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At a certain client, was asked to help them with an "intermediary" solution to stopgap a license renewal on their HR recruiting system.

This is something I was very familiar with, so no big. Did some requirements gathering, told them we could knock it out in 6 weeks.

We start the project, no problems, everything is fine until about 2.5 weeks in. At this point, someone demands that we engage with the testing team early. It grates a little as this client had the typical Indian outsourcing mega-corp pointey-clickey shit show "testing" (automation? Did you mean '10 additional testers?') you get at companies who put business people in charge of technology, but I couldn't really argue with it.

So we're progressing along and the project manager decides now is a great time to bugger the fuck off to India for 3 months, so she's totally gone. This is the point it goes off the rails. Without a PM to control the scope, the "lead tester," we'll call her Shrilldesi, proceeds to sit in a room and start trying to control the design of the system. Rather than testing anything in the specification, she just looked at the existing full HRIS recruiting system they were using and starts submitting bugs for missing features. The fuckwit serfs they'd assigned from HR to oversee this process just allowed it to happen totally losing focus on the fact this was an interim solution to hold them over for 6 months and avoid a contract renewal.

I get real passive aggressive at this point and refuse to deliver anything outside the original scope. We negotiate and end up with about 150% scope bloat and a now untenable timeline that we delivered about 2 weeks late, but in the end that absolute whore made my life a living hell for the duration of the project. She then got the recognition at the project release for her "excellent work," no mention of the people who actually did the work.

Tl;Dr people suck and if you value your sanity, you'll avoid companies that say things like, "we're not in the technology business" as an excuse to have shitty, ignorant staff.

Comments
  • 3
    Thanks for the rant, but my blood pressure wants a word :(
  • 0
    You are in a technology business if you have an in house developer. Why else would you have a in house developer if you are not in technology business.
  • 0
    @mr-user
    Everyone is in the technology business. If you took the computers out, the businesses fall over.
  • 0
    @SortOfTested

    That not how I would define a technology business. Almost every business use computer these day.

    It like saying since you draw picture you must be a painter.
  • 1
    @mr-user
    You're free to define it however you want.

    Over the last 20+ years I've worked with a large number of companies in many different verticals. All of those that failed, were the ones that didn't recognize that they needed a technological advantage and let their technical IP and human capital walk out the door. They bought the same software as everyone else, and tailored their processes to those tools. They then either shrunk into irrelevancy, or were bought out for their customer list.
  • 0
    @SortOfTested

    If you put it that way that make sense. Learn something today. Thanks.
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