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An important factor is new manager syndrome. You start with some new head honcho somewhere. A CxO, an Enterprise Architect,... These tend to swap every 3 to 5 years. Head honch sees horrible bloat, and decides to Act with some Master Plan. This entails buying some expensive software, deployed by a random external team, that will solve everything. In practice, expensive software tends to barely work. Also, the deployers have no idea what the company is doing. But, anything that might be bad news is career ending, so things get deployed swiftly. Then comes integration. External team chooses some integration point, probably somewhere in the last head honcho's expensive software, as that's the only thing where the design is not yet completely forgotten. There will be impedance mismatch, i.e. bad news, i.e. unspeakable. So people do something, anything to forcibly connect A to B. Someone presses start, then the deployers run away in 2 weeks tops. All kinds of weird crimes are done by the new expensive software. Bad news is still not welcome, but things start to hurt more and more over the next few months. Staff was already overworked, so does some quick and dirty fixes. Head honcho falls out of grace, a reorg destroys every shred of knowledge gathered in the exercise, and a new new head honcho floats to the top. The cycle starts again. |
Well, they probably didn't run away - they were probably only paid for two weeks tops. The only constant I've ever observed in 30 years of software development is that the people who make decisions think that saving a few thousand dollars in programmer salaries is worth having a business that nobody really understands, that operates at minimal efficiency, and generates unhappy customers. God forbid anybody ever treat highly educated programmers as competent professionals and equal partners in the business.