I run a software development team. I have run several in the past as well. I take great pride in my team doing what they are supposed to do and try to instill that pride in them as well. More and more lately I have noticed that many of the companies that we interact with have staffs that lack any pride whatsoever. In fact, most of them don’t even seem to care at all that their product is broken, their customers are disappointed, and that their company is getting its ass handed to it. I look at this attitude as being akin to some Professional Sports Players knowing that free agency is just around the corner and they will be leaving the team anyway.

Example:

We are integrating with a company right now for our new system. Our old system is integrated with an old version of their software and limps along, thus the need for a new system – the reason I was hired to begin with. Over the past week my Enterprise Architect has been toiling over this integration often times getting seemingly random answers from their software package that make little to no sense.

This morning I had a call with one of their software gurus that went something like this:

Me: We followed your spec. It says none of these data fields are required.
Him: Well they are.
Me: So why doesn’t the spec say that?
Him: I don’t know, they are required though.
Me: Do I have the wrong spec?
Him: I’ll send you the right one.

He emails the right one.

Me: This spec also says the data in question is not required.
Him: I’ll tell our documentation people.
Me: So the server we were testing against also seems to be returning bad data.
Him: Your server is broken.
Me: You guys set it up.
Him: Yeah, its broken.
Me: Can you fix it.
Him: The thing is I am going on vacation, so after the new year yeah.

We pay these guys a crap load of cash and that is his response. Their documentation is wrong – oops – and the server is BORKED (broken to you normies) which is a aww gee darn I have a vacation to go.

Moral of the story is this: I am so sick and tired of hearing about companies that are having a hard time keeping their doors open when these same companies are the ones that are conducting business in a whogivesafuck manner. Do the rest of us a favor and just go under already – then maybe your free agents can go ruin another team.