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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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