
Paylocity's Steve Sarowitz Spent $1 Million Building Flawed Software. - edw519
http://www.inc.com/magazine/20081201/paylocitys-steve-sarowitz-spent-1-million_Printer_Friendly.html
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xsmasher
I'm going to project a lot of personal interpretation on this one - but it
sounds like the CEO was an "idea man" who tried to create a clone of another
software package because making software is easy, right?

My buddy who knows how to program will be the project manager and he can tell
me if the developers are trying to snow me - because project management is
just doing some spreadsheets and talking to the techies, right?

Then we hire a bunch of inexperienced (and easy to bully) developers to build
out the idea - no need to pay top wages for a bunch of typists in t-shirts,
right?

They had neither methodology nor experience in design, implementation, and QA.
No one should have been shocked when the project failed, or by the price tag.
Pumping money into a project is no assurance of quality.

At least the developers got to feed their families during the debacle.

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stuff4ben
I find it hard to fathom how you can spend a million dollars on an application
that can't scale past 100 users. Unbelievable!

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pbhjpbhj
It's an interesting story - but the details must be massaged: did they really
install the software on one day and expect all users to be accessing it the
next, surely you'd have a parallel system run with something like payroll. If
you communicated with the bank I'm sure they can put an account into some
state in which payments could be simulated and never actually payed out so you
know that the whole bank end of things works properly.

And how the hell can the project manager not know that the software can't
handle more than 100 users - indeed how was it limited? Doesn't one always
design for some scaling, 100 sounds arbitrary and very low.

Take away message: know when to quit. Know when to start again.

