Development Bloppers

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.

• A large conventional IT-company in Holland, Amsterdam, had a problem. All of their programmers and managers were above the age of forty. They wanted to hire some new blood and preferable younger then twenty five. The normal reliable HR company finally found the perfect match of a programmer for them:

• A programmer working at the largest institution, which is specialized in space research, was having problems working with women in the same room as he was working in. So the management decided to fire the man. In their unlimited wisdom, they let him stay on for a month before he was forced to leave. The programmer was so angry, that he instantly forgot about women and dedicated his time and efforts in making the first major virus program, which penetrated and paralyzed most of the major networks in the world. The virus became active the moment he was forced out of the building.

• A huge company in the US, created several research teams to look for new ways to work with computers (designing revolutionary user interfaces). The end product was the use of the mouse and icons presenting complicated processes and things which were called ‘windows’. The management of the company were laughing so hard, they canceled the project and fired everyone involved. ‘Ridiculous’, they yelled, still laughing. Now they are not laughing anymore.