• @[email protected]
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    10 months ago

    The company would bid on government contracts, knowing full well they promised features that didn’t exists and never would, but calculating that the fine for not meeting the specs was lower than the benefit of the contract and getting the buyers locked into our system. I raised this to my boss, nothing changed and I quit shortly after.

    • @hactar42
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      4210 months ago

      I’ve worked in IT consulting for over 10 years and have never once lied about the capabilities of a product. I have said, it doesn’t do that natively, but if that’s a requirement we can scope how much it would take to make it happen. Sadly my company is very much the exception.

      The worst I saw was years ago I was working on an infrastructure upgrade of a Hyper-V environment. The client purchased a backup solution I wasn’t familiar with but said it supported Hyper-V. It turns out their Hyper-V support was in “beta”. It wasn’t in beta. They were literally using this client as a development environment. It was a freaking joke. At one point I had to get on the phone with one of their developers and explain how high-availability and fail-over worked.

      • @[email protected]
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        510 months ago

        I could very well have been that developer. Usual story, sales promised the world, that our vmware-based system would run on anything and everything, and of course it’s all HA and load balanced, smash cut to me on Monday morning trying to figure out how to make it do that before it goes live on Wednesday.

    • @esadatari
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      2810 months ago

      eh DHCP isn’t really important right? obviously if it hasn’t changed since the 80’s why would you need to reboot your server.

      what are vulnerabilities?

      • @[email protected]
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        2110 months ago

        You responded to the wrong comment, but i’ve been seeing that a lot so I wonder what causes it.

          • JackbyDev
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            810 months ago

            Sounds like a DHCP issue.

            (I mean, not really, but it rhymes I guess.)

          • Dark Arc
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            10 months ago

            I’d actually wager the comments are cached, sent to the front end wrong (because of the bad cache), and then the front end posts against the wrong comment ID (maybe that’s what you mean to be fair :) ).

            • @[email protected]
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              110 months ago

              I had something different in mind, coming from Angular: There would be a list of comment objects associated with DOM nodes, then the comment list would get updated, and Angular would associate the DOM nodes with the wrong list entries.

              How would a bad cache mess up the association between a comment and its ID?

              • Dark Arc
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                10 months ago

                I used to do AngularJS and I’ve done some react… maybe something like that could happen. I’d wager it’s unlikely though (bordering on Angular/Inferno itself having a bug).

                I’ve seen some other things that seem like caching issues (e.g., seeing the wrong counts when switching between posts).

                A cache could literally report the wrong ID for a comment to the front end in the JSON if the caching isn’t right (and bad input = bad output).

                Granted, in both cases I’d wonder why we’re not seeing this all the time, it’s got to be something niche, possible something already fixed but not on all instances.

    • @forgotaboutlaye
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      1110 months ago

      Promising features that never existed is part and parcel to a lot of software sales, whether gov or private. Speaking from post-sales experience.

      • @[email protected]
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        310 months ago

        I think it’s fine to promise them, but to claim they currently exist when you never plan to implement them is what I couldn’t support.

    • @Tar_alcaran
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      1110 months ago

      The contractor I worked for was run by a man who used to say “if the contract says they’ll blow up the contractor on delivery, we’re putting in a bid and solve the problem later”

    • drphungky
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      810 months ago

      I worked in government contracting (and government, for that matter) for years and that blows my mind. I can’t remember the details, but if you even had a bad reviews, much less being found noncompliant, it could disqualify you entirely from some contract vehicles for a matter of years. Wild that there’s some agency that somehow lets people get away with fraud.

      Also, if that cost the government money, there’s a chance you could report that after the fact and make some money.

      • @afraid_of_zombies
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        1410 months ago

        Might be local government. Me and sales have this argument pretty often

        Me: it is in the spec

        Sales: no one noticed it except you

        Me: thanks?

        Sales: no one is going to care

        Me: then take it out of the spec and resign everything.

        Sales: why are you making a big deal about this?

        Me: because it is in the spec that we signed and if we don’t honor the spec they can backcharge us.

        Sales: that won’t happen

        Me: you are right because we are going to follow the spec. If you don’t want me to please email me, the department head, and the client specifically ordering me not to follow the contract that we signed.

        • @[email protected]
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          310 months ago

          Yeah I’m in Europe and our customers were municipalities buying healthcare related solutions. It happened after our little startup got taken over by a big player and they started getting involved in the contract bids.