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Project from Hell (2008)

projectfailures.wordpress.com

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Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#41

Post by drinchev »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #36
jmull wrote: post #25

I would guess the project was (is?) running pretty much just as the people in charge wanted it to run. 10 years in and they were still billing -- more than ever -- for a project that would have completed 7-8 years previously if things had been done according to plan. All the seemingly massively stupid and counter productive decisions made make sense if the goal is to confuse matters to make it seem like progress has…

But they are being fined at E1000's a day. In the UK we now have projects forced to go through regular if not frequent traffic light reviews - a panel of actual experts reviews the project - i think it was one such thing that killed the NHS network project (12 billion over spend). one panel, one review. saved money. i suspect the french gov will have put something similar in place, but i do agree with the final parag…

> The company recovers daily penalties by billing ever-increasing change requests to the government. The year is 2008.

I hope you didn't miss that sentence. It's the irony that probably lives in every government project.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#42

Post by KKKKkkkk1 »

What I have witnessed there is beyond everything I could possibly have imagined in terms of software engineering. Far more serious than just a lack of professional competence was the utmost contempt for human dignity which at some point made me compare the whole experience to (what I imagine can be) jail.

I think these two actually go hand-in-hand. Happy Monday!

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#43

Post by serpix »

1ris wrote: post #35
marcosdumay wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they were not really employees, but consultants. On places where it's hard to fire people, mostly everybody works as consultants and people tend see those positions as normal job positions.

In Germany it is hard to fire somebody. Almost nobody works as consultant, and consultants are not normal job positions.

In Finland this is the only way to get anybody even slightly competent to get something done.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#44

Post by amyjess »

marcosdumay wrote: post #33
baud147258 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From another post in the blog: "Among the many comments, some surprised me. Seems lots of people cannot believe you can be fired in France for being 1 minute late at work. Sorry to burst your bubble, mates, but this is what SSIIs (contractor companies) were invented for. You don’t lose your job, you immediately lose the contract you are working on (no justification needed, this is what contractors are for)" So they w…

> So they were not really employees, but consultants. On places where it's hard to fire people, mostly everybody works as consultants and people tend see those positions as normal job positions.

A startup I once worked at a decade ago decided to hire a sales executive in the UK. They initially hired him as a contractor and only made him a full-time employee a few months later because in the UK you can easily fire a contractor but not an employee, and they really wanted to make sure the guy they hired was the right person for the job.

(To answer the inevitable "was he the right person?": Yes, he was. EMEA was continually our best-performing sales region the whole time I worked there, and he built our EMEA sales infrastructure from the ground up. Some years later, after the company exited, most of the senior people regrouped at another startup. He was in charge of EMEA for a few years, and then he was promoted to CEO.)

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#45

Post by wazoox »

rhapsodic wrote: post #5

>Average turn-over for the newcomers: 3 months, the legal time to leave your job in France. Can someone explain the meaning of this? I think something got lost in translation.

When you're a "cadre" (most engineers are), you can leave or be fired on the spot for 3 months (now 4), renewable once (so then at most 6 months, now 8 months) without any notice, no need for a good reason, it's just over, bye bye, here's your cardboard box and get out, US style.

So in this case, what could happen? either you're a competent engineer, got just hired and sent to this circle of hell, you'd probably leave the next day, no regrets; or you're radically incompetent and you just stick to this job and salary, until 2 months and 29 days later the manager just fires you because you're no good (and he can). Rinse, repeat.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#46

Post by _pmf_ »

lifeisstillgood wrote: post #36
jmull wrote: post #25

I would guess the project was (is?) running pretty much just as the people in charge wanted it to run. 10 years in and they were still billing -- more than ever -- for a project that would have completed 7-8 years previously if things had been done according to plan. All the seemingly massively stupid and counter productive decisions made make sense if the goal is to confuse matters to make it seem like progress has…

But they are being fined at E1000's a day. In the UK we now have projects forced to go through regular if not frequent traffic light reviews - a panel of actual experts reviews the project - i think it was one such thing that killed the NHS network project (12 billion over spend). one panel, one review. saved money. i suspect the french gov will have put something similar in place, but i do agree with the final parag…

> a panel of actual experts reviews the project

Except, as these things go, what is being reviewed is whether the projects meets its arbitrarily nonsensical, self contradictory requirements and whether all 1528 required process artifacts have been properly archived in manila folders, not whether the project makes sense or follows basic economic principles.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#48

Post by desertrider12 »

msla wrote: post #12
mpweiher wrote: post #4

And there are people who claim performance doesn't matter, only correctness does. Hmm.. Also: we chose C++, because it is fast.

> And there are people who claim performance doesn't matter, only correctness does. Hmm.. Performance is meaningless if the code is not correct. After all, I can make the code arbitrarily fast if I'm not going to be held to any standard of correctness: It always returns "FOOBAR". Done, and very, very fast. > Also: we chose C++, because it is fast. That is a bit naive. C++ is a standard, so how fast is a stack of pape…

C++ is only "fast" because people who care about performance use it and a lot of people who are good at compilers work on gcc/intel/llvm. If the LLVM team decided to spend 5 years making python "fast", I bet they could make it benchmark just as well as C++.

Re: Project from Hell (2008)

#49

Post by cpeterso »

So what was the ultimate fate of the project? The 2018 follow-up post [1] says the boss was jailed for fraud, but doesn't say whether the project eventually shipped or was killed (or, even worse, is still in development).

[1] https://projectfailures.wordpress.com/2018/03/24/follow-up-o...

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