"Body Shop" consultancy farmed me out to company producing software for corporations in an industry known for its artificially-inflated profit margins. Additionally, the software itself helps (or at least, was intended to help) the corps with regulatory compliance.
Company's software was horrendous, but they were making millions selling to this industry, and I quickly came to realize they did so by having a 5:1 marketer:software developer ratio, and selling to people making purchase decisions who were very much not spending their own money.
And as a developer who worked on the project for several months, I have no idea what the end-user experience must have been like, but I can guess.
Problems with their app dev process (largely a personal rant):
1. Nested Active Record pattern meant developers could not reason about the performance of the code. Simply referencing some Object.Foo property meant than a virtually unbounded number of out-of-process calls would be sent to the db. Management abhorred the notion of doing anything to improve this.
2. Cloud-based SQL Server hosting was cost prohibitive (customers prohibited multi-tentanting), so mgmt thought they could get their dba to convert the app to Postgres by doing find-and-replace of the SQL strings that were basically interleaved 1:1 with code all throughout the application.
3. Mgmt would get 3-4 people to work on the same code file simultaneously, in a dynamically-typed language and with no unit testing. "Hydra Bug" doesn't even begin to describe ...
And this company was making millions of dollars selling this software.
Company's software was horrendous, but they were making millions selling to this industry, and I quickly came to realize they did so by having a 5:1 marketer:software developer ratio, and selling to people making purchase decisions who were very much not spending their own money.
And as a developer who worked on the project for several months, I have no idea what the end-user experience must have been like, but I can guess.
Problems with their app dev process (largely a personal rant):
1. Nested Active Record pattern meant developers could not reason about the performance of the code. Simply referencing some Object.Foo property meant than a virtually unbounded number of out-of-process calls would be sent to the db. Management abhorred the notion of doing anything to improve this.
2. Cloud-based SQL Server hosting was cost prohibitive (customers prohibited multi-tentanting), so mgmt thought they could get their dba to convert the app to Postgres by doing find-and-replace of the SQL strings that were basically interleaved 1:1 with code all throughout the application.
3. Mgmt would get 3-4 people to work on the same code file simultaneously, in a dynamically-typed language and with no unit testing. "Hydra Bug" doesn't even begin to describe ...
And this company was making millions of dollars selling this software.