This might be long, so I apologize in advance...

About 6 months or so ago, my boss came to me (and another programmer) and said we are converting to a new system and we have until the end of the year to get all of our applications and programs converted to use the new system. We have a good 10 years worth of code written by several differnt programmers. I told her it wasn't enough time but she said we would just have to work hard. (I thought we should prioritize what we had and try to get the big things done first so we would have something but she insisted it could be done.)

So then there is a bunch of political bs at work and several people quit including my boss and the other programmer. My new boss comes in, says we're going ahead with the conversion and one of the companies we work with wants to help. They have some contractors who say that it should be no problem. The new contractors get started but they don't really share a lot and they don't ask any questions. (the only specs they have are a copy of the code) I kinda figure it's because they want to squeeze me out so they can keep our business. After about two months they show us what they have done and it looks GREAT. I start feeling like a complete dumbass because I didn't think it could be done and their demo looks 1000 times better than what I had been doing before.

So I'm kinda twiddling my thumbs with a new boss and some contractors doing my job, wondering if I shouldn't be looking for a new job. Two more months go by and the company comes back and says one of the guys flaked out on them and didn't do his part. They've replaced him with a new guy and the two of them think they still will have no problem meeting the deadline. About two weeks before the deadline they start to hedge their bets and say it's been taking them longer than they expected and we're probably only going to get some of the things on our list by the time we go live. (Conveniently the system conversion is a train wreck all by itself and we still have no data over there to test.) They still haven't asked me any questions about any of the code.

Finally it gets to be the week before the conversion and they call us up and tell us there is a problem. The guy who is in charge of the other company asked for a demo from the two programmers of what they were going to give us. He tells us that they do have code and it kind of works but nothing that looks like anything he could call a deliverable. Not one damn thing.

Now I know the stat about most programs missing their timelines and being over budget but I can't believe they have nothing. So it's now been several weeks and we're all working on it. We've got one app almost working and a second one about half way and I really can't imagine this having gone any worse. Has anyone else been through anything like this? Is it typical to just promise the world so you get the contract, even when you don't understand what you're doing? If things hadn't looked so great in the first demo, I might have questioned this more, but every single time we talked to them they made it sound like they couldn't understand why I thought it would be difficult.

With this type of undertaking that happens a lot. Look at early demos of software and games for example and you'll see that a lot of the time features and things get cut because they thought they could do them but ended up not being able to.

I'd imagine it might be similar here.

Or they could be lazy, incompetant, douchebags.

I Wear Pants;642150 wrote:With this type of undertaking that happens a lot. Look at early demos of software and games for example and you'll see that a lot of the time features and things get cut because they thought they could do them but ended up not being able to.

I'd imagine it might be similar here.

Or they could be lazy, incompetant, douchebags.

Lol, I can understand not being done on time. I never thought it could be. But every single time we talk to them they make it sound like it will all be done tomorrow and we don't have shit. It's the promises that are just blowing my mind. Unless they didn't even look at it at all until right before the deadline they had to know this shit wasn't working.

I Wear Pants;642150 wrote:With this type of undertaking that happens a lot. Look at early demos of software and games for example and you'll see that a lot of the time features and things get cut because they thought they could do them but ended up not being able to.

I'd imagine it might be similar here.

Or they could be lazy, incompetant, douchebags.

tl;dr

Anyway, get new job ASAP.