[scruple]

They want everything but they can't even define a starting point. It's insanity. I've been going back and forth with a customer about this (through my product and sales team) since August of last year. At first the priority was high and it seemed like the scope was reasonable. But no one was making moves or delivering on my requests / asks / concerns. I suggested a phased approach, so that we could _be_ agile and get _something_ in front of the customer for feedback. But before I even got there the requirements changed again and again and again and again and again...

Thankfully all of this specific work is easy to segregate away from the rest of my team. It's proven to be very toxic and morale draining. If my entire team was involved, I've no doubt that we'd have lost people by now.

And the real kicker: It turns out that right now we can't even deliver on the first pass that I had originally suggested, despite me being basically done with my teams piece, because some other team in the company was loose with their language and convinced a bunch of product and sales folks that, yes, of course they had what the customer was asking for. They didn't. They still don't. I'm convinced today that they never will. Bunch of fucking sycophants.

I have no idea how these things happen but recently I've become convinced that this sort of confusion-on-all-fronts is just par for the course in this industry today. The only work that I've been able to do in the past couple of years that was well understood and easy to articulate, and as a result capable of being completed mostly on time and within scope, was born out of a select few individuals being able to identify a real problem and a real solution and grinding away at it in a controlled fashion. But that seems to be rare and not at all "how things are done."