Once upon a time in Devland, there were two best friends @Alice and @Michelle and they worked together at The DevCo company as developers.
After a tough day handling an @-ANGRY-CLIENT-, they thought that they had to go and @RantSomewhere and so they went to a café. At the café, they ranted about some stupid clients, and @theItalianGuy at the third floor of their office building who never picked up calls, and @thatJavaGuy from the second floor who, they thought, was @notarealDev, and the usual stuff about their work. Somewhere in between, @Alice thought it would be @funvengeance to @hack @theNSA; “@karma is coming to get them”, said @Michelle.
To do this, they knew they’d have to take help from none other than @Gandalf who lived in a nearby @cave. So, the next day, taking a leave from work, @Alice and @Michelle embarked on journey to meet @Gandalf. After about an hour’s drive, they reached @Gandalf’s @cave. @Michelle went ahead to knock on @Gandalf’s rusty cave door. Being a lazy @necromancer, he magically opened his door 2 minutes later. “Who is't dares to disturb me in mine own catch but a wink?” shouted a voice from the back; “We’re two developers from DevCo and we need your help in our mission to @hack @theNSA”, shouted @Michelle. After a few seconds, he replied, ”Hmm… N'rmally I wouldst sendeth thee to mine own cousin @Hagrid, but in thy case, I sayeth thee shouldst visiteth the detective who is't goeth by the nameth @S-Holmes”. @Alice replied back, “Thank you, Sir @Gandalf, we’ll get help from this @S-Holmes, I’ve heard that he’s an @exceptionalGuy”; “Mine own pleasure, Farewell!” said @Gandalf, and the door closed shut.
So, @Alice and @Michelle went back to their car, and that time @Alice raised a question, “How are we gonna find this @S-Holmes? We don’t have a phone number or anything so we could contact this guy.”
“We should call @thatJavaGuy from work, I’ve heard he is a man of resources, he must know how to contact @S-Holmes”, said @Michelle.
And it was true, after a call with @thatJavaGuy, they were able to obtain @S-Holmes’s phone number.
“Howdy, this is @S-Holmes, what can I diddily ding dong do you for?”
“Hi, I’m @Alice, I’m from DevCo and I was hoping that I could get your help in our mission.”
“What kind of mission?”, asked @S-Holmes.
“We want to @hack @theNSA.”, replied @Alice.
“Okay… I think I might be able to hel-diddly-elp you! There’s an old and abandoned laberino noodly-near @stacked Street. It was made in @1989 and since then, it houses a magical computeroo that can hel-diddly-elp you in your mission. So, you just have to connect the computeroo to the Internet and you can diddily ding dong do your programmeroo thing and then you'll have access to the the noodly-nsa diddily ding dong database!”, answered @S-Holmes.
S-Holmes continued, “But I shall warn you, there's a riddly-rumorino that the laberino was abandoned because of an @electric-ghost that lurks there, but I bel-diddly-elieve it is just a computeroo program that was diddily ding dong designed to try to @stop hackers from accessing the top secret stuff!".
“Okay, thanks for your help! I bet we can handle whatever this @electric-ghost thing is, so… Goodbye!”, replied @Alice.
“Goodbye!”, said @S-Holmes and that ended their conversation.
Luckily, the @stacked Street was just a couple of miles away from them, so they reached the lab quickly.
As they got close to the lab they saw something that really surprised them…
--------
To be continued in part two...
(Do you want a part two? :/)

My first ever story is a little special because it is kind of dev related at it has "cameos" by various devranters, as you might have noticed.
How many did you count?
More in Part Two.

Thank you for reading and please, any feedback is welcome. Did you like it?
I haven't really revised it once, it is straight out of the keyboard.
Should I drop the "@" ?
But then it would impossible to spot some of the devRanters .
Let me know.

PS
What should be the title?
1)Alice in DevLand?
2)Adventures of Alice and Friends: Hacking the NSA?
You decide..(or maybe I'll pick the second one :D)

Interviewer: Do you know about SQL injection?

Student: Yessss

Interviewer: Okay, how we can prevent it?

Student: Yes, we should prevent it as prevention is always better than cure. It can lead to data loss and other problems so it can be difficult to fix it if it happens. The best case is that nothing like that takes place. [...]

Interviewer: I get it but how?

Student: By not building any web applications.

[Silence]

Interviewer: Nice, you may go. Do not call us. We will call you.

We have a bunch of white people in human resources that are trying to hire "diverse" people because the company sets HR diversity targets. Which is an inherently racist way of hiring someone.

I am told to interview this guy who claims to have Angular experience. Before the interview I ask to see a form that he has built in Angular. He sends me a repo which is ripped off of an open source project and has the readme and git commits removed. A quick web search shows that it isn't his work. He shows up to the interview and I find out he is from a Southern African country. I deliberately ask some questions about code that I can see he didn't write that I prepared ahead of time. He lies to me and tells me all about how he wrote it which showed me that he has no idea what the code does. I tell HR they better not hire him because he was very comfortable lying to me, and I'm confident that he doesn't understand any of the code that he showed me. I do not trust this guy and would never choose to work with him. HR lady says "Ah okay."

Today he walks in with a big grin on his face. HR lady fucking hired this guy. I can see his monitors from my desk and he spent his whole first day looking at a soccer website on his second monitor. I call up HR, "Why would you even ask me to interview him if you refuse to listen to my feedback?". Lady tells me "You need to be open minded about diversity. Probably most of the things you observed were either cultural differences or language barrier." I tell her definitely not. He lied to me multiple times, and he took credit for other people's work." She tells me that they will keep an eye on me because I'm not being open to diversity.

Are you kidding me? This white lady is literally stereotyping me as a racist because I'm white.

So this fucking HR lady called me a racist because she decided to hire someone that we shouldn't trust. Then she put this asshat on my project. Now I have to be cautious about my position because HR is "watching" my racist ass. Even though I am literally the only one on the development team that is white and speaks English as my first-language. I called a team meeting before the on-boarding is over so I can tell the other developers what is happening. We restructured our code review process so that I will never give him feedback. Then when the time comes that he slips up the "diverse" developers will kick him out so I won't be reprimanded as a "racist".

This company that I work for is a special kind of stupid.

Fuck open office spaces.

A few months ago I landed a super sweet job as a senior full stack developer, mainly going to work with their Python microarchitecture. The company pays well, has a sweet balance between freedom and responsibility, 30 days vacation etc.

During the recruiting process they walked me around the office that was super cozy with 14 devs in on large room and 10 people from marketing in another. They also mentioned that they would move and merge office with operations and customer service (around 100 more people) in a few months.

Life was good in the old office, I thought that this is the company where I will work for a looooong time.

Now we are in the new office and its fucking shit. No walls or FUCKING CEILINGS between departments. Right above my head there is balcony with customer service talking loud as fuck 24/7. Everyone that is not a developer is just so fucking loud.

I have to use earplugs AND earmuffs to get silence, or blast my ears with way to loud music. Every day around lunch I'm completely done mentally.

I know I'm extra sensitive to noise because of my ADHD, but seriously who the fuck thought this was a good idea?

All the devs have told our boss what needs to be done. If they listen i don't know. In the meantime I will start looking for a new job....

" this page uses cookies"
"We've updated our privacy policy"
*30 sec full screen ad* OR "please turn off your adblocker and refresh"
"Would you like to take a survey?"
"Click to read more"
"You've reached your free articles for the month. Please subscribe!"

Jesus fucking Christ! Is it such a sin to read articles in peace? How does anybody use your shitty site. How does anybody PAY for your shitty site?! Fuck your articles. Why do companies think this is a good model?!

I joined based on a friend invitation, then he didn’t attend...
It was two days hackathon...
Spent the first day trying to find any thing to do... but didn’t!
Slept in the place chatting and socializing...
In the second day, I found interesting JavaScript library, and decided to invest my time trying it...
Built a prototype in two hours, photoshop a presentation in two hours... waited 3 hours to the end of the event... present my Working POC...
Won second place and qualified to the world wide competition!

Me : The website renewal bill is up and it will due in 30 days

Client : Sleep

Me : 14 days

Client : Sleep

Me : 7 days

Client : Sleep

Me : Last notice, it'll be dead tommorow if we dont pay today

Client : Sleep

*website dies*

Me : F

Client the day after suspension : Hey, we can't access the site.

Me : Play dead

***

I think i should say "email service will die if you don't pay the renewal bill" instead

based on how quick they react when shit stopped working

Omfg this fucking guy!!!!

Context:

We are going through a major refactor of some of our backend components. I was tasked with cleaning up our ML code while another guy was tasked with cleaning up the general CRUD side of the backend, let's call him DA for "dumb ass".

** At 11pm
DA: I am getting a strange error from your backend. Look:

"Invalid call: method=PUT expected=[POST]"

Me: you need to send a post request not a put request

DM: no, it's not that. I am sending the right thing

Me: ... Let me see...

* 15min ish of testing *

No, it works fine on my version, 1.1.0 what's your version?

DM: I'm on 1.1.0.

Me: send me code?

DM: *send

"request.put(..."

Me: you are sending a PUT... It's literally in the screenshot. Send a Post

DM: I am

Me: no, send a Post

DM: I don't understand, I am sending the request

Me: it's a post not a put

DM: but...

Me: it's a post not a put
Me: good night!!!!!!

*came in this morning to see this conversation in slack from the remote teams*

Dev: Hey guys, I'm trying to push to the develop branch, telling me its locked. Is there a new process?

Lead dev: Yes I locked it because the repo is now dead, the last release that went out is the last for this year and ever for this app. Were merging this app with another, starting from the last release's code. We'll all have to swap over to the new repo soon.

Dev: ... eh ok I didn't put anything in the last release branch as it wasn't urgent. Normally our process is anything in /develop goes out in the new year. I've been merging to /develop for the last few weeks ... is that code now gone?
*14 question mark emoji reactions*

Lead dev: Yes
*27 angry emoji reactions*

Engineering manager: WHAT? when was this decided? When was it communicated?

Lead dev: oh I assumed my product counterpart had been spreading the messages around, have they not?

Several teams: no, nope, first i'm hearing of it.

Lead dev: Ok, i'll ask them what happened. Be aware then that most of the stuff thats going into develop now, most likely won't be allowed in until March. They want to prioritise releasing this new merged app and don't want anything to impact it.

Dev: So wait, i'm working on stuff now. What do I do? Where do I base the branch? Where do I merge?

<no response>

*My team comes into the office*

Dev: eeehhh ... what does this mean for our past 4 weeks of work? and all the stuff needed to go out in January?

Me: not.a.fucking.clue

A few of Stux's !dev pet peeves

1) People that walk slow as fuck in the middle of a side walk. Like hurry uppppp. I've gotta get 0.5 miles in like 8 minutes and you blocking the walkway doesn't help.

2) People that don't understand how side walks work. Treat it like the fucking road. ⬇️⬆️ Is the pattern in which you should walk. It's not rocket science.

3) People that start walking up the bus steps as I'm clearly walking forward to get off. Ffs let me off and THEN get on you stupid bitch

4) people that bike or ride their skateboard/longboard around campus but are moving slower than I am while walking. If you're gonna do that hop the fuck off and carry the damn thing.

5) people that don't try to solve an issue with their code on their own BEFORE they call the professor over. (There goes the !dev lol)

6) people that act like their favorite musician or athelete or actor or anyone fucking famous they play kiss ass with can't be criticized. Just bc they're famous and/or good at what they do sure asf doesn't make them perfection and I retain the right to voice my opinion.

My name is Stuxnet and you're watching Disney Channel.

I met my girlfriend cooking. She has no programming experience whatsoever and is quite computer illiterate. But that's fine as that's not something I need in a partner.

She regularly asks me what I'm working on. I'll try to explain it, and sometimes she definitely gets it, but sometimes she's clearly lost as fuck. She'll enthusiastically say things like "that's awesome honey!" To things that are just explanations. Sometimes it makes me laugh. Most of the time it leaves me in this weird confused state, like she's just pandering.

But I know she means well and wishes me the best. She's an amazing woman, and even if she doesn't get a single thing I try to explain, I'd much rather be with that than the "Why the fuck are you always playing on the computer?" Types of people I meet far more often.

6 months ago I sold everything, quit my job, gave up my apartment and left the country with my 11kg backpack. I booked a one way ticket to South America. I wanted to travel, get lost but also finish up some personal projects and do a little tech books challenge I came up with. I learnt so much over the past half a year, it's crazy.

Not looking back. Projects paid off and it turns out that my dream company actually found me themselves without me even applying... and so still from South America I'm in final rounds of the interview! 🤗

All my worries about a gap in CV, no employment along with other problems I thought I was gonna have... It's all BS. So if anyone here is waiting for a sign. Well, this is it now. Go!

I'm currently one of two "pen testers" for the anticheat system of a game.

It all started a few days ago when the developer handed me the obfuscated package and told me to go at it. No big deal, I've bypassed it before the obfuscation, so I just changed some imports and sent in the screenshot.

Fast forward 100+ hours, it's turned into a cat-and-mouse game. He sends us (the testers) an update, we break it within hours. We show him what we exploited and he attempts to fix it. Rinse and repeat.

Finally, today he patched the one hole that I've been using all this time: a field in a predictable location that contains the object used for networking. Did that stop me? No!

After hours of searching, I found the field in an inner class of an inner class. Here we go again.

OMFG
Waking up in the middle of the night to a strange feeling in my ear and noises. Started shaking the head, which did nothing except panicking because of intensifying scratch noises in my head.
Getting the fear to be eaten inside out.
Get the phone and call sister to get me to the doc but her phone is powered off. Starting to Google "consequences of an cockroach in your ear", reading this is not as bad as I thought and that some people do not even realize it !??
Laying down for 3 minutes in the dark, *heating up and feeling my pulse* hoping it will crawl out. Which obviously did not fucking happened, this sucker just squatted my ear.
So I go to the bathroom and start filling up the tub. While it is filling up, I Google "how to get cockroach out of your ear". Finding an article that you should pour oil in your ear to suffocate the squatter. So I go to the kitchen, grab my sunflower oil, go to the mirror and start pouring. I am starting to shine like a bodybuilder and hear the noises again. After what felt like an eternity, I hear even more scratching in my head, this is the moment I do half a headbang and *wush* *flap* something hit the ground. I look down in the hope it wasn't just the sunflower oil and see this little thing which is clearly a cockroach. I am fucking relieved, not hearing any noises anymore.

!security

(Less a rant; more just annoyance)

The codebase at work has a public-facing admin login page. It isn't linked anywhere, so you must know the url to log in. It doesn't rate-limit you, or prevent attempts after `n` failures.

The passwords aren't stored in cleartext, thankfully. But reality isn't too much better: they're salted with an arbitrary string and MD5'd. The salt is pretty easy to guess. It's literally the company name + "Admin" 🙄

Admin passwords are also stored (hashed) in the seeds.rb file; fortunately on a private repo. (Depressingly, the database creds are stored in plain text in their own config file, but that's another project for another day.)

I'm going to rip out all of the authentication cruft and replace it with a proper bcrypt approach, temporary lockouts, rate limiting, and maybe with some clientside hashing, too, for added transport security.

But it's friday, so I must unfortunately wait. :<

True rant:

A student close to my place ask me to help him install some Software.

Me: Sure this does not take long.

Over to his laptop I noticed this weird popup on screen.

he said: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm clicking it away and opens up his browser typing in the address bar the search term for the software.

The Laptop quickly copy and paste my search term into a sketchy search website with not correct results..

Then another popup came again on screen.

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

I'm already internally face palming. but continue my effort to get him his software.

tried different approach on the searching part en trying to click the install button for the software..

and again. my click is high jacketed and it downloads something completely different.

and guess what.. a popup showed up

His response: Oh. you just need to click that away. :)

Stop Molesting your laptop dude! Fix your Shit I'm out!

The company I work for...
Has:

1. No CI/CD
2. SVN instead of GIT
3. Outsourcing to India (oof)
4. No Automated Testing
5. Uses Bugnet (ancient, outdated)
6. No clearly defined code standards
7. No real documentation on the code
8. Rubbish code
9. No desire to reduce technical debt
10. Poorly maintained DB
11. Poor outdated equipment
12. A useless PM
13. Still priotizes IE support (??)

On a scale of 1 to 10 how fucked is this company and anything they develop?

Found this gem on spiceworks.
Link:-
https://community.spiceworks.com/to...
Below transcript was sent to poster by someone

My workplace and a twenty three year-old phone app developer:
Them (on phone): Can you send me a clicker carpet with the laptop?
Me: ...
Me: a what now?
Them: Clicker. Carpet.
Me: A ... clicker carpet.
Them: Yes
Me: What the. what is a clicker carpet?
Them: You know the clicker. The thing that moves the arrow on the
screen
Me: ...
Me: A mouse?
Them: No, the clicker. (Sends me an image of a mouse) This.
Me: That's called a mouse.
Them: I need a carpet for one of those.
Me:. A mouse pad
Them: The clicker carpet.
Me: It's a fffff. it's called a mouse pad. The clicker is a mouse. The
thing under it is a pad. MOUSE. PAD
Them: You old people and your made-up technical names.
Me: No, it's always been mouse and mouse pad.

Them: I have text messages with friends that says otherwise.
Me: The Desktop team is sending you a MOUSE PAD with the laptop.
Them: My friends and I are on the cusp of eliminating the PC with the
cellphone, by the ways. So I may only use the laptop for like year or so.
Me (under my breath): You and your friends are idiots.
Them: What?
Me: What? Are we done?
Them: Yes what?
Me: *hangs up*
Everyone was looking at me by the end of the call. I got louder the longer
I talked to this guy. When I told them about phones replace PCs, our main
dev was like, "Do they expect hours programming shit on the cellphone?
This kid is stupid."
Thanks for validating my feelings.

I’m on a trip through Scandinavia with a travel group. Today we are staying at a Hotel in Hammerfest. I just got into my hotel room and my lamp looked like that. So I made a photo and went to the reception:
Me (showing photo): Is this supposed to look like that?
staff: Uhmm maybe!?
Me: 🤨
Staff: Do you belong to the travel group?
Me: Yes.
Staff: Then it’s supposed to look like that.

WTF!!!?

Probably the intern who, while a decent and intelligent guy for the most part, thought it was increasingly hilarious to keep putting random cat GIFs somewhere in the product with each PR he made.

First time "ok, very funny, but you can't do that in production software, don't do it again."

The third time around the "joke" was wearing a little thin.

Eventually a script was written so that, every time he made a PR, he'd get "emailed" one of a few pre-defined messages from a random member of the team a few minutes later, telling him to remove it and stop pissing about...

Having to rely on individuals who frequently use the words "thing" or "thingy" to convey important time sensitive information.

Nothing is more infuriating.

I was very troubled as a teenager. I had some pretty intense family issues that led me to smoking cigarettes at 12, marijuana at 13, and drinking everyday at 15. By 17, I was using other "party favors", as we called them, on an every day basis. I left high school at the beginning of my final year, about a week before I turned 18, moved out of my family's home and started working three different part time jobs.
This was the lowest point of my life. I've never felt so much like a fuck-up and loser than back in those days. I hated myself, hated what I had become, hated everything I did. Hate hate hate. I spent a year like this, pitying myself, seeking sympathy from people when I shouldnt have been, basically seeking out someone who would tell me that I wasnt so awful.
That never happened. I only deepened the hole that I had dug for myself.

Then I got angry. I thought it wasn't fair that everyone else was enjoying life except for me. I wanted to find a passion. I wanted to find excitement again. I wanted to look forward to something else besides going back to bed.
When I turned 19, I decided that I was going to take control of my life because I was so angry with my position at the time.
I put myelf into college. I made myself stay awake and focus on schoolwork and internal improvement. I started facing my flaws and defects head-on and conquering them rather than letting them eat me from the inside out.

Now, I am only a couple months away from turning 21.
I rarely drink now. I quit smoking cigarettes after almost 9 years.
I graduate this December, and enroll into my next degree program in January.
Today, I signed employment paperwork with the company I interned at over the summer. I am now a full-time DevOps Engineer with salary, bonuses, 401k, and full health coverage.
My boyfriend and I just moved into our own house that we are renting together. No more needing shitty roommates.
I have most of the debt that my mother left in my name paid off.

A couple of years ago, I couldn't have cared less about my life or how I turned out. I truly expected to get arrested, wind up homeless, or just flat-out end up dead.
I never thought I would see myself where I am today.
I am extremely proud of myself for turning my future around. I know some of you may read this and think I'm an idiot, or that this seems trivial because I am so young. Thats okay.
I have learned that hard work always pays off, and that sometimes you must sacrifice what is expedient to gain what is meaningful.

Earlier I signed up on this forum called NulledBB. Basically some hacker skiddie forum that had a dump of an archive I wanted, unfortunately behind a paywall which I didn't want to bother with.

On signup I noticed that I couldn't use my domain as an email address, as I usually do (the domain is a catch-all which means that mail addresses can be made up for each service I sign up to on the fly, super useful). They did expose the regex that they accepted email as however, which included something along the lines of "@live.*".

So I figured, why not register a subdomain live.nixmagic.com real quick and put that into the mail servers? Didn't take too long and that's what I eventually went with, and registered as somepissedoffsysop@live.nixmagic.com (which I have no trouble putting on a public forum as you'll see in a minute).

Still didn't manage to get that archive I wanted but I figured, fuck it. It's a throwaway account anyway. But eventually that email address started to receive spam. Stupid motherfucker of a forum operator with his Kali skidmachine probably leaked it.

Usually I just blacklist the email address in SpamAssassin by adding an additional spam score of 100 to email sent to such addresses. But in that case it didn't even sit on the main domain, thanks to that stupid regex block from earlier... 😏

*Logs into my domain admin panel*
*Le rm on the live.nixmagic.com record*

Null routed entirely.. nulled, if you will! 🙃

Man, fuck the SO community
I asked a question on software engineering (all fancy like, links quotes checked spelling and grammar etc.)
if it would be beneficial to switch to another language in order to increase performance and memory limitations during a specific task

Literally one guy said it violated 4 of their rules
Opinion based; asking for language switch; too vague and another one

About 20/30 minutes later my question had a -3 score...

Fuck off with too vague, also why shouldn't I switch language for a single task... If it would be faster..

Anyway found an even better solution, but it cannot be enough said.. the SO community is a bunch of old stubborn fucks who only care about their score.

Darn it! Google knows about my superpowers!

So , at my first day as an intern in the company that would probably be employing me, i heard some great lines that made me gain so much hope in humanity -.-

From HR :

- "your timings will be 10 to 7 , 6 days a week."(even though it takes 4 hours to commute to and fro from that place). "We have a 9 hour a day schedule, and anything between 5-9 hours is considered a half day"

- "we have a 1 paid holiday per month scheme. And that starts after first 3 months, and yes TitanLannister, that also applies to interns. You may take a leave but that won't be considered for payment"(even though the said intern's internship is of 3 months and he already notified that he would be needing a 10 day leave for his exams and a few other college related work leaves )

-"here is an official laptop you could work upon(has average specs but inferior to my laptop). Note that its already loaded with slack, and a browser history tracking software, so you might wanna log out of that if you want to use it for personal use. Also if you want to use your personal laptop, then these tools would still be added into your laptop"

-" all the things mentioned above are connected to this fingerprint card that will automatically upload those details on an hr software and enable history tracker "

-"take your time, but we need this task done by you in next 24 hours. There is no deadline, but we need this work done asap"

In the words on purgatony:
"This is hardly working
This is hardly living
This is my JOB"

Worst disturbance while working?

Putting headphones on for 1 minute. and colleges start waving and asking stuff every 10 minutes.

and when you do not respond, the more waving intensify and whistling and when you take off your headphones..

They ask:
What do you think of the weather today?

New neighbor came in yesterday, she cute, and apparently she also goes to the same college as me, though... when she came in last night to thank me she thought I was doing something illegal

Neighbor: "What are those?"
Me: "Lemme ex-"
Neighbor: "Are you doing [hacky hacky uwu]?"
Me: "First before you get the wrong-"
Neighbor: "I'm call-"
Me: "This is a fucking weather sattelite reciever ffs"

[Awkward silence]

Fast forward to today, landlady came in and immediately recognized my weather sattelite rig (I did it for a science fair before I graduated SHS), told neighbor she shouldn't worry because I have stuff like this everyday

God, if it wasn't for our landlady, I would have the police in my ass for neighbors getting the wrong idea...

Seriously nani the fuck

Oh boy its actually embarassing...

I was in a cosplay event, when I realized I only have 30 minutes till I check in for my first day in the job as a support agent.

I never had the time to change because of traffic and I was commuting so I spent the next 9 hours in side the company premises wearing a japanese schoolgirl uniform.

...I got quite everyone's attention, even the HR... ( well at least the HR just reprimanded me about that >_<)

Note to self: remember to give yourself 30 minutes more of allowance....

Recently had an interview with a company. At some point an SELinux question came up and while I didn't provide the best answer ever (I'm hardly familiar with SELinux and mentioned that as well beforehand so they knew), it was technically correct and the reaction of the interviewers was funny.

TI (technical interviewer): say your php script isn't executed and after a while you find out that SELinux is blocking php script execution, how can you fix that?
Me: setenforce 0...? (essentially disabling SELinux at all)
TI: disabling it entirely for getting php execution to work?! That doesn't sound like a good solu...
HRI (HR (non technical) interviewer, also present): *turns to TI* - but, would it solve the problem?
TI: 😐 well, yes, but... That's a bad thing to do so I wouldn't count is corre..
HRI: *still aiming towards TI* but you simply asked him for a way to solve the php execution issue, would his answer work? Regardless of whether it's the best or worst solution, would it be a solution which works?
TI: well... yes...
HRI: then he answered correctly I'd say, next!

(yes, I'm aware that my answer wasn't good as for security at all but it would have solved that problem which is what was asked)