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I don't think the cynical view makes a lot of sense. The original contractor is likely billing for hours to fix the site now. Bringing in additional experts doe

I don't think the cynical view makes a lot of sense. The original contractor is likely billing for hours to fix the site now. Bringing in additional experts doesn't benefit them. A failure of this scale and visibility isn't going to help their business reputation and if they lose the maintenance contract on the site they're likely to be out for millions. I can see bidding low with the expectation of making a killing on change orders (I think the contractor succeeded at that), but outright failure to deliver doesn't make a lot of sense. I think like most IT projects you need to look at the management team in charge and the decisions they made to understand if this failure could have been identified and avoided.

mgkimsal 13y ago
> A failure of this scale and visibility isn't going to help their business reputation Do big failures really hurt people or companies all that much? At some point, you're dealing in a realm in which relatively few people even play (or perhaps even want to play) and you may be the only game in town anyway. Bankers/CEOs who lost millions were still given large bonuses with the reasoning that "we wouldn't be able to find anyone else to do their job". Well... I could certainly lose millions faster than many of them, and I'd do it for half their bonus, thereby saving the companies money :)
- yen223 13y ago
  That's something I used to wonder too. I used to work for a company that had a number of highly-visible failures, the kind that gets reported in the news. They somehow still managed to score multi-million-dollar contracts. I suspect having a great sales team is more important that having a great engineering team.
- protomyth 13y ago
  "Do big failures really hurt people or companies all that much?" Some folks do get black balled[1], and companies will liquidate from time-to-time, but in the end, I really cannot think of anyone that didn't end up richer except the poor souls the companies hired. These days, most of them just switch to another company and continue the cycle. 1) if your name is know to a career, high-level administrator in a bad way, expect a lack of contracts

mgkimsal 13y ago

> A failure of this scale and visibility isn't going to help their business reputation Do big failures really hurt people or companies all that much? At some point, you're dealing in a realm in which relatively few people even play (or perhaps even want to play) and you may be the only game in town anyway. Bankers/CEOs who lost millions were still given large bonuses with the reasoning that "we wouldn't be able to find anyone else to do their job". Well... I could certainly lose millions faster than many of them, and I'd do it for half their bonus, thereby saving the companies money :)

yen223 13y ago
That's something I used to wonder too. I used to work for a company that had a number of highly-visible failures, the kind that gets reported in the news. They somehow still managed to score multi-million-dollar contracts. I suspect having a great sales team is more important that having a great engineering team.
protomyth 13y ago
"Do big failures really hurt people or companies all that much?" Some folks do get black balled[1], and companies will liquidate from time-to-time, but in the end, I really cannot think of anyone that didn't end up richer except the poor souls the companies hired. These days, most of them just switch to another company and continue the cycle. 1) if your name is know to a career, high-level administrator in a bad way, expect a lack of contracts