All I can say in response to our anonymous submitter's story is, ALMOST?!

With the World Cup being hosted in North America this year, I remembered this story that happened back in 2014. At the time I was working in Brazil, for a company that builds software systems for public services. And, with the World Cup being hosted there, in came the opportunity for local agencies to invest in modernization, with pretty much a blank check to get new services, so long as it was deployed before the end of the World Cup. And so the sales people did what they did best, and went around trying to upsell whoever would be willing to buy — no matter our actual capacity for developing the things.

So it was that I was pulled into this new fancy digital system for the police force of a state capital. However, we had only about 4 engineers available, and what they sold was a project estimated for a team of 20, to be delivered in 3 months, with no room for delay. And it wasn't just our core C&D product, but this massive thing with customized public-facing websites, live tracking of the position of different police cars delivered to a tablet in each car, automated reporting, etc.

Germany and Argentina face off in the final of the World Cup 2014 -2014-07-13 (5)

First thing: We received a pile of 24 resumes, and were told to choose 16 of those. Maybe 3 were acceptable, but we had to waste 1 month hiring and onboarding 13 other people who were worse than useless. Classic man-month problem. We eventually had to tell management that nothing would be delivered this way, so they did the very best next thing: fly us to this other city, so we could work embedded there, in full crunch mode for the delivery. We pretty much worked 12+ hours a day, 7 days a week, for those next 2 weeks.

Another situation: they wanted this system where people could take a photo of an incident in progress, and submit via this app + website, to be verified by an operator in real-time. We nicknamed it the "dick-pic encyclopedia." Even worse, we only had the budget to run a single server, so this thing receiving public traffic would live in the same system that was tracking police car locations. Luckily they were convinced it was a bad idea so it was only ever online for a short period of time.

Next, was the police car tracking. This was done by a tablet installed in each car, which would be sending and receiving location information. But, 1 week before our deadline, we were hitting a serious bug: everything was working when we ran the tests ourselves, but the cops would report very weird bugs when testing it in the field. So we asked to do some field debugging, and I went on a ride-along. Things were working pretty much fine everywhere, so I asked to be taken to where he remembered seeing the tablets fail—to which the policeman just decides to drive off straight into one of the favelas around the city. I guess I can cross out "doing debugging in a police car passenger seat in a notoriously dangerous neighborhood" off my bucket list. Root cause: turns out cellphone connections would be pretty spotty in those areas, which we weren't handling properly.

Either way, we delivered something on time that was severely below spec, and very much over-budget. Company tried to squirm out of paying overtime (was told that we would gain "prestige" by doing those extra hours), but I put my foot down and left that job shortly after. Last I heard they actually got sued for this and a bunch of similar projects, and almost went under.

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