Bad engineering, Web Shops, User Experience (UX), Proactive planing, Fails

More absolutely brain dead engineering. Found out two companies with utterly incompetent IT staff. Western Union and Money Gram. It seems that even these companies can't afford anyone even remotely competent. Well, they just lost to Bitcoin. Because they're clearly way too arrogant to do any business, even with people who are just willing to give their money. I just can't stop loving major corporations which crate utter ssshhhh - money? Yeah. What's the better way to rid of customers tan directly telling them GTFO. And frustrating them with non-functional sites and stupid invalid logic and providing absolutely worst possible user experience. As potential customer, I feel stupid, if I'm willing to user such a crap service provider. In this case their (Western Union) form validation requires county field to be filled. Sorry, we don't use counties in Finland, nor the Finnish form even got field for that. We've tested that sh*t, obviously haven't ever tied, even once. Quality? 0/5 - I just wonder if their primary focus is to troll and piss off potential customers to the max.
I wonder if it would be fun to create online trolling store. It would have awesome offers, you can share to your worst enemies. But ordering is made as annoying process as possible. Using all the possible 'dark patterns' to annoy you. Of course, because it's trolling site, not a scam site. You could ever finish the order. But offers should be so awesome many people would try it over and over again. - Maybe you could turn that into business. Before the transaction fails, you would need to accept all kind of terms (which would be absolutely horrible of course) and give lots of private information (as much as possible). Also when the payment fails, you could offer a few alternate providers which can supply the service, but of course which much higher price. Maybe that could be a business. Then you would sell all the information collected for the failed transaction to anyone willing to pay anything for it. Of course the site would run in jurisdiction where you can basically abolish all privacy laws. And naturally the mile long ToS would tell you all this. So there's nothing illegal about it. It's just well, exploiting dark patterns to the max. I'm pretty sure someone has tried this already. Any references, anyone?
I tried the site mentioned above with vanilla Chrome. Guess what, it didn't work out either. Btw. They did exactly what I suggested above, they said transaction failed and offered an alternative. Interesting.
Proactive planning, versus random reactive attitude. Once again encountered two projects simultaneously where the project team actively refuses proactive planning based approach and prefer random reactive process. If I ask when it's best time to do thing X, which might cause problems. Nobody cares. Ok, then I schedule a random time which suits me. After the task is completed, starts horrible whining, that timing was bad and ... Yeah ... Well, when I asked for it, why nobody cared? - STFU.
In another case, there were horrible mess which was being resolved for two weeks. And what it was about? One bleeping directory was missing. When that directory was created, everything worked. After that, I asked what's the future process to ensure that this won't happen again. I'll add extra logging to my application, to make it absolutely clear that directory is missing. Yes it was in log already, but not as clearly as it could be. But who's responsible for creating that directory, not me. Nobody gave a bleep again. So, I'm pretty sure that this same problem will be ahead of us again in the future. At least now the log got extra line which states DESTINATION DIRECTORY IS MISSING, ABORTING. I could of course also create that directory, but it's not currently my responsibility. Also if I do that, will I be then responsible for setting right access rights? So, it's better no to do it after all. It's just so interesting to see how some companies are full of that bleeping computer, when some other companies got smart processes and employees. So called elite teams and quality organizations, awesome.
I almost forgot that it can even be worse than that. In some cases things are messed up without telling anyone, and then hastily patched. If someone asks what's wrong and what's being done. They just give disinformation, lies and none of your business. Some companies like UpCloud actually are awesome, they always provide very clear information what's being done, when and what the clients should expected it to happen etc. There are so huge culture differences between different companies and organizations and their information culture.

2018-10-21