OT - Corporate Stupidity

[Ovid]

Thought I would write this up to get my mind off the election.

---

A couple of years ago, I was working at an insurance company on a huge project working with very sensitive financial data. We had outsourced the project management to a well-known consulting firm that sent us, amongst other things, a fresh-out-of-college computer neophyte who couldn't grasp the meaning of "specifications." She kept bad-mouthing the head of the payroll department because he stopped sending her payroll information. His complaint was that she kept re-requesting the information with a different format every time, taxing the resources of his programming staff. He finally refused to deliver anymore payroll data until she firmed up her specifications.

The pissing contest began. She copied her e-mails to everyone in her address book and he would hit "reply all." Other people kept getting added to the list and it kept growing and growing and growing. Finally, she managed to supply him with a set of specifications for the payroll data that the payroll manager believed was final. He sent her the salary information for every employee in the company -- and "replied all" to a significant percentage of the work force.

I was delighted to discover that my salary was a fair amount higher than others with comparable experience :)

Any other stories out there?

Cheers,
Ovid

Join the Perlmonks Setiathome Group or just go the the link and check out our stats.

[tilly]

I used to work at a "secure" site for a large pharmecutical company, working with financial data on what they paid contractors. The blinds were drawn and could not be opened. Cameras were banned. Yet the guards had no problem with me waltzing past carrying a laptop which had records of every payment made to outside parties in North America in the previous three years. (I was working on a query tool, and wanted to keep on working on the train.)

I don't mean that they had no problem with me walking past with a laptop that happened to have that. I mean that I specifically pointed out to them that that is what I had (in disbelief over being unable to open the blinds) and they simply did not care because it wasn't addressed in their regulations!

[royalanjr]

If it's not in the regs, they do not want to fool with it. It's a kind of minimalist thinking that (they hope) will keep them out of trouble......

Roy Alan

[Adam]

Thats pretty funny. Getting people to commit to a specific design spec is amazingly frustrating. Especially when they think they have. (I love specs which don't list even half the details, and then the guy comes back and says, "well it doesn't do what I want" even though it does what he asked for. Sigh) But I digress.

I too am distracted by the Election. Several more states should start releaseing early result info now. The polls in two states have been closed for an hour (Indiana and Kentucky) and several more states close the polls at 7pm (Eastern).

[c-era]

That reminds me of a bank I did some work for. They needed some custom reports generated from their database. When I arrived I sat down and took note on the field names and such. After a few minutes the guy from the bank asked what I was doing. I told him that I need the names of the field to generate the reports for him. He looked at me puzzled for a moment and then said, "I was just going to put the database on you laptop". This database contained customer information such as; name, address, SS#, birthdate, city of birth, mother's maiden name, bank acount #, pin #s, morgage info, and car loans. Even though I tried to explain to him why he shouldn't put a copy of the database on my laptop he was convinced that was the only way I could get the job done. After I had finished the program and got paid, I transfered my account to another bank.

[Blue]

My very first programming job was for a small company that did audiovisual filmstrips for schools. Remember those films that were just a bunch of still that you advanced at the beep from the tape back in 5th grade? This place made them.

Well, the owner had a great idea for computer aided discussion of topic materials and also computer testing with a purpose to increase retention of the material. So far, so good.

The guy never really understood computers.

Every day the spec would change. Needs would change from sequencial access to files to random access, in programming languages that made a much bigger brouhaha about it then Perl. And that's just a tame example.

The design spec would go through revisions daily. And since he was the boss and paying me hourly, he felt justified. And since it was my first programming job and I didn't know better, I let him.

Just to link this back to Perl, I guess what he had me do I could reproduce in about a week or two in Perl. Of course, I'm many years wiser, and I would take the bloody design document out of his hand, but it really would of been a good fit.

=Blue
...you might be eaten by a grue...

[redmist]

Tilly's story reminds me of when I was a punk kid with nothing better to do than sneak into office buildings. There is this big skyscraper in my hometown, and we would go into the lobby of a Fed Ex office, and when no one was looking, we snuck down some steps into an underground coridoor. This coridoor lead underground to the skyscraper 10 meters west. Then we just pretended like we belonged there and walked a good 50 meters through the coridoors, passing business men and lawyers and (on occasion) use their bathroom.

One day, when we were feeling particularly no good, we snuck into one of the elevators in the coridoors, and took it up to a random floor. Well it turned out to be a Law firm who's lawyers yelled at us, so we ran. Then we found a room that was under construction, and smoked pot in it whilst the security guards downstairs had *no* idea what was going on. It was a blast.

Moral of the story: security guards are silly.

redmist
redmist.dyndns.org
email::redmist

[wardk]

Here's a true story, from about 1991.

I was checking on some end users that were using a custom AS400 application that fed our A/P system.

I noticed at their desk the existance of a) an unused coax cable and b) a 2400 baud modem. I also noticed their response was very slow and then noticed that they were dialing in on their own modems to the AS400. I asked them why they weren't using the coax, they said their manager told them they were saving money by dialing in.

Then I query them, "where is the host", so they take me not more than 20 feet to a room housing 2 AS400's. These two supported different systems, but used the same software, tweaked to each system. Since both The systems were very inter-related, and thus, they needed to share data.

So we have 2 AS400's sitting next to each other that need to share data. Did they have a wired connection? No, these two boxes were standing alone.

So how did the data get from one to the other? Well it was "easy"....tapes. What they did is each night they cut a round tape from system A and sent it to the data center 15 miles away, where they would copy it to a square tape for mounting on system B. and thus, they were able to share!

[little]

I was working in some companies yet, but things as you described happen as I relize regularly everywhere.
So one company implemented a new system for accounting and monitoring and such stuff, but whether the employees got training on it nor was there anyone who had known how to use it, cause the boss didn't want to spent money on this however.
The very kind consultant from the solftware company who aimed to support had a basic knowledge of computers but in fact he had no idea about the companies business and did not even know about the meaning of several entry fields.
As a result the software was not used, but anotheer was installed. The funny thing from my point of view was, that the owner of the company deducted the license fee from the managers wage due to his incompetence. well ...
While working in another company those decided to take the step from the 20 year old accounting system on an AS/400 to something newer, and this was BaaN. As this is a quite powerfull one it consumed nearly 1 year of five persons to implement. The management had some little controversions about the raising costs and agreed on starting to use the new system.
All went "well" so far, except that the store for packing material ran over cause they simply forgot to reduce the used items. :-) The sales department had no idea how much of which products where left in the store and what could be sold and delivered. The accounts departement did not know what to collect or to pay and could not even send reminders. To make it short: The company made sales of 100.000 DEM in a month which was the amount of 1 percent of that companies normal sales in a month. After the second month the management continued the discussions about the needs to use a more modern software but aware of the risk to loose their jobs they agreed to use the old system again. As they had decided that there is no need to run both systems parallel for the time thats neede to assure the new system works only with minor bugs they engaged all employees for the weekend to get all data in.
To make the point: Stupidity can cost not only your neck but also a few hundred jobs.
And then there was the most stupid mangement I ever met. They tried the same as the company above, just with a different new system. As I felt the duty to report my expieriences the just sat back grinned and continued. Well, I'm currently working for the insolvency administrator of that company and guess why!

Have a nice day
All decision is left to your taste