I spent 25 years in the IT industry, and I have some interesting tales. This is one of them.
In the 1st half of my career, I got a job as a ‘C’ Programmer for a software house. One of my first tasks was to rewrite the central core of their best-selling application to make it more efficient. My brief was “Make it as fast and efficient as possible”. So I did. Over the course of about 6 months I analysed performance and rewrote the slowest bits that would make the most difference, the idea being that a new software release would be made to the customers to make them all happy that we cared about them enough to make things better: a free gift to ensure their loyalty. I did a good job of it too, and the resulting code was much more efficient and had fewer faults.
And then about a week before “go live”, I had a meeting with the Sales Director. He’d seen the improvements, but said that it was now so fast that we could charge the customers for improving it. So, I was instructed to go back and write some delay loops in the software to slow it down. I was told to make it just slightly better than it used to be, unless the delay loops were switched off, when it would go at full speed.
And this is the killer: one little secret command was wanted to switch off the delay loops. The customers would be charged a day’s consultancy fee (about £1000 a day, and this is over 15 years ago) for an engineer to twiddle his/her thumbs for 8hours whilst doing the 30 seconds work necessary to disable the delays.
This is an example of pure Capitalism at work, and is not at all untypical of the IT industry.
Cheers, Tom.