>>I got this email today from a senior person at a large NYC financial institution:
>>
>>"It looks great!!! Thank you and have a great weekend."
>>
>>Sounds wonderful, doesn't it?
>>Well it should be but it's really not.
>>I started this project early last November.
>>I wrote about 50 lines of VFP code (one of my last VFP apps still standing) to make this app happen.
>>I finished most of those 50 lines of code and sent sample outputs for acceptance before Thanksgiving last year.
>>The average time between query and response was about 8 weeks.
>>The average number of harangues by me was about 4.
>>By the time I got an answer, I had forgotten the question.
>>By the way, the person who requested this app and congratulated me today was the one who didn't answer.
>>Am I alone here, or is this a new norm?
>>People saying that they'll do something and just not doing it until someone harangues them?
>
>Yes.
>I blame social media and television.

Dunno what/whom to blame, I just gave up on trying to understand. In my case, it's probably the corporate structure of the customers' organization, where CYA is equally important as the NDA and security clearance. It may be that they aren't rewarded much for performance, but chastised severely for not ticking every box on their checklist.

My experience varies wildly. My favorite example is one little exe, which synchronizes some info between two databases. In the best of cases, I install it and let it process the last few months (as a demo and just to get things going) in a couple of hours. In some other cases the amount of my work is just the same, but it takes months. The worst one is three years old now, still not running because we're waiting for someone to talk to their IT cerberus to open up a port, or create a service account or whatever. And the amount of initial noise and screaming when they demand priority is just about the same.

A worse case of the same is one customer with some 4-5 units (i.e. pairs of databases) where they noticed something was wrong, and asked for an analysis and possibly a fix. The process of fixing had its pauses and restarts, they'd come up with more cases, I'd analyze, send results, asked if it was OK and then would completely forget about it, because there was no response for weeks. Then they demanded the fix be written and tested on a separate copy of the target database, which took me whole day to set up and run (rights, rights - I ran into a case where the exe wasn't allowed to read a config file from parent directory, had to copy it to local one) and in the end I told their guy where he can check the results. That was in october 2017, still waiting to hear from them.