Threat of nuclear apocalypse briefly puts a damper on Pornhub traffic

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The intra-corporate battles are worse than the battles with competitors. I have wasted too much of my business life dealing with different divisions of the same company. You have to draw a line and hold to it, because if the client is this much of a PITA when they have sought you out to buy your product or services, why believe that support is going to be profitable.

Oh, Dog, another set of standards worshipers. “Let’s screw up our business model so we can fly a flag saying we adhere to an artificial standard.”

You’re right, every large bureaucracy learns how to generate garbage RFPs. I think they all use the same incompetent consulting firms.

It’s not just government RFP’s that suck. Right now we’re dealing with a major customer where IT and IT Security are getting into a major catfight over whether they’re going to be able to deploy our solution. IT already paid for a penetration test of our cloud infrastructure via white hat hackers (it bounced off like rubber) to prove to IT Security that our solution would work, and IT Security just sent us a big questionnaire asking us whether we complied with 5,000,000 different standards for insuring that big company IT never actually produces anything, which of course we don’t because we’re a small “agile” company, if we required a 20 page change document signed off by product managers yada yada every time we wanted to change a comma in our software we’d never get anything done. About the only reason we haven’t told them to go **** themselves is because they *did* pay for that penetration test, and are going to do a re-test once we fix some of the minor issues they uncovered (mostly debug statements that printed too much data into the customer Javascript console, thus possibly giving hackers enough information to attack the system). And now they want to trial an on-premise version of our product, which is *less* secure than the cloud product because the cloud product has all sorts of network and system hardening that can’t be done in an on-premise product because we have to fit into *their* network architecture, rather than into *ours*. Until we get that last bit of value out of them we’ll keep stringing them along…. but I’m getting a bad feeling that this is just a waste of our time. Sigh.

So yeah, not just government sucks. It seems to be a problem at a lot of big bureaucratic companies. SIGH.

I don’t understand why the military reacted the way it did. The military should have nipped this in the bud, not fired up the sirens. It was the weekend, so maybe an Officer of the Day ‘exercised excessive caution’. Hell, there was less control on this than school closures for snow days in New York.

I stopped bidding on government RFPs because the description of the scope of the work sucked and you had to wait forever for your money, even worse than Hewlett Packard. The “cats” were outside consulting firms who wrote the RFPs but had no more understanding about what the users needed than the coders who were supposed to create it.

Yeah, the lack of a Emily Litella button definitely was a Big Deal. The “Cancel” menu item merely quit sending out “We’re all gonna die!” messages, it didn’t send a “Never mind!” message. They didn’t even know how to send out a cancellation until they’d spent 20 minutes dialing through the FEMA phone tree to find the one person in all of FEMA who knew how to send it out.