We all know someone like this. Most of the time we work with at least one of them.

You know the kind of person I'm talking about.

The guy who decides to go with a decision without being very well-informed about it, and then, later, even when it becomes painfully clear that it was a bad decision, in order to save face or avoid admitting that he didn't do enough research, he refuses to do anything to remedy the situation, choosing instead to just stubbornly stay on the path he knows full well is not working.

I work with someone like that. "Dan" made a deal between our company and another software company a few months ago. I don't know the details, but suffice it to say that we paid them a lot of money for them to specifically port their main product over into a version that we can sell alongside our own product to our customers.

"Dan" needed a programmer to work with this application, and I got whored out -- I mean I was volunteered to be that programmer.

The application sucks. The way it is written, from the ground up, there is no conceivable way it can do anything that this other software vendor claims it can do.

I've been working with it for about two weeks straight now, and I have yet to be able to accomplish ANYTHING with it without some level of major malfunction on the part of this application. It's crap. Vaporware. A dream.

I have discovered that there simply are no working versions of this program. This is it.

I also found out that one of our senior programmers was in the initial meeting where this application was first discussed. Our senior programmer advised against working with this application for a number of pretty good reasons. He also stated that if we as a company DID end up going ahead with it, he wouldn't be the one to support it, because he saw no way for them to get it to do the things they claimed it could do.

Flash a couple of months forward, and here I am, finding myself in a position where I'm being expected to support a buggy, slow program that doesn't function on even the most basic level. I have no source code. There is no documentation for it. The only other person in-house that knows anything about it is our head sales guy ("Dan"), and of course the decision to go ahead with this lunacy was his to begin with.

I know our clients well. I provide back-end support for them as my primary job. I fix their data. I troubleshoot code on the fly in their live systems. I know how they react to things that don't deliver on promised functionality.

If we start selling this application to those same clients, we'll have a revolt on our hands.

The best course of action? Step away from it, admit that this probably was the wrong horse to back, and move on to something that DOES perform this function for our clients, and promote that.

This, as logical as it might seem, will not happen. Even when it's perfectly clear to everyone now that this program will be a disaster for anyone that pays money for it, and a disaster to our relationships with the customers we dupe into buying it, "Dan" won't admit he backed the wrong horse and made a bad decision.

Instead, we will continue to beat this dead horse until there's nothing left to beat.

To sum up, I have written my interpretation of the above situation in the form of a small skit:

Dan: I think we should go with X-product. I like how it looks. The packaging is nice.

Programmer #1: Well, it's poorly written. There is no documentation. It doesn't do anything they claim it does. It's horrifically expensive compared to every other alternative, and almost every other alternative works better. It's very unstable. It's practically unworkable. I recommend against it.

IT Department Head: It's so resource intensive we can barely get it to run on a dedicated server with no users connected to it. Even then it takes a half an hour to run even a basic report. I recommend against it.

Dan: Well I don't really care what you guys think about it. I like it. I think our customers will like it. We're going ahead with it anyway.

*2 months later*

Dan: (to Programmer #2) Why can't you get this to work?

Programmer #2: Where to begin? Well, it's poorly written. There is no documentation. It doesn't do anything they claim it does. It's very unstable. It's practically unworkable. Who's the idiot that recommended this?

Dan: (angry) Well MAKE IT WORK!

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