Yep, sounds like a bank to me. I worked at one of the big 4 for 6 years (way too long, I know) and the experience was horrible. It once took us a full year (no exaggeration) to get a single server allocated...and my group was actually one of the well funded teams
Funding wasn't a problem for the client in my story. They were happy to spend money. I think the initial contract was for X million USD that would have covered something like 5000 support hours on our end (was based on time spent, not per incident) and then after, it was like 300 USD per hour.
Separate project, I know I was billed out at 500 USD per hour 10 years ago. That was working with an exchange. Initially a joint venture, my company decided to divest itself. We sold all the source for the system that we developed and theyd be running to the exchange. We clearly documented our "build" process and requirements. The core part of the system (and as far as I know the only part that ever went live) was a Python app that used very specific modules, but we also had some patches that were submitted upstream, but not yet in public distributions. So, we were very explicit that you need exactly these versions of Python, these explicit versons of the libs and you need to apply our patches to the libs. We had also only developed and tested on a specific version of linux, and made the indication they should use the same, or we couldnt guarantee the software.
Well, we handed all of the source and documentation to the exchange. They, in turn, hired an outside consulting group. For the life of them, they could not get it to work. First question asked was: did you follow the instructions? Response was "of course, do you think we're idiots?"
The assertion that they followed the instructions exactly sent me down around a 3 week debugging session, attempting to reproduce the issues they were having in our office. Starting from scratch and the exact instructions I had written up for them (I was the only author of the Python app that was failing), I could not reproduce the issue.
After 3 weeks of back and forth, escalations on all sides and some thinly veiled accusations of sabotage, I went on site, sat down with the consultant, told him to start from scratch and show me what he'd been doing.
First thing I notice is that he installs the latest version of Python, and latest version of all the extra libs we needed. He'd completely ignored all of our instructions despite telling us the exact opposite!
It took all of 15 minutes to identify and correct the issue. Ended up billing close to 40K USD in support because the contractor didnt follow instructions and, well, lied (intentional or not) about having done so. Never heard a peep about it from management about the hours or questioning the resolution, and as far as I know the exchange paid the bill without question, even in the height of the aftermath of the 2008 crash.
