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I once had to develop a full application with really hard problem solving in a really complex domain that I had hard time to understand. This was for a big nati

by pjerem 5y ago

I once had to develop a full application with really hard problem solving in a really complex domain that I had hard time to understand. This was for a big national phone operator. We delivered it under a lot of pressure from the sales team (I was in a shitty company, with few employees) and the contract was in multiple millions euros. That was literally one of our 2 or 3 customer. We delivered. One day we eventually get paid (our customer was well known in the industry to pay only when they are forced to - yeah, shitty customer too). The project is finished, customer is happy with what we demoed and delivered. Then maybe a year later, we decided to add a feature to this product to be able to sell it to another client. I got pull and build this damn thing. Nothing worked. Like, nothing. The login form was broken. Then I remember. A full year and not a single support ticket. The company owner « joking » about how our sales team used alcohol, parties and embarrassing photos to make their customer buy our software. The insane amount of pressure we had to deliver this technically hard project. I left this company the day this popped in my head.

rm445 5y ago
That's a crazy story. My guess would have been, not that the product never worked, but that the delivered version was hacked together in the last 24 hours before delivery and never made it into source control. You know the technical details - do you think something like that could have happened, or really no one tried to use the product even once?
- pjerem 5y ago
  No, I don’t think it was changed. I just think that the people who bought the tool weren’t the engineers who needed it and that for some reason the engineers never ended using it, maybe because they didn’t even knew about the existence of the tool or because they felt it was useless to them. I don’t even remember them to be involved in the project, but once again, shitty company, I had no direct contacts with the end users. Everything was proxied with their buyings dept, our sales dept, and our product « managers » (who really liked their job of not being anything more than well paid proxies between sales and programmers). With this setup, I’m pretty sure our product, as complex as it was, was probably useless to them. But meh, I left this company and I now work at a nicer company where I’m truly motivated knowing our end users enjoy using our products.
voiper1 5y ago
>The company owner « joking » about how our sales team used alcohol, parties and embarrassing photos to make their customer buy our software. That was an episode in House of Lies where the consultants sell their idea only through blackmail.

by pjerem 5y ago

rm445 5y ago

That's a crazy story. My guess would have been, not that the product never worked, but that the delivered version was hacked together in the last 24 hours before delivery and never made it into source control. You know the technical details - do you think something like that could have happened, or really no one tried to use the product even once?

pjerem 5y ago
No, I don’t think it was changed. I just think that the people who bought the tool weren’t the engineers who needed it and that for some reason the engineers never ended using it, maybe because they didn’t even knew about the existence of the tool or because they felt it was useless to them. I don’t even remember them to be involved in the project, but once again, shitty company, I had no direct contacts with the end users. Everything was proxied with their buyings dept, our sales dept, and our product « managers » (who really liked their job of not being anything more than well paid proxies between sales and programmers). With this setup, I’m pretty sure our product, as complex as it was, was probably useless to them. But meh, I left this company and I now work at a nicer company where I’m truly motivated knowing our end users enjoy using our products.

voiper1 5y ago

>The company owner « joking » about how our sales team used alcohol, parties and embarrassing photos to make their customer buy our software. That was an episode in House of Lies where the consultants sell their idea only through blackmail.