Content-Type: text/shitpost

Long, long ago I had a summer intern job with a software company, XYZCO, that published a database product, XYZDB. It came with a number of optional add-ons: XYZREPORT, XYZFORMS, and so on.

One of these was the statistics package, XYZSTAT. One of the senior programmers once mentioned to me that no customer had ever reported a bug in XYZSTAT. “Wow,” I said, naively. “Is it really good?”

“No, it's garbage. The only software without bug reports is software with no users.”

“I don't understand.”

“What happens is, purchasing managers need to choose a database product. They have a list of features that the database could have. One of the items is “statistics package”. Our sales folks told us we were losing sales to PQRCO because customers would say "We see that PQRDB has a statistics package, doesn't XYZDB have one too?” So we found some kid in California who had written a statistics package and bought it from him and renamed it XYZSTAT. But we know nobody actually uses it because there aren't any bug reports about it.”

Not that different from writing a résumé, actually.