281–290 of 794 posts
Not a project, and a second hand story that I'm sure a lot of people can recognize. But I knew a sysadmin at a large european educational institution whose only job it was to hit up-arrow and enter a few times a day when a server crashed. They knew how to fix this too, they just didn't care. And nobody else had enough experience to understand.
Corporate users of 3G dongles used to rack up enormous charges while roaming. They’d get hit with five-figure bills and complain to their carrier that they didn’t warn them, and often the carrier would end up swallowing the charge, even though they were rarely marking up the costs heavily. I worked on a project with a major carrier to enable companies to monitor and alert on cost overruns, and shut off devices in som…
I suppose the tool would still be useful for EU -> not EU roamers? Interestingly Liechtenstein, Iceland and Norway are not part of the EU but I know my German SIM card works there with its home tariff, but Switzerland is still the holdout. EDIT: Wikipedia says Monaco, Andorra and San Marino also don't have free roaming... Also, did this EU directive come as a surprise? AFAIK they move at glacial pace and carriers sho…
Oh I thought this was gonna be that like the entire product / company / idea was useless, not just like a small number of weeks' worth of work. I've probably created a hundred or more proofs of concept for things that turned out to be a bad idea. Say these averaged out to a week or so of work each, and that's about two full years of useless work. And that's ok! Most stuff you work on will get thrown away before you l…
I'm still working on a project that was mainly written by someone who left the company right before I joined – ten years ago.
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Which is why they are vastly better whilst in the middle of a tricky migration, especially if it is going badly, and especially especially if it is being done by the most expensive contractors.
yes, the key is to always have some sort of migration happening so every problem can be addressed by saying "this will be resolved after the new ERP is rolled out"
Perfect scheme.
In the end, we managed to produce three working web pages, and then the team was disbanded and the project shelved. The whole thing might have costed the company a million or more. Pretty sad, but now I tell people that I know why the interest rates of their bank accounts are zero.
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I manage a team of Consultants at a small ERP firm focused on mostly manufacturing and distribution the #1 cause of failure is summed up greatly by Isaiah Bollinger, paraphrasing "most bad implementations are because people are trying to buck the system they bought, rather than work with it, understand how your ERP, eCommerce or other system does a workflow and match it. There's billions of dollars going in and out o…
I worked in consulting for over a decade, and... yeah. When people migrate from one system to another, they try to make the new system work exactly the way the original system does, especially if the original system is homegrown. That lack of flexibility tends to be responsible for more than half the cost (and time span) of the migration.
"We want the new system to work exactly like our old one"
It's probably not worth the money...
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I used to work at Accenture back when they paid workers overtime. As engagement managers got into overage (underestimated projects, often fixed fee), they would put pressure on their workers to work overtime but not log the hours. Two law firms were already reaching out to workers ~2002 trying to form a class for a class action lawsuit. My boss came by one Friday morning and informed me i'd be onsite working all week…
I feel there is something missing in this story… what was implied by your email about cancelling your flight home the agreement to only log 40 hours? Sounds like you were just saying “affirmative”… what is the stunt he thinks you were pulling? And what is the second email about which you mention gmail and taking him off. It was a great story until that point and I want to know what happened next, I feel I’m missing s…
I once worked for a VP who needed to sunset an old internal tool that people were unwilling to part with, so he asked me to make it suck intentionally. Added random sleeps to slow down performance. Random alert messages about fake errors. It was weird. EDIT: Since this is getting some votes I'll add some more details. He would also come by to tell me how happy he was about all the complaints he was getting about it.
I don’t mean to be the morality police, but that seems illegal.