Let's be honest. Most people don't know a whole lot about structural 
engineering. But now consider the following scenario:

   You're surfing the Internet, when you discover the website of a large 
international contractor specialising in the installation of luxury 
swimming pools. So you look around, and eventually place an order for 
$4,000 to have a swimming pool installed in your back garden.

   Three days later, one guy with a spade turns up. He digs a 6-foot 
wide, 1-foot deep hole in the middle of your lawn, fills it with water 
using a garden hose, and then says "There's ya pool mate. Can I have my 
$4,000 now?"

Now if you're anything like me, this story does /not/ end with you 
calmly handing over $4,000 of your hard-earned cash. (!!) More plausible 
endings include forcefully stating "You owe me a new ****ing lawn, you 
moron!" or calling the police.

Thing is, most people don't know much about structural engineering. But 
it turns out they /do/ know the difference between a luxury swimming 
pool and a hole in the ground with water in it.



Now consider a larger project:

   Your boss decides you need more storage, so he hires a contractor to 
build a small storage building round the back. [Ignoring for the moment 
that you need planning permission for that stuff.] So the contractor 
sense round a bunch of hot-shot salesmen who ask you about what you want 
and so forth. And you discuss how obviously security is an issue, you 
want the building to be secure. You want automatic fire suppression and 
burglar alarms. And ideally you'd like the outside of the building to 
look reasonably presentable - you know, within budget constraints. It's 
only a warehouse, after all.

   Then the builders arrive. And by "builders", I mean one guy with a 
spade and a cement mixer. You all watch in disbelief as he digs a large 
rectangular hole in the ground, fills it with cement, sticks some wooden 
panels vertically into the wet cement to make walls. When the cement 
dries, he hangs a large sheet of fabric over the top, and drapes one 
edge over the doorway to make a "door".

   When you say "that doesn't look very secure", the company assures you 
that they are industry-leading security experts. When you ask why the 
building has a storage capacity that's a tiny fraction of what you 
actually asked for, they say that due to the time constraints, there 
were some "issues" with the build, which they assure you will be 
straitened out in the near future. And when you ask about the automatic 
fire suppression, they tell you that it has automatic fire suppression, 
but when they installed it in the building there were some "issues" 
which this just need to iron out.

   (And the burglar alarm? Well, it turns out that due to the radical 
industry-leading security implemented in the building, such an alarm 
would actually be redundant. Their sophisticated design actually 
obviates the need for one, saving you a considerable amount of money.)

Now obviously, in the real world, this contractor is going to get sued 
into the ground. Because even a trained monkey can tell the difference 
between a large professionally-built steel warehouse and a shack 
consisting of four wooden panels cemented into the ground. No matter how 
pointy your bosses' hair is, he's going to seriously go to town on these 
people.



But now consider a generic Daily WTF story:

   Your company needs a stock control system. Nothing fancy, just a 
program that tracks what comes in, what goes out, what you therefore 
have on the shelves, and estimates when you need to reorder. So you look 
for a company that can either sell you an existing product or design one 
for you.

   After a while, you find a large software house offering to 
custom-tailor a product to your individual needs for what /seems/ like 
quite a lot of money. But their sales pitch is really great, and your 
boss likes them. So you arrange a meeting. The high-powered salesmen 
arrive in their expensive suits. You negotiate what the system will and 
won't incorporate. And a delivery schedule is agreed. It's "only" a 
simple stock control system, so the deadline is a few weeks hence.

   A few weeks come and go, and after repeated phone calls, the 
contractor eventually delivers... an MS Access database, together with a 
crudely-written MS Word pamphlet explaining how to sprinkle your 
business data across the half-dozen tables that make up the database 
such that the data normalisation rules are preserved. (Um, isn't that 
the SOFTWARE'S job??)

   When you ask about the raft of features that are simply non-existent, 
they tell you the features are implemented, but there were "issues" with 
them, so they don't work properly yet. When you ask about all the stuff 
that /is/ present but just doesn't work properly, they tell you these 
bugs will be fixed in the next update.

   The next update fixes a tiny few bugs, doesn't really affect the vast 
majority of bugs, and somehow manages to introduce several /brand new/ bugs.

And yet, apparently everybody is... OK... with this... ??



This is the baffling thing. Not that there are software companies that 
try to screw you, or who blatantly don't have a clue what they're doing. 
Surely people like that exist in /any/ field. But if you ask for a 
luxury swimming pool and you get a hole in the ground, you do not accept 
the work. If you ask for a warehouse and you get a wooden shack, you do 
not accept the work. And yet, if you ask for a commercial stock control 
application and you get a trivial MS Access database that you have to 
operate by hand... nobody seems to comprehend that this is NOT WHAT YOU 
PAID FOR.

How is that kind of screwiness even possible?? How can software 
companies deliver a product that departs so drastically from what they 
promised, and yet NOBODY NOTICES? It's mind boggling.



Then again, in some of these stories, you have to think that to some 
degree, the customer got what they deserved. I mean, if you tell the 
customer "this will take 6 months", and they say "oh, can't you have it 
finished by Thursday?", and "no" is not deemed an acceptable answer... 
WTF were you EXPECTING to get?!

It's like... If I phoned a building contractor and said "I'd like a 
housing estate. Can I have it by 7pm today?", there is only one possible 
answer. If I asked for maybe two weeks or something, a suitably 
disreputable contractor /might/ try to throw something together by that 
deadline. But 7pm today? Nobody is even stupid enough to /ask/ such a 
question in the first place.

And yet, with software, this is perfectly OK? Wuh?!



OK, I think I need to go outside again for a while... >_<

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