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The Yak Corral

my first job

Author

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Tim
Starting Member

392 Posts

Posted - 2003-05-01 : 20:18:16

Arnold's story about the girl appending a comma to 10,000 rows in excel brought back memories

I finished university and armed with my new found knowledge and youthful enthusiasm I rock up for the first day of work as a juniour programmer in a bank.

The guy who was supposed to organise work for me was busy looking at something new called the internet, and didn't have anything prepared for me.

So he drops this huge report on my desk, which was a dump from some communications trace. About 5,000 pages of what looks like random characters spewing across the page.

He tells me that there are certain patterns in the data and I have to higlight them with a flouro pen, and mark down the time that these different patterns occurred from the timestamp at the start of each line.

So I start to wonder why I went to University at all, but I figure this must be important if I was asked to do it.

About a week later I proudly present my results, and he asks me to draw a graph of the frequency of occurences grouped by time slots. I finally do that and he puts it in a filing cabinet. I never saw or heard of it again.

Following week I was reassigned to a new supervisor....

robvolk
Most Valuable Yak

15732 Posts

Posted - 2003-05-01 : 21:36:45

Did the guy you were working for look like Ed Harris, and no one but you could see him?