What's it all about, Alfie?

OK... I'm not trying to be unreasonable here, but I have to get at least a little of this off my chest. I'm working at UBS O'Connor, and these guys are a reasonably good lot - certainly the group I'm working in right now. But they have selected a vendor package that is maintained by the worst people I can imagine. Really... the worst.

If they were even slightly worse, it'd be OK, because then the management would see that their stuff is only marginally better than in-house works, and the cost and pains associated with it are far outweighing the benefits of the vendor's package. It's really incredible.

Without getting myself into a slander lawsuit, I'll just say this group is a vendor... a very bad one, but just a vendor. Their software is marginally better than nothing, but not much better than nothing. It's got a few nice features, but it's got a ton of problems, so in the end, I wish I didn't have to deal with it, or with them. But I do.

So... today I received a license file from my contact at the vendor. I was told to put it in place of the existing one, as it will expire at the beginning of the new year. What they didn't tell me was that it was keyed to a specific version of the software - the version that we now have in Q/A, but haven't yet put into production. This means that when I put the license file into production things started crashing. Luckily, I keep excellent notes and version control everything so that we got it back up and running within minutes. But the point remains that I don't have a license file for the new year, and I wish after all these months of dealings with these folks, they'd spend the extra 30 sec. to include in their email that this version only works with the newest version of their software and that there's another version coming for the older one still in production.

I treat bug reports this way... I make sure there is a repeatable problem and narrow it down for them. Even including code snips that reproduce the problem in their libraries as cleanly as possible. Yet I've still never seen page one of documentation on their system, I have to look at the compiled classes in the jars for any indication of the capabilities of the system... and in general, I'm getting absolutely crummy customer service.

Man that makes me mad... for all that O'Connor is spending on these guys and their software, you'd think that the least they could do is to give a little documentation... a little description of this and that... limitations in license files... But I guess they don't think that's important where these guys come from.