I work in an industry full of "good old boy" corruption.
A couple of years ago, our sister company asked us to support them (aka do the work for them) in an ML project with a vendor. We researched several in the industry and presented our choices. They rejected all of them and selected this fairly unknown one. This vendor was chosen without seeing a demo or interviewing alleged customers.
Immediately, this vendor set off red flags, but our CEO was too chicken shit to push back. (No, I know what you're thinking. Our CEO wasn't in on it. He's too chicken shit and stupid.) I naively came into the company around this time and immediately set up discussions to explain our data and its sources. They didn't care. They just wanted the data. They threw fits when we brought up that we weren't comfortable with releasing financial and confidential data. They were up in arms about security requirements. We had to fly out to their headquarters for a demo, and they only offered to show us a canned demo. They kept blaming my company at every opportunity including to the point of switching out meeting notes and documents for signature.
The running theory is that they were out of money, and were desperate for an exit strategy. They needed us to show off to potential buyers and investors. My theory was that they were only in it to sue us and get a settlement. And of course, decision makers at the sister company were in on the scam.
Finally, our parent company finally started seeing through the scam, but we still had to cover our asses and meet certain deliverables. I created an epic that basically was sending data through Kafka to the vendor. And of course, they wanted it yesterday.
I told the team, "This is all bullshit. They [the vendor] do not have the expertise to examine the data. They're not even going to look at it. Your work is going to be thrown away when this finally gets shut down. We just need to pipe data there. I don't care how messed up and dirty it is, don't bother testing."
Sure enough, a little while later, the parent company shut down the project. I gleefully killed the pipe when word came down. The kicker was that the vendor wasn't officially notified for another month.
During this time, did they ask us why the pipe was killed? Of course not.
A couple of years ago, our sister company asked us to support them (aka do the work for them) in an ML project with a vendor. We researched several in the industry and presented our choices. They rejected all of them and selected this fairly unknown one. This vendor was chosen without seeing a demo or interviewing alleged customers.
Immediately, this vendor set off red flags, but our CEO was too chicken shit to push back. (No, I know what you're thinking. Our CEO wasn't in on it. He's too chicken shit and stupid.) I naively came into the company around this time and immediately set up discussions to explain our data and its sources. They didn't care. They just wanted the data. They threw fits when we brought up that we weren't comfortable with releasing financial and confidential data. They were up in arms about security requirements. We had to fly out to their headquarters for a demo, and they only offered to show us a canned demo. They kept blaming my company at every opportunity including to the point of switching out meeting notes and documents for signature.
The running theory is that they were out of money, and were desperate for an exit strategy. They needed us to show off to potential buyers and investors. My theory was that they were only in it to sue us and get a settlement. And of course, decision makers at the sister company were in on the scam.
Finally, our parent company finally started seeing through the scam, but we still had to cover our asses and meet certain deliverables. I created an epic that basically was sending data through Kafka to the vendor. And of course, they wanted it yesterday.
I told the team, "This is all bullshit. They [the vendor] do not have the expertise to examine the data. They're not even going to look at it. Your work is going to be thrown away when this finally gets shut down. We just need to pipe data there. I don't care how messed up and dirty it is, don't bother testing."
Sure enough, a little while later, the parent company shut down the project. I gleefully killed the pipe when word came down. The kicker was that the vendor wasn't officially notified for another month.
During this time, did they ask us why the pipe was killed? Of course not.