Tales from the World Cup

A developer recounts working for a Brazilian software company during the 2014 World Cup, where sales staff oversold a massive police modernization project meant for a 20-person team to a 4-engineer shop, with a fixed 3-month deadline. The story covers disastrous hiring (13 of 16 mandated hires being 'worse than useless'), crunch mode with 12+ hour days for two weeks straight, a risky combined-server architecture for a public photo-submission app nicknamed the 'dick-pic encyclopedia,' and a field debugging trip into a dangerous neighborhood to fix spotty cellular connections affecting police car tracking tablets. The project shipped late, under-spec, and over-budget, management tried to dodge overtime pay, and the company was later sued and nearly went under.

Source: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/tales-from-the-world-cup. 8 Sync News only summarizes and links out; content copyright belongs to the authors and original sources.