Hilarious project.
Edit: I did both Mouthwash Ramen and Time Machine to the Present. I’m now addicted to this, thanks.
They would list all kinds of lasers. When they got some offers for one of them, they'd sell it and schedule the delivery in 90 days. Then, they started the project from scratch. Crazy stuff and borderline legal :D
What do you mean that feature doesn't exist? Well, I sold it to the customer, they have to go live in two weeks and their workflow depends on this feature.
A week later. "OK, their install team says it can't technically do C yet, however there's an early 2026 preview scheduled which addresses most of C. The D feature isn't in the edition we have, our buyers are talking to their sales people and we may need to pay extra to unlock D. And you're correct that two other organisations in our industry confirm X is dogshit and you'd be better off without it but it can't be disabled. Still A does work, and we have filed bugs about the known defects with B so hopefully we can get those fixed"
Every time I buy a product as an ordinary consumer I marvel at how much worse my huge employer is at buying products than I am. I reckon if they were sent to the store to buy a whole roast chicken with a £20 note they'd come back with six expired chicken sandwiches and no change.
It's the size of the deal that matters. Most of the consumer goods you buy are sold on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. No individual sale is worth the vendor forming a "relationship" with that customer or promising bespoke features. B2B sales are often large deals that require months of negotiation and may be worth millions. Bullshitting in order to land the deal is incentivized on both sides, to the point where both only have a fuzzy idea of what exactly is being bought and sold.
But consumers get this experience as well when they make larger purchases. When I buy a car, maybe I fail to mention the unreported fender bender my trade-in was in, and maybe the salesman tries to charge me $1200 to etch "anti-theft tracking numbers" on the new car's windows, citing some dubious statistics about vehicle recovery rates.
Or as I like to do, buying random things on AliExpress and Temu knowing full well that some of the things will not meet the expectations you’d have from the product listings.
Sometimes I’m lucky and the stuff is good. Sometimes I’m a little unlucky and it’s worse quality than I’d like.
At least I quickly learned to read carefully what was said to realize that what’s depicted is not exactly what’s being sold. Some sellers do this misleading trick where they have some amazing photo up front but there are either multiple variations of it or the thing being sold is only some component for that thing. I still sometimes see product reviews from other buyers that were upset that they didn’t get what they thought they were buying and I don’t blame them because it can be pretty misleading at times, but if you read carefully and look at all the pictures and check what the “color” or similar option dropdown says etc you will usually spot it when they are selling something different than what it might look like at first. So I haven’t had that kind of misfortune for years now. But sometimes you still get products that are lower quality than you were hoping for, even when the product listing was pretty accurate. Some kinds of bad quality is just not possible to judge unless you see the product in person.