  • Pain, doom, disaster, or maybe I'm just having a bad day.

    Today's QotD and my response to comments on it could be taken as an object less in how to screw up the question be disgracefully careless in responding to comments pointing out the problems. I didn't know I still had it in me to get anything quite that wrong.

    Tom

  • L' Eomot Inversé (11/30/2011)


    Pain, doom, disaster, or maybe I'm just having a bad day.

    Today's QotD and my response to comments on it could be taken as an object less in how to screw up the question be disgracefully careless in responding to comments pointing out the problems. I didn't know I still had it in me to get anything quite that wrong.

    Do not feel that bad. I have had 2 that I was beaten up on, plus 1 where Steve altered my input (Forgot a comma). My observation of comments on mine, plus those on yours, shows just one thing. How disrespectful people can be. I noticed the "incorrect" text in the CORRECT answer, and attributed it to just a little mistake, and noted that the values being compared were numeric values, and concluded that yes val(2) = val(3), is as equally correct that Val(3) = Val(2). The point that the question was attempting to make, was still obvious, at least to myself, but apparently not to those who whined and cried about what they thought was the correct answer. I am tempted to go back and quote all those whiners and challenge them to submit a QOD, if only to show them how difficult it is. Now shall we keep a list of names of the whiners, and see how many of them actually submit and have published a QOD ?

    Hopefully this experience will not deter you from submitting additional QODs. (By the way, my 49th and 50th QODs will be published on Dec 7th and Dec 15th lets see how I fair)

    If everything seems to be going well, you have obviously overlooked something.

    Ron

    Please help us, help you -before posting a question please read[/url]
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  • L' Eomot Inversé (11/30/2011)


    Pain, doom, disaster, or maybe I'm just having a bad day.

    Today's QotD and my response to comments on it could be taken as an object less in how to screw up the question be disgracefully careless in responding to comments pointing out the problems. I didn't know I still had it in me to get anything quite that wrong.

    Meh - don't worry about it too much. v2=v3 or v3=v2...simple typo and not a big deal imho.

    Jason...AKA CirqueDeSQLeil
    _______________________________________________
    I have given a name to my pain...MCM SQL Server, MVP
    SQL RNNR
    Posting Performance Based Questions - Gail Shaw[/url]
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  • Congrats to all the PASS Board Candidates:

    Adam Jorgensen, Rob Farley, Denise McInerney, Geoff Hiten, Kendal Van Dyke, and Sri Sridharan.

    Brandie Tarvin, MCITP Database AdministratorLiveJournal Blog: http://brandietarvin.livejournal.com/[/url]On LinkedIn!, Google+, and Twitter.Freelance Writer: ShadowrunLatchkeys: Nevermore, Latchkeys: The Bootleg War, and Latchkeys: Roscoes in the Night are now available on Nook and Kindle.

  • SQLRNNR (11/30/2011)


    L' Eomot Inversé (11/30/2011)


    Pain, doom, disaster, or maybe I'm just having a bad day.

    Today's QotD and my response to comments on it could be taken as an object less in how to screw up the question be disgracefully careless in responding to comments pointing out the problems. I didn't know I still had it in me to get anything quite that wrong.

    Meh - don't worry about it too much. v2=v3 or v3=v2...simple typo and not a big deal imho.

    It's not really the typo that bothers me. It's that I checked the thing when I saw the comments and didn't spot the error, so wrote nonsense responses :blush: :blush:; then spotted the typo in the answer but didn't notice the matching typo in the options, and wrote yet more incorrect replies as a result :blush: :blush:; and if I'd understood comments correctly instead of reading them sloppily, and done a thorough check first time round instead of jumping to the conclusion that the first thing I spotted was the whole problem, it would have been corrected a couple of hours sooner :blush::blush::blush:. With a background where my customers were offering 24/7 service to their customers I regard losing a couple of hours like that as irresponsible; add to that that my customers used to want me or my people to communicate with their customers to help fix their problems sometimes so that making incorrect responses to error reports is absolutely anathema (it would have been a good way to commit commercial suicide, if that had been the company's goal - but it wasn't). The typo doesn't matter - these things happen; the failure to deal with it properly does matter - and maybe I'm frightened it's a sign I'm losing my touch.

    Anyway, I shall feel better tomorrow evening - flying back to civilisation tomorrow afternoon and expect to have about an additional 20 degrees (extra 36 degrees to you, I guess) of temperature to help me feel good. As well as decent wine at about 20% of the price undrinkable rubbish costs here :-):-)

    Tom

  • L' Eomot Inversé (11/30/2011)


    SQLRNNR (11/30/2011)


    L' Eomot Inversé (11/30/2011)


    Pain, doom, disaster, or maybe I'm just having a bad day.

    Today's QotD and my response to comments on it could be taken as an object less in how to screw up the question be disgracefully careless in responding to comments pointing out the problems. I didn't know I still had it in me to get anything quite that wrong.

    Meh - don't worry about it too much. v2=v3 or v3=v2...simple typo and not a big deal imho.

    It's not really the typo that bothers me. It's that I checked the thing when I saw the comments and didn't spot the error, so wrote nonsense responses :blush: :blush:; then spotted the typo in the answer but didn't notice the matching typo in the options, and wrote yet more incorrect replies as a result :blush: :blush:; and if I'd understood comments correctly instead of reading them sloppily, and done a thorough check first time round instead of jumping to the conclusion that the first thing I spotted was the whole problem, it would have been corrected a couple of hours sooner :blush::blush::blush:. With a background where my customers were offering 24/7 service to their customers I regard losing a couple of hours like that as irresponsible; add to that that my customers used to want me or my people to communicate with their customers to help fix their problems sometimes so that making incorrect responses to error reports is absolutely anathema (it would have been a good way to commit commercial suicide, if that had been the company's goal - but it wasn't). The typo doesn't matter - these things happen; the failure to deal with it properly does matter - and maybe I'm frightened it's a sign I'm losing my touch.

    Anyway, I shall feel better tomorrow evening - flying back to civilisation tomorrow afternoon and expect to have about an additional 20 degrees (extra 36 degrees to you, I guess) of temperature to help me feel good. As well as decent wine at about 20% of the price undrinkable rubbish costs here :-):-)

    Tom, we all have days where everything just ends up upside down, no matter how hard we try. Every company has customer service failures, too.

    They key to an excellent reputation isn't doing things perfectly every single time - it's owning up to our mistakes and handling them in a forthright and non-defensive manner when we make them. How we react in those situations says far more about us as professionals and as human beings than how we behave when we get things right.

    Don't be too hard on yourself. You made mistakes, you owned those mistakes, and you did your best to make things right. There's nothing more you can do.

    The QOTD arena is a difficult one. I stopped bothering to answer the questions for awhile because I got tired of "trick" questions. It had gotten to the point where I spent more time trying to figure out if I was dealing with a typo in a question or an intentional trick than I was spending learning something new from the question itself, and that wasn't fun any more. I used to read the discussions after just to see how ridiculous they would get - and found myself getting far too wrapped up in the inevitable "someone said something wrong on the internet and then someone else said something mean about the person who made an honest mistake" drama. Bah. I don't need to poison my brain with that type of trash on a regular basis.

    You (and many of the other regulars around here) provide an amazing amount of valuable information to a whole lot of folks. It's appreciated - even in situations where v3=v2 = v2=v3 but "v3=v2" <> "v2=v3". 😉

    -Ki

  • bitbucket-25253 (11/30/2011)


    I am tempted to go back and quote all those whiners and challenge them to submit a QOD, if only to show them how difficult it is. Now shall we keep a list of names of the whiners, and see how many of them actually submit and have published a QOD ?

    Well, maybe some were just winers; maybe some answered "none of the above" because they reckoned it was more likely to be a trick question than a typo (actually, two matching typos) - QoTD does have some really awful trick questions; and at least one (cadavre) had the decency to take the trouble to understand my inaccurate first responses to the comments and point out to me (politely, no whine, no one-upmaship either, not even saying that I'd clearly not understood the earlier comments) that I hadn't understood what he and others had been saying.

    Hopefully this experience will not deter you from submitting additional QODs. (By the way, my 49th and 50th QODs will be published on Dec 7th and Dec 15th lets see how I fair)

    I'm nowhere near those numbers. 50 QotDs is quite an achievement, I reckon - at current rate of progress I would take about 128 years to catch up with you even if you never submitted another one. My next two (coming up on 5th Dec and 12th Dec) will be my 6th and 7th I'm going to check them thoroughly before then, after today. But I'm not going to be deterred (I won't claim I'm actually undeterable, but I will claim to be closer to that than most).

    Tom

  • bitbucket-25253 (11/30/2011)


    My observation of comments on mine, plus those on yours, shows just one thing. How disrespectful people can be. I noticed the "incorrect" text in the CORRECT answer, and attributed it to just a little mistake, and noted that the values being compared were numeric values, and concluded that yes val(2) = val(3), is as equally correct that Val(3) = Val(2). The point that the question was attempting to make, was still obvious, at least to myself, but apparently not to those who whined and cried about what they thought was the correct answer.

    My apologies if that was how I came across, I was attempting to point out that because of the literal strings in the case statement that the only "correct" answer was "none of the above" - I thought it was a trick question.


    --EDIT--

    Arrghh, must remember to read all relevant posts before replying 🙂

    L' Eomot Inversé (11/30/2011)


    and at least one (cadavre) had the decency to take the trouble to understand my inaccurate first responses to the comments and point out to me (politely, no whine, no one-upmaship either, not even saying that I'd clearly not understood the earlier comments) that I hadn't understood what he and others had been saying.

    Thank you, glad I didn't come across as whining. The points are irrelevant (to me at least), it's just cool to have a little trivia when I start work in the mornings 😀


    Forever trying to learn
    My blog - http://www.cadavre.co.uk/
    For better, quicker answers on T-SQL questions, click on the following...http://www.sqlservercentral.com/articles/Best+Practices/61537/
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  • L' Eomot Inversé (11/30/2011)


    ...

    As well as decent wine at about 20% of the price undrinkable rubbish costs here :-):-)

    It means you can enjoy 20% extra 😉 It would be better for your mood...

  • My wife and I are celebrating our 21st anniversary today. As part of that, I'm taking next week off of work (my third vacation since 1988), and probably won't be around SSC much during that either.

    Should be back to my usual schedule of inanities, non-sequiturs, and politically inappropriate comments, Monday after next.

    Gail, while I'm gone can you keep an eye on database corruption forums and related material? Oh, and can you do the same while I'm here, too? And if I'm here, but not paying attention? Or if I'm here, paying attention, and posting junk? Or ... 😛

    - Gus "GSquared", RSVP, OODA, MAP, NMVP, FAQ, SAT, SQL, DNA, RNA, UOI, IOU, AM, PM, AD, BC, BCE, USA, UN, CF, ROFL, LOL, ETC
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    "Nobody knows the age of the human race, but everyone agrees it's old enough to know better." - Anon

  • GSquared (12/1/2011)


    My wife and I are celebrating our 21st anniversary today. As part of that, I'm taking next week off of work (my third vacation since 1988), and probably won't be around SSC much during that either.

    Should be back to my usual schedule of inanities, non-sequiturs, and politically inappropriate comments, Monday after next.

    Gail, while I'm gone can you keep an eye on database corruption forums and related material? Oh, and can you do the same while I'm here, too? And if I'm here, but not paying attention? Or if I'm here, paying attention, and posting junk? Or ... 😛

    <headsmack>

    😀

  • My Best wishes to You GS!!! Utilise your vacations well 🙂

  • GSquared (12/1/2011)


    Gail, while I'm gone can you keep an eye on database corruption forums and related material? Oh, and can you do the same while I'm here, too? And if I'm here, but not paying attention? Or if I'm here, paying attention, and posting junk? Or ... 😛

    Don't I always do that? 😉 :hehe:

    Vacation awesome, photos sometime soon.

    Today's nugget of wisdom - when computer is giving all sorts of drive-related errors, first check that the sata cables are properly seated, especially if the computer has been recently moved.

    I lost half the morning to what I thought was another drive failure, turned out the be a loose SATA cable. Now makes me wonder about the 'faulty' drive that I replaced a couple months ago as the symptoms were much the same.

    Gail Shaw
    Microsoft Certified Master: SQL Server, MVP, M.Sc (Comp Sci)
    SQL In The Wild: Discussions on DB performance with occasional diversions into recoverability

    We walk in the dark places no others will enter
    We stand on the bridge and no one may pass

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