• (cs) in reply to I Best VP In All Portland
    Anonymous:

    Alex Papadimoulis:
    Several months later, and long after the developers built the real Knowledge Essentials system, Binnentech finally approved the purchase (despite paying it long ago) and Dave returned to The Netherlands to do a real install of the system. A few months later, Binnentech purchased a full license and deployed the system across the globe.

    Based on my experience working with the Dutch, the actual timeline was years, not months.  Why make a decision now, when you can endlessly discuss the merits and failings over the long haul.   It was amusing to watch contractors, employees, and management come and go over the years while the "decision makers" continued to debate the details of the product purchase and deployment.  Basically they made a career out of the process.

    ya ya ya

    I don't know about what time you are talking, but at this moment we have some European Tender legislation. As a big company, or government unit, you have to shoot out a very well specified requirement, on which anyone can participate. That is to make sure AMD has the same probability as Intel to be chosen, stuff like that.

    The fun on this game is that large contractors are needed to guide the Tender. Because if the spec is wrong, you could end up with the wrong product. No matter how much you like Intel, SAP, or LogicaCMG, you have to do the tender. And you have to select the companies on the criteria you set up front.

    The preparation of the tender can take something like a year, and often misses the deadline. To compensate that, the offers sometimes need to be made in 2 weeks, where 2 months is more reasonable... Needles to say, the year of preparation is just a waste of time. But hey, thats what Europe says our country should do :(

  • (cs) in reply to tiro
    tiro:
    mbvlist:

    Maybe I'm mistaking, but everytime some of your politicians, or someone who thinks he is important (lets say Dr. Phill), need a bad example, they take the Netherlands. We're the guys that are killing babies at random, who smoke a joint everyday, and so forth. There are people smoking weed each day, but that's a very small minority. It's just more visible than (for example) crack-addicts in the USA.

     

    Sooooo your argument is that all Americans think all people from the Netherlands smoke weed because you might have heard Dr. Phil say something about it once?

    Actually, that's a pretty valid argument on The Internets.  You did, however, forget to compare us to Nazis. 
     

    No, I heard it more often. But I forgot the names of those republicans and democrats. Appearantly some Americans know better ;) Sorry for generalising too much.

    I won't compare the American society to the Germans back then. Maybe the government ;) But that's way offtopic

  • JL (unregistered) in reply to Scott

    Anonymous:
    How long did Dave get to stay in the Netherlands?  Kind of shallow here, but that was the cool part of the story for me.

     I understand it's quite shallow over in the Netherlands, too.

     But seriously, there's every chance that company wasn't actually in the Netherlands, due to the story anonymizing.

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    [image]Binnentech finally bit when the sales rep told them about a new product: a much simpler knowledge management solution called "Knowledge Essentials" that could be used without a costly migration....There was just one small problem: Dave had never heard of Knowledge Essentials.

    <font size="+1">S</font>ome salesmen will do anything to get their commission.
  • doc0tis (unregistered) in reply to James
    Anonymous:

    Jesus, with this kind of business model I could be the most successful government IT contractor on the face of the earth!  And it would probably work!

     
     
    Seriously,  Mike Judge should turn this into the sequel to Office Space.  I'd pay 9 bucks a ticket to go see that.

    But would you spend $9 a ticket now to see a movie that they've kinda thought about? ;-)

     

    --doc0tis 

  • Been there, done that (unregistered)

    While sub-contracting for Comverse (CMVT) a decade ago, when they were relatively small and expanding, I learned that their standard practice was:

    1. Win a contract with promises of "we have A, B, anc C" while actually having A and maybe a vague idea of how to do B and no idea of how to do C.
    2. Start developing the product from the money already paid by the customer.
    3. Every time the customer discovers that its specifications weren't accurate enough, charge 100% more to "implement the changes".

    Sometimes customers will do entire purchasing decisions based on some demo functions glued together with C and Perl scripts.

    But it works.... if you didn't do that then the competition, which also do this, will always win.

  • (cs) in reply to EvanED
    EvanED:

    Sometimes I wonder if I have what it takes and should stay a grad student and go for a PhD, or if I should leave with a masters and go into industry. And then I read stories like this, and I know that I want to stay. Mmmm, non-real-world-ness...

    From what I've heard, politics, backstabbing and dishonesty can be every bit as bad in the academic world as in the corporate one. Me, I couldn't wait to get my degree and start working on software that's actually going to be used rather than barely functional proof-of-concept stuff.

  • (cs) in reply to Derek
    Anonymous:

    Anonymous:
    It's this how all business is done?

     

    Pretty much, yes. 

     yup, i'd have to agree.  At my previous job, we'd sold several licenses to a process/request management app, and conveniently hosted it for the clients (there was an option for  the client to purchase a standalone package, but that never sold).  Whaty we didn't tell the clients however, is that they accessed out internal version of the application (used to manage our internal processes and requests), simply hidden behind another domain.  The reason? When the app was initially written, it was written directly into production, and was so thoroughly entrenched into the rest of the internal system, that it was not even possible to create a 'standalone' version, without re-writing the entire project.

  • billyg (unregistered) in reply to EvanED

    At least you'll get you're ego stroked when you hear Dr. EvanED.

    You'll also be completely useless to those of us that produce for a living.

    At least with a Masters that might be hope for you.

  • billyg (unregistered) in reply to EvanED

    EvanED:

    [image] Anonymous:
    [image] Anonymous:
    It's this how all business is done?

     

     

    Pretty much, yes. 

     

     

    Sometimes I wonder if I have what it takes and should stay a grad student and go for a PhD, or if I should leave with a masters and go into industry. And then I read stories like this, and I know that I want to stay. Mmmm, non-real-world-ness...

    At least you'll get you're ego stroked when you hear Dr. EvanED.

    You'll also be completely useless to those of us that produce for a living.

    At least with a Masters that might be hope for you.

  • (cs) in reply to ManBunny

    Anonymous:
    It's this how all business is done?

    Unfortunately (?) not. For this to succeed, some criteria needs to be met.

    1. The organization you're selling to must have a sufficient level of incompetence. This is not rare these days.
    2. The organization you're selling to must be suitably large. Preferably large enough for the right hand to be unaware of the existence of a left hand (and moreso, even if it had a slight knowledge of the other hand's existence, it must be too too busy to not worry what it might be doing)

    Personally, I liked the part where the approval for payment came only after the payment was made. Interestingly, I've noticed this not to be too uncommon these days. If for some reason the payment would not be accepted, it'll usually just go for another round until someone pays it - and someone usually does it sooner or later. However, for this, same criterias as above need to be met.

  • Wuggy (unregistered) in reply to Noam Samuel
    Noam Samuel:
    Yes, that's right, there have been more than 5 versions of /bin/true. I'd like to see their CVS commit comments.

    I think I've got them right here:

    1 - Initial version
    2 - Fixed bug #1984 - Now returns true correctly.
    3 - Implemeented CR #2048 - Version number added. Now possible to tell if using buggy earlier version of "true" or not.
    4 - Fixed bug #3239 - Now returns true correctly again, instead of the version occasonally.
    5 - Implemented CR #4238 - Extended to return FILE_NOT_FOUND.
  • Jon W (unregistered) in reply to ManBunny

    Is this how all business is done?

     

    No, as far as I can tell, only Enterprise business.

     

  • (cs) in reply to I Best VP In All Portland

    Based on my experience working with the Dutch, the actual timeline was years, not months.  Why make a decision now, when you can endlessly discuss the merits and failings over the long haul.

    Don't knock procrastination; it has excellent survival characteristics:

    • If you never make a decision, you can never make a mistake
    • If the need for a decision passes before the decision is made, it clearly wasn't important enough to prioritise or expend effort on
    • You can do an awful lot of research in the guise of information-gathering...
  • (cs)

    The Real WTF(tm) is that they really had developers prepared to quickly build a prototype (and probably the real product) as fast as possible. I've experienced several similar situations, but in most such cases, the selling company had no capacity to do any real work for the customer for the next two months.

  • (cs)

    Anonymous:
    In Linux at least, you don't even need a script for true.

    Making it a binary has the advantage of not having to fire up the interpreter for the script. 

  • (cs) in reply to gwenhwyfaer

    gwenhwyfaer:
    Don't knock procrastination; it has excellent survival characteristics:

    • If you never make a decision, you can never make a mistake
    • If the need for a decision passes before the decision is made, it clearly wasn't important enough to prioritise or expend effort on
    • You can do an awful lot of research in the guise of information-gathering...

    And then there's my favorite:

    • If you wait to the last minute, you'll only spend a minute doing it
  • (cs) in reply to EvanED

    EvanED:

    Sometimes I wonder if I have what it takes and should stay a grad student and go for a PhD, or if I should leave with a masters and go into industry. And then I read stories like this, and I know that I want to stay. Mmmm, non-real-world-ness...

    Don't worry too much about it.  I'm a PhD dropout, and after about a week of feeling depressed that I was giving up, I suddenly had this very happy feeling of being free.  I don't regret it (besides, I keep getting email telling me how I can always get a prestigious non-accredited diploma :-).

    As far as industry goes, some places are smart and well run, and some are just a bunch of bozos. It's a lot like academia, where logic takes second place to petty politics.  Most of these horror stories come from places that use the word "Enterprise", so avoid that whenever you can  Also avoid "Management System".  If you can't tell what the software does from its description, then don't accept the job.  There are great places though, places that make products that you can hold or programs that serve a purpose or are fun to write' as opposed to places that make "solutions".

    But if you're going to leave school, do it sooner than later.  I found myself applying for entry level positions because my work experience was 4 years old and I wasn't a recent graduate.  Industry just does not like people that aren't easily categorized.

    The difficult thing after leaving grad school is that it's hard to reject a job offer on an empty stomach.

  • Drocket (unregistered)

    I want to know more about the 'simulate an installation of Knowledge Essentials and run into "technical difficulties' part of the story.  Like, what exactly was he supposed to do?  Was he just supposed to fiddle around with a blank CD while making sure nobody looked over his shoulder?  Or did they go the 'high tech' route and build a VB application with a fake installation screen followed by fake error messages?  It wouldn't be hard at all to build an 'installer' which would show a progress bar.  At about the 60% mark, throw up a 'Error:  unable to read file XXX' screen  Oops, they gave me a bad disc.  I'll call HQ and have them overnight another CD but before they do that, what exactly did you want this software to do again?  No reason, just curious.  

    Basically, did they use any props in this little scam, or was he supposed to wing it?

  • TK (unregistered) in reply to biziclop

    biziclop:

    One Wednesday evening I was busy staring at the telly trying to recover from another mind-numbing day of software maintenance when I suddenly spotted a commercial. Our company was proudly advertising our new Service. I stared blankly for another five minutes while trying to figure out what to do.

    For I knew I was the lead developer of the product. Furthermore, I knew the development project hasn't even started yet. There was no kickoff, I didn't have the specs (and by specification I mean a bunch of marketing guys sitting on the opposite side of a large table joyfully brainstorming while I desperately try to follow their pogostick of thoughts and write down the keywords), all I knew from the advert that users can register on Friday.

    Several months later (we were progressing well, except for the fact that we had to gather the registrations in a dummy database for two months) we needed a decision from marketing. We've spent a week using various methods of interrogation, but all our effort was in vain. And then came the spark: I went to one of our resellers and picked up a leaflet that went into great detail as to why our service was the best in the world. I managed to find all the answers in it.

    Leaflet-driven development works just as well as its lie-driven counterpart. 

    Now, that's a read WTF. You should submit stuff to this site,

  • (cs)
    Alex Papadimoulis:

    [image]

    In terms of code, Knowledge Essentials could be summed up like this:

    int main(int argc, char ** args)
    {
    return 0;
    }

    It compiles, ship it!
     

  • Linux Luser (unregistered) in reply to Noam Samuel

    On my system, it says version 5.93.

     

    Maybe I better upgrade... 

  • JosueMedia (unregistered)

    WOW, this is SICK! .... major WTF ... i could never pull such a thing nor be part of for a company to deceive clients. I would love to have seen Dave's reaction when he expected to fail but was not how it ended up to be. I think Dave deservers a 2 weeks vacation + a free trip anywhere around the world, including his 20% bonus.

  • John Cowan (unregistered) in reply to ptomblin

    Actually, "true" is a lot simpler than that.  On some systems it's zero bytes long.

  • rob_squared (unregistered) in reply to ManBunny

    Anonymous:
    It's this how all business is done?

     

    I thought this kind of crap only happened at school.  ie: I forgot to do my homework but the teacher forgot to post the assignment details online.  Or some such. 

  • (cs) in reply to EvanED

    Cheers Alex, awsome WTF. It's good to throw in something unpredictable once in a while to stop us from getting too cyncical (too late for some though).

    BTW, read a book by scott adams(Dilbert creator) and you'll find a huge amount of this stuff. In his book he says that there are 3 sorts of crap(products):
    1. Crappier Crap
    2. Exactly the same Crap
    3. Better Crap

    Better add to that list "Non-existant crap".

  • (cs) in reply to spec

    This is the general scenario in any business. If vendor is not doing it from his side then long management thought process from client side will make vendor to stall at some point in the development cycle. Bottom line is that this happens everytime.

    With regards,

    Mandar Thosar 

  • Raw (unregistered) in reply to mandar-seo

    Been there, done that. Repeatedly. Except that the company I work for didn't even bother to deliver, and they still managed to get their money because some people at the customer had too much prestige invested in the product to call the bluff.

  • Robby (unregistered) in reply to biziclop

    Leaflet driven development can generate lots of cash:

    I once did a functional design of a "nice-to-have" development tool for a running project. For readability, I put it in leaflet style (like an advertisement). Somehow, one of our commercial guys took up the leaflet and put it in an offer for our client, telling him the tool was already built. We sold it for 70k Euro's (yes, I'm in the Netherlands!)

    Then, the tool could be used in an other project (same client). Changed the name, sold it again......

    Finally, we had to show the program, but it had never been built. "it's the concept you paid for", "it has to be customized", "it's developed as a prototype, now we must build the real stuff for you"  bla bla bla.

    We ended up in a project, paid by the customer, to build the tool (new name!) for 200 k Euro's. The tool was built, worked(!) and has never been used since.

    Now they sell it as a "module" (extra option, has to be paid for) in a standard application! I'm sure this client will buy this module one day..... they really need it!

     

  • Not True! (unregistered) in reply to Dave (not that one)
    Anonymous:

    int main(int argc, char ** args)
    {
      return 0;
    }

    The only problem is, this particular code was stolen from the Linux program "true".

    This is simply not true!

    True uses exit instead of return! And no magic number '0' but EXIT_SUCCESS like any good and standards compliant program should. What is '0' anyways. This makes no sense! Real "true" is over sixty lines without copyright notice. How dare you trivialize such a brillant piece of engineering!

  • flatline (unregistered) in reply to Chris

    I have actually been involved in almost an identical situation.  For any doubters out there, I can assure you that this truly is how a lot of business is done.  Salesmen are constantly deceiving potential customers and, believe it or not, these customers actually want to be deceived.

     What's more, this is why geeky startups - the ones that have the product first and then try to sell it - fail.

  • (cs) in reply to mbvlist
    tiro:
    Actually, that's a pretty valid argument on The Internets.  You did, however, forget to compare us to Nazis.
    Oh hey, it's a Godwin!
  • disaster (unregistered) in reply to mbvlist
    mbvlist:
    Anonymous:

    Alex Papadimoulis:
    Several months later, and long after the developers built the real Knowledge Essentials system, Binnentech finally approved the purchase (despite paying it long ago) and Dave returned to The Netherlands to do a real install of the system. A few months later, Binnentech purchased a full license and deployed the system across the globe.

    Based on my experience working with the Dutch, the actual timeline was years, not months.  Why make a decision now, when you can endlessly discuss the merits and failings over the long haul.   It was amusing to watch contractors, employees, and management come and go over the years while the "decision makers" continued to debate the details of the product purchase and deployment.  Basically they made a career out of the process.

    ya ya ya

    I don't know about what time you are talking, but at this moment we have some European Tender legislation. As a big company, or government unit, you have to shoot out a very well specified requirement, on which anyone can participate. That is to make sure AMD has the same probability as Intel to be chosen, stuff like that.

    The fun on this game is that large contractors are needed to guide the Tender. Because if the spec is wrong, you could end up with the wrong product. No matter how much you like Intel, SAP, or LogicaCMG, you have to do the tender. And you have to select the companies on the criteria you set up front.

    The preparation of the tender can take something like a year, and often misses the deadline. To compensate that, the offers sometimes need to be made in 2 weeks, where 2 months is more reasonable... Needles to say, the year of preparation is just a waste of time. But hey, thats what Europe says our country should do :(

     

    Oh gods don't remind me. We just went through that process for a new mass storage. Got about 8-10 replies to the first round of tendering, of which approximately one actually satisfied something approaching what we really meant. Made a shortlist of four for the next round, of which only two actually came through with proposals, not including the one we actually liked from the first round. Eventually end up with what is basically an upgrade of our current system. 

  • noname (unregistered) in reply to I Best VP In All Portland
    Anonymous:

    Alex Papadimoulis:
    Several months later, and long after the developers built the real Knowledge Essentials system, Binnentech finally approved the purchase (despite paying it long ago) and Dave returned to The Netherlands to do a real install of the system. A few months later, Binnentech purchased a full license and deployed the system across the globe.

    Based on my experience working with the Dutch, the actual timeline was years, not months.  Why make a decision now, when you can endlessly discuss the merits and failings over the long haul.   It was amusing to watch contractors, employees, and management come and go over the years while the "decision makers" continued to debate the details of the product purchase and deployment.  Basically they made a career out of the process.

    ya ya ya

     

    As a dutch person I am highly offended by this statement. I have allready called several friends and we are scheduling a meeting to discuss the possibility of setting up a committee to study this statement and come with recomendations for setting up a workgroup to formulate a plan to hire a profesional to select a training program so that we can send someone to learn how to properly reply to this insult. When we've done that we just have hire someone to send to this program, for which will set up a committee....



     

  • (cs) in reply to flatline

    What's more, this is why geeky startups - the ones that have the product first and then try to sell it - fail.

    Yeah, stupid failed Google.

     

  • FuzzyW (unregistered)

    Yep sounds about right! We have bought these types of systems, sold an idea, paid for it and then spend the next 2 years helping the company design and improve it while still paying vast sums in support for a crippled and half-baked system, which never really flies as well as the sales rep said it would!

  • (cs) in reply to Licky Lindsay
    Anonymous:

    If "K&R" is defined as the style used in the The C Programming Language, 2nd edition, then it places the opening brace of a function on its own line. Only left-braces *inside* a function go on the same line as the if, else, while, etc.

    No The second edition of "The C Programming language" is not in K+R style, despite being written by K+R.  K+R style has nothing to do with the location of curly braces, but is whether the types of the arguments are written before the argument names inside the parentheses or after the parentheses e.g.

     void foo( int x ); // ANSI or K+R second edition style

    {} 

    void foo( x ) // "K+R style", as in the first edition of the book

    int x

    {}
     

  • Crazy Dave (unregistered) in reply to MET

    Credit Insurance company by any chance?

     
    Sounds suspiciously like some of the shit we have had to use recently.. 

  • (cs) in reply to mbvlist
    mbvlist:

    I'm just really curious what company you anonimized to binnentech. Sounds a lot like 'binnendienst', which every tech company has. Maybe a Philips devision?

     

    Well, I would be surprised if it isn't just a Dutch-ish version of Initech.

  • U-wing (unregistered) in reply to ammoQ

    ammoQ:
    The Real WTF(tm) is that they really had developers prepared to quickly build a prototype (and probably the real product) as fast as possible. I've experienced several similar situations, but in most such cases, the selling company had no capacity to do any real work for the customer for the next two months.

     Exactly. It is not too uncommon these days not to have a product and not to have any developers. When you get the deal, you start looking for people. Cutting cost of course. That way you also avoid embarrassing stories like this. The newly hired hands don't know that they don't know anything about the product because it does not exist. Very enterprisey. And scalable to smaller companies also.

  • donrico (unregistered)

    normally i dont come up with the name of the app until about half way through development. (and normally its pretty lame - not creative enough on that side) it must be awesome knowing what the name of it will be before you begin.

  • (cs) in reply to mbvlist
    mbvlist:

    Maybe I'm mistaking, but everytime some of your politicians, or someone who thinks he is important (lets say Dr. Phill), need a bad example, they take the Netherlands. We're the guys that are killing babies at random, who smoke a joint everyday, and so forth. There are people smoking weed each day, but that's a very small minority. It's just more visible than (for example) crack-addicts in the USA.

    Please don't confuse american politicians and fake doctors/random celebrities for the general run of the US population.  Despite the images portraid in the media, most Americans are actually reasonable, reasonably educated, friendly people.  It's just very popular in the modern media to portray us as rabid wackos with IQs lower than our shoe sizes and the educational standards of a squirrel hooked on heroin.  This is true of European and American media.  Remember, politicians, modern reporters, celebrities and fake doctors are all in the entertainment business.

    Most of us know the Netherlands aren't at all like they are portraid in Pulp Fiction.  It's a two-way street though.  Keep in mind that most of America bears very little resemblance to what it looks like on CNN (especially during election season), and we'll keep in mind that you aren't all stoned all the time.  How's that for fair?

  • rohcQaH (unregistered)

    Anonymous:
    http://www.kiasyn.com/index.php?a=pastebin&p=20

    on most platforms, your maybe will turn out to be biased. bad code. 

     

  • (cs) in reply to EddiePedant
    EddiePedant:

    What's more, this is why geeky startups - the ones that have the product first and then try to sell it - fail.

    Yeah, stupid failed Google.

     To be fair, they really didn't start with a product they were trying to sell other people. They started with a service they thought other people would use.

  • gauauu (unregistered) in reply to MET
    MET:
    Anonymous:

    If "K&R" is defined as the style used in the The C Programming Language, 2nd edition, then it places the opening brace of a function on its own line. Only left-braces *inside* a function go on the same line as the if, else, while, etc.

    No The second edition of "The C Programming language" is not in K+R style, despite being written by K+R.  K+R style has nothing to do with the location of curly braces, but is whether the types of the arguments are written before the argument names inside the parentheses or after the parentheses e.g.

     void foo( int x ); // ANSI or K+R second edition style

    {} 

    void foo( x ) // "K+R style", as in the first edition of the book

    int x

    {}
     

     

    I think most people would disagree with you.  While you have a point that the argument types are defined different ways based on the edition, most people, when talking about K+R style, refer to the braces.

     

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_True_Brace_Style#K.26R_style 

  • Big Cheese (unregistered)

    Until I started my own company, I never quite grasped the concept of my then-employer selling features BEFORE we'd built them.  Sounded like a roundabout way of doing things.

    Now I understand.  I don't enjoy it, but it's unfortunately a fact of life.  The trick is not selling something that's too far off from what you already have...
     

  • German (unregistered) in reply to ManBunny

    Anonymous:
    It's this how all business is done?

     

    I work in development and I've seen some projects go like this for real (not all projects, anyway)

    Marketing reps have no clue...

  • a (unregistered) in reply to mbvlist
    mbvlist:
    tiro:
    mbvlist:

    Maybe I'm mistaking, but everytime some of your politicians, or someone who thinks he is important (lets say Dr. Phill), need a bad example, they take the Netherlands. We're the guys that are killing babies at random, who smoke a joint everyday, and so forth. There are people smoking weed each day, but that's a very small minority. It's just more visible than (for example) crack-addicts in the USA.

     

    Sooooo your argument is that all Americans think all people from the Netherlands smoke weed because you might have heard Dr. Phil say something about it once?

    Actually, that's a pretty valid argument on The Internets.  You did, however, forget to compare us to Nazis. 
     

    No, I heard it more often. But I forgot the names of those republicans and democrats. Appearantly some Americans know better ;) Sorry for generalising too much.

    Hmmm.. All of that hash clouding your brain? ;) 

  • Joe (unregistered) in reply to Dave (not that one)
    Anonymous:

    int main(int argc, char ** args)
    {
      return 0;
    }

    I can assure you that--unlike the final product--this initial version is bug-free, highly performant, obviously correct, ANSI compatible, well formatted, modular, and understandable by nearly any programmer except perhaps Paula Bean. The only problem is, this particular code was stolen from the Linux program "true".

    That's overengineered.

    int main(){}

    Much better, and still 100% iso9899.
     

  • BRiaN (unregistered) in reply to ManBunny

    Yeah. Not sure I see any WTFs here.  Looks like day-to-day in this industry that's focused on perceived value rather than quality.

    Anonymous:
    It's this how all business is done?

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