IT Development Bloopers

Here you can read some serious funny (depending on your perspective) development bloppers (or bloopers) I encountered in my professional life. Read it, be amused, horrified and maybe learn from it.

A company in Jerusalem wanted to have a major project developed. Of course, the specifications must be made first, and then development. So what happened? The requirements, specifications, project plan and acceptance tests were documented, bound in leather bindings and placed in a nice closet … But were never read.

After nine months of intensive development and a million dollars later, the customer (the company itself) looked bewildered at the end product! “We never ordered that!“

A company in Tel Aviv was specialized in converting printed encyclopedias into digital encyclopedias (on CD). The CTO of the company had a very unusable hobby; he liked to collect programmers. The actual work was done twice a year by himself and his product manager, while the rest of the 20+ programmers were amusing themselves with playing Frisbee and browsing the internet.

A project manager in a company in Rishon loved to look at women, so what did he do? He hired five female programmers and one senior one. The senior programmer was programming, and he could look at the rest.

A company in Tel Aviv north was successful in their development of their IT projects, until senior management (the VP-RND manager and the Software manager) went into a fight. Both managers were sabotaging each other projects to the extent that they called the police and went to court to demand restraining orders against each other.

A large company in Jerusalem developed a large website for three years with 250 people working on it until they were discovered by Microsoft. Microsoft was interested in buying the company, and before they did, they sent an Information Analyst to the company to find out what they were actually considering buying. At the end of his search, he found out that the company’s technology was based on a small DLL (34 kilobytes), from which its source code was lost and was copied from a post in a forum in Australia as a beta-program and the developer forget all about it.

A large company in Kvar Saba developed a large, complicated website. They had a large team of programmers (145 of them) working intensively on it, and they had several potential clients (like IBM, Boeing and others). They even reached the professional news media as the most promising technology company of the year in Israel. There was a small problem, though. When a browser contacted the website, the server load was increased with 600 Mb of memory. When the second browser reached the site, the server memory load doubled! They had no idea why that happened. None of the developers and the RND manager had ever heard about the term ‘single instancing‘.

A large company in New York thought that Israel was good in RND. So they created a (daughter) company in Jerusalem and the marketing was done in New York itself. After three years of fooling around in Israel and spending eight million dollars, they came to the conclusion that the RND was based on bluff and the marketing was based on professionalism. So what did they do? They swapped! Marketing in Israel and RND in New York. After one month, the company could finally start selling.

The senior management of a medium-sized company in Haifa did not understand the principle of design for an IT project. After multiple efforts explaining the principle of a designer, I finally used an example of building a house and an architect compared with a software designer and a computer program. That they (finally) understood. Six months after my job was done, I discovered that they hired a real (building) architect and forced the bewildered programmers to listen to the man.

At a medium-sized software company in the UK, they were developing questionairs to test the potential candidate programmers in C#. They discovered quickly that most C# programmers, especially those with extended experience, couldn’t finish the test, while the new programmers could. Management decided to test their own programmers and fired all those failed as well. At the end, they hired the beginners, and the result? They themselves failed all running and future projects and went bankrupt.

Two project managers were hired for a large software development company in Holland. One project manager moved his development team to Cyprus in a nice Mediterranean climate. The other project manager didn’t and stayed in cold and wet Holland. Guess which project succeeded? Correct, the one in Cyprus. Not only did they succeed, but they finished their project in record time and returned to Holland happily. After that, they could take a three weeks vacation (paid by the project budget) and there was still time before the second project manager finally was finished with his team of unhappy programmers. The man also failed to complete the project according to the requirements and was 60% over budget. The other project manager was 55% under his budget.

In a web development company in Jerusalem, Israel, they started a new project. The project suppose to last one year and the cost would be one million dollars. Per accident, they hired a Dutch project manager, and they were finished in four months and 10% of the budget. As a good commercial company, they rewarded the project manager with a million dollar … in shares. Except the shares were not allowed to be sold, only after two years. The project manager left the company. The company was bankrupt after two years because of incompetence: all their projects failed.

An industrial company in Tel Aviv hired a software group leader. He was in charge of the teams, who were assigned to develop software for industrial ultrasound. Their customers were railroad and airplane companies. He reported to the software manager and the chief engineer. That didn’t go well. The chief engineer and the software manager were in constant fight and did everything they could to sabotage each other projects. The group leader was forced to keep both men from entering physically the rooms of the programmers in order to keep their software from sabotaging.