Comment by protomyth
7 years ago
Be on a project where you billed over a 100 hours for some aspect of it that they decide to cancel. It is amazing how group decisions can blow so much.
Now, I do not mean experiments and throwing the artifacts of that experimenting. That makes perfect sense. Its when they have a need for something that is part of their current business and they just don't execute properly to the point of cancellation.
I work for a Fortune 100 company. I've seen $5+ million spent on some software that was abandoned a year later, and nobody loses their job! It happens frequently enough that everyone is basically blase about it.
Ive heard $300 million was spent on a system at a comoany I worked at which didnt work at all. They bought it because a competitor did. The lower-level managers had to tell the higher-level ones that it was OK "despite some problems." They kept tying more things into it and recommending it to others. Media reports same thing.
Funny that the supplier's entire business model seems to be to charge so much for a BS solution that each company is forced to recommend it to others to avoid reporting the loss.
I work at a decent sized Engineering Firm, I billed 4 Months of time to a project they then outsourced. Then again I'm salaried, but that's still 4 months of wasted effort.