I once had the opportunity to work on a contract with not the lowest bidder, and nowhere near the top either. Requirements meetings where you don't need to repeat every basic point, not great but actual technical docs matching the system and not an earlier iteration, delivery with warranty support with the same folks and not some new hire, etc. It was years ago and I still think about that project sometimes.

Know one? I work for a multibillion dollar one.

• Non-IT group bought very expensive application.
• Contracted with 3rd party to maintain app/infrastructure (also STUPID EXPENSIVE)
• 6 months of planning between purchasers, app vendor, and contractors
• 6 months of rolling out/installing/configuring application
• realize infrastructure is already obsolete and cloud vendor is about to remove support for it. Updates required ASAP
• Vendor and contractors are not able to complete updates
• Expect me to fix everything for them (despite not being involve in any of the above)
• Contract not voided (they are still getting paid) despite me needed to solve all the problems

"Make the following changes after installing the application."

I just ran your installer with administrator privileges. Why the hell is there anything for me to do after that?

"After uninstalling, do the following to remove all traces of the application."

Seriously, again with this?

Oof lol

I’m sorry OP, I know your pain.

I used to have to work with a vendor who sent all our records in CSV form, usually weekly, and each week had different column headers and formats (date formats changed each week, decimal precision, numbers as text, numbers as dates, etc). Like they had a different manual extract process each week, which required us to manually reconcile each week.

I currently have to work with a large vendor and I hate them. The other day I went to open a ticket for an issue, then I saw they already had one. I read the ticket, it was my own ticket from a year ago, with zero responses and a “triage” label applied.

All of my tickets I’ve ever made are still open, and a few just have comments saying they’ll investigate or pointing me at the docs, which are wrong. Never a follow up.

I keep telling my boss we need to dump them, we spend more in salary dealing with their shit than the competition costs. Hell, I could build this in house in a month, but I don’t have time for that.

oh, you mean the "some IT professional designed this non-IT industry-specific software and doesn't understand why information needs to flow the way it does, causing the software to work wrong" trap?

how about the "we always drop product updates on Friday because we know you don't want to work weekends" trap

See also:

Customer: we want your product/service but without *important component* and instead with *custom feature*

Sales guy: yeah sure that's no problem

Then tech is is given a week to make it just barely work with duct tape and prayers

Its okay to name and shame these products and vendors - they're not listening to their customers so maybe the court of public opinion will work?

To be fair, it can be wicked tough to package things properly. Especially when said software is a spaghetti-code mess.

I once spent 8 months onsite at a client reverse-engineering our own damned software so I could make our agent function in Solaris native packaging instead of the script+binary we had been using. IIRC, their security team refused to let an agent on their network without us using native packaging.

Hey, I got worse with some freaking expensive vendor. And because the ones who decided to go this path in opposition to everybody who knew better won't accept the mistake, they sold it as a massive success to leadership, which puts pressure on us because "they are making our life's easier".

This reminds me of my last job's $25 000 dollar a year $2000 Voron 2.4 3D printer.

That's how much It likely cost from employees fucking with it on company time to get it to work. And honestly... If they didn't keep trying to "upgrade it" it would have been a more reasonable expense...

Zoho

Company with a dozen different bespoke testing environments constantly telling me this.