In my 25 year career, I have never had to deal with such a garbage software vendor as this one. I don’t want to go on a rant since I have other things to do today and could go on for hours, but here are the highlights:
- Application has like 30 modules. Each module has its own config file.
- Config files are not centralized and reside in the directory with each module.
- Vendor ships a zip file of slop code that requires manual assembly.
- Vendor provides no substantial documentation. Every request for technical documentation is met with “Let’s setup a meeting to solve your immediate problem”.
- Vendor ships dummy config files in every release necessitating manual backup/restore of the config for each of the 30 modules
- Vendor changes config file format every third release. This requires re-configuring the entire application stack and all 30 modules.
- Vendor puts the version info in the goddamned config file instead of building it into the compiled .NET application as a variable like a sane person would do.
- Vendor sends an update every week and gets pissy when we don’t deploy it within 3 hours of their “we shat out an update” email.
- Vendor has been asked repeatedly to address this. The only response we’ve gotten to these complaints is the sound of crickets chirping. 🦗
To answer any questions:
- Yes, I voiced my concerns long ago. They were ignored.
- Yes, they are the “lowest bidder” and it goddamned shows.
- Yes, they know I hate them.
- Yes, I tried writing scripts to manage the config files. They work once or twice until the vendor changes the config file format every 3rd-4th release.
- Yes, it is sunk cost fallacy all the way down, but I’ve been given my orders.
Oof lol
I’m sorry OP, I know your pain.
I used to have to work with a vendor who sent all our records in CSV form, usually weekly, and each week had different column headers and formats (date formats changed each week, decimal precision, numbers as text, numbers as dates, etc). Like they had a different manual extract process each week, which required us to manually reconcile each week.
I currently have to work with a large vendor and I hate them. The other day I went to open a ticket for an issue, then I saw they already had one. I read the ticket, it was my own ticket from a year ago, with zero responses and a “triage” label applied.
All of my tickets I’ve ever made are still open, and a few just have comments saying they’ll investigate or pointing me at the docs, which are wrong. Never a follow up.
I keep telling my boss we need to dump them, we spend more in salary dealing with their shit than the competition costs. Hell, I could build this in house in a month, but I don’t have time for that.