Try to solve when there is no possibility to give a solution. Most weirdest :)

Here's what you may try for:

There are 20 eggs and you have to divide them in 5 different cups by odd number without cracking the eggs. Take a note that each cup should be filled and no egg should be outside of the cup.

A neighbor's granny question :)

Context:

I left a job a couple of months ago. This company was super disorganized and every day, I heard everyone complaining about how something broke in production. I stayed quiet for a couple of weeks but this continued on. Finally, I asked several people if I could write some tests, even if they were just for crucial parts of the applications we were building.

Weird Advice:

One of the developers responded that he didn't recommend writing tests because there was a good possibility they would fail. I was a junior in this position and he was kind of arrogant so I tried to push the issue in a lighter manner by explaining all of the benefits. He still kept telling me no say I finally explained to him what writing tests really meant and how failing tests show us where/how/why/etc things broke so we can fix them much faster. He just ignored me from that point on, and then I left a few weeks later.

Here's one situation with one of the senior colleagues with whom I worked;

Me: Hey, we should introduce Redis (InMemory Cache) in our backend. There are lot of redundant DB hits happening, we can cache several API responses

Him: Yeah we'll use Redis but make sure for every request, you get data from cache and then validate with DB before sending that cached data as a response. I don't want client to get stale data anytime

Me: but.. 🤔

Pops up regularly:

Other:" we make the UI beautiful when were done with the internal and business logic stuff..."

Me: "uhm... No.... You don't..."

First time code especially regarding UI usually has come to stay. There is no such thing like we make it nice later.

Actually, I have a few more... it's not so much advice as just stupid things clients or their employees have said.

There was this one bank I did work for in 2017 that was nothing but headaches, but the two biggest headaches was their IT director, and VP of marketing.

"you can't make a site responsive without bootstrap, it's what makes sites responsive" -- their head IT guy was 100% convinced that was the truth, when -- as always -- this guy knew not one blasted thing about HTML or CSS, and didn't even know what a media query was. He even started to try and convince the president of said bank that I didn't know what I was talking about -- which is when I snapped, and said "look, I wouldn't even be here if this {expletive omitted} had any {expletive omitted} clue what he was doing. You hired me to fix the mess this {expletive omitted} made, and the only thing I'm trying to figure out right now is why the {expletive omitted} you haven't fired this {expletive omitted}"

I did so in command voice too. For those of you unfamiliar with command voice, go watch "Boys in Company C" and "Full Metal Jacket".

Their marketing director was no better -- they threw a conniption fit when I yanked all the bloated slow goofy flash animations and scripting heavy BS off of the banking portal -- you know, the part where people go to do things like check their balances and make transfers. Their reasoning "It has to be flashy and fancy to draw in new customers"

On the banking portal... aka behind the client login... aka something people who didn't have accounts with them yet would never even see.

Of course this was the client where I got them out of their legal problems, left them with a nice clean fast usable accessible page that met all WCAG requirements to get them out of their continuing fines... and not two weeks after we get them clear of all the legal woes those same two {expletives omitted} went in and put everything back exactly like it was -- then were shocked when sued again, and tried to blame me for it. I went from "guy hired to fix it" to "witness for the prosecution" -- as it went from "they didn't know any better" to "willful and malicious".

Somehow those same two {expletives omitted} are still with that bank, but hey at least I got paid triple by the time the legal hell was settled.

There's a reason I've started to think that modern marketing executives and many IT "suits" are just burger flippers with degrees. Actually, that's insulting to burger flippers; even they'd probably know better.

Not the weirdest, but some of the best pieces of advice I've ever got!

"Setup CI/CD" - I still laugh when I remember the days where I upload the files using FTP/SFTP

"Learning new technologies is fun, think twice before using it in production" - I've heard this advice before, but only realized it after we switched from VueJS to ReactJS!

"Use p80 rule while building" - Optimize for 80% of your users. Leave that 20%. As a startup, I think this is really great

"You can never build a perfect product" - Ship fast, get feedback, iterate

These are some of the best advice I got while building my startup MFY - mfy.im

Follow me on Twitter, yes I tweet a lot! twitter.com/gijovarghese141

"Use a front end framework" -- any of them. I hear it all the time how "great" these bloated train wreck laundry lists of how not to build a website are, and I cannot fathom how anyone qualified to build a website could even suggest using any of them.

Bootstrap, w3.css, react, vue, jquery, angular, whatever. They are utter and complete junk, and it's like the fans of them live in some bizzaro-world alternate reality where ignoring the intent of the specifications, the purpose of HTML, anything remotely resembling good practices, separations of concerns is somehow magic ally "better" ...and that's before we even talk about them all basically being anywhere from two to ten times the work to even work with!

To be frank, all the positive claims of how "great" these frameworks are, is, well... full of more manure than Biff Tannen's '48 Ford Super De Luxe.

The only way I could see thinking any of these "frameworks" offer any sort of benefits is a complete failure to grasp the point of HTML and CSS, much less the most basic concepts of their use.

... and the scripting ones aren't any better; slopping scripting only elements into the markup with no graceful degradation plan? Epic /FAIL/ at web development.

But really HTML/CSS frameworks are the worst. They're gibberish nonsense reeking of everything that was wrong with HTML 3.2 and why HTML 4 Strict got rid of so much of it. It's like a trip with Mr. Peabody back to 1997.

Weird, bizarre, nuts, whacko... I just don't get it.

Not advice but I was once interviewed by a CTO that thought React was the bestest thing in the whole world and way better than anything else because...... it had state and props! which he stated with much glee on his face!!! while I sat there a bit puzzled!?

I had only just finished reading my React book the evening before my interview and wondered what I'd missed in the book because.... maintaining state on the web is nothing new, nor is passing properties.... Then I was told that I "didn't have enough experience" even though my experience spans into those early days of the web when we were having to figure out exactly how to maintain state on the web.

While I was in that city, the "advice" I kept getting as a LAMP developer was to learn React because "PHP was dead" (to them - mostly startups using React), then I move back to Vancouver where it is pretty clear that I should have spent my time learning Laravel instead....

I plan on picking up Laravel next calendar year because I seem to be much more employable as a LAMP developer with 20 years experience than as a React developer without any industry experience using it (and I've recently started switching to Vue because it's open source).

I was asked to rewrite a portal in bootstrap instead of PHP. IN not WITH .... yes .... one of those moments :) ...