Many years ago early in my career I worked at an an engineering firm as a third-party contractor doing programming for a large municipal blackwater system.
Despite the fact that I was working on critical code implementing core requirements of the system, I was only paid $20/hr. I believe the firm was charged $40-60.
Long before I started working in the product and before any working software was deployed, the majority of the budget was spent. I believe they had at least three civil engineers, and a hands-off software architect who I only saw once, developing a document with hundreds of pages of studies and requirements.
I remember one severe issue we had was that I was not allowed to test on the real database or one of a similar size. So a main query was tested the day it was deployed (on some extremely expensive Oracle server which was very outdated). And unfortunately my query did not perform adequately on the larger dataset. But the senior programmer decided not to tell me or to try to fix it. He just truncated my query with LIMIT and said nothing. This resulted in the query breaking and showing an error, and totally incomplete and invalid data. It is amazing it actually continued at all from that point but unfortunately it did. I only found out about it several weeks later when the project manager decided to take me on a visit. Strangely, no one ever mentioned the issue, nor addressed my immediate suggestion that the software could not operate without the problem being fixed. I assume the other programmer just said "well that guy is inexperienced" and they had other projects to work on and no budget left so they just left it for quite awhile. Anyway I could not believe that so I left shortly after.
Despite the fact that I was working on critical code implementing core requirements of the system, I was only paid $20/hr. I believe the firm was charged $40-60.
Long before I started working in the product and before any working software was deployed, the majority of the budget was spent. I believe they had at least three civil engineers, and a hands-off software architect who I only saw once, developing a document with hundreds of pages of studies and requirements.
I remember one severe issue we had was that I was not allowed to test on the real database or one of a similar size. So a main query was tested the day it was deployed (on some extremely expensive Oracle server which was very outdated). And unfortunately my query did not perform adequately on the larger dataset. But the senior programmer decided not to tell me or to try to fix it. He just truncated my query with LIMIT and said nothing. This resulted in the query breaking and showing an error, and totally incomplete and invalid data. It is amazing it actually continued at all from that point but unfortunately it did. I only found out about it several weeks later when the project manager decided to take me on a visit. Strangely, no one ever mentioned the issue, nor addressed my immediate suggestion that the software could not operate without the problem being fixed. I assume the other programmer just said "well that guy is inexperienced" and they had other projects to work on and no budget left so they just left it for quite awhile. Anyway I could not believe that so I left shortly after.