>>>>>>>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.
>>>>
>>>>This is called Peter's Principle which breeds incompetence in every business in this country. And every day it gets worse. I deal with this shit every single day.
>>>
>>>I agree that it's getting worse.
>>>
>>>Part of it might be because of a jobless rate below 4%.
>>>
>>>Another cause might be the rapid pace of change in today's business world.
>>>Things that were important a week ago might not be important today, and vice versa.
>>
>>A fish rots from the head down.
>
>So, here's the least intuitive news I've seen in a long, long time and it's great.
>
>Programmer X, a key guy in an organization a good client of mine needs as a partner, has NEVER, EVER done what he has said he'll do.
>
>
>His boss, anxious to get something going that will upend an industry that can use some upending, a few months ago scheduled weekly conference calls on the topic.
>
>X would say, "I just need to do a few cleanups. You should have what you need tomorrow."
>
>And it never happened.
>
>So, this AM at the call X said all that again, and I yawned.
>
>Well, this PM I got an email from X that documented how to access one of the most elegant REST API sites I've ever had the pleasure to see.
>
>The documentation he sent was flawless and I was reading data from the site minutes after receiving the email.
>
>I needed one column that the hadn't included and within minutes after sending an email requesting it, I saw it.
>
>Lots of bad news out there, but let's not forget that some wonderful surprises are out there too.

It turned out the good performance, not the crappy performance, was a fluke.
In several encounters since then, X has reverted to type- studied mediocrity.
That sounds pessimistic, but it's not.
The X's in the world create huge opportunities for anyone who can simply do what he says he'll do.