I come from a company where during a project, we saw the client 3 time during the whole project. We were never informed when did the client came in office in order to discuss with him about his requirements. I did setup redmine and told them that if they have any request they can post an issue there. But they never really used redmine to publish anything. They would instead:

• harass a team member on the phone at any time of the day or night
• hand us over sheets of paper with new requests or changes
• hand us over new design (graphical)

They requested how much time it would take us to finish the project, I gave them a date and a week to test everything and deployment. I calculated that time taking into account the current features we had to do. And then blamed us that our deadline was wrong and that we lied. But the truth is that one week before that deadline they added a couple of monster feature from nowhere and that week were we were supposed to test and deploy, my friends spent all day in the office changing all little things.

After that project, my friend got some kind of depression and got scared everytime his phone rang. They kind of used him as a communication proxy.

After that project of hell, (every body got pissed off on that project) as far as I know the designer who was working with us left work after that project and she had some kind of issue too with managers. My team also started looking for work somewhere else.

At first I tried to get things straight with management, I tried to make a meeting to discuss about the communication issues and so on.. What really pissed me off and made me leave that job for good is the following.

• Me: "We have to discuss about what went wrong on the last project. It's quite important"
• Him: "Lets talk about it in a week or two. Just make a list of all the things you did wrong"
• Me: "We already have a new project and we want to prevent what happened on the last project to happen again"
• Him: "Just do it and well have our meeting in a week, make a list of all the thing you did wrong."

It kind of ended there then he organized a meeting at a moment I wasn't unable to come. My friend discussed with him and tried to explained him that we really had to discuss about organization issue on how to manage a project. And his answer was pretty much: "During the meeting I don't want to ear how you want to us to manage a project but I want to know what you guys did wrong"

After that I felt it wasn't even worth it discussing anything since they weren't even ready listening to us. Found a new job and I'm pretty happy with my choice.

I'd like to know how you'd handle such situation. Is there anything to do to solve communication problem? After that project my friend got a depression and some other employee had their down too as far as I know. I wonder what else we can do other than leave these place as soon as possible. Feel sad for the people that are still there and get screamed at just because they need money in order to eat and finding an other job like that isn't that easy.

note

I died a little when our boss asked us to make a list of things we (programmers) did wrong. This is probably the stupidest request I ever got. If everybody thinks they did everything right, it doesn't mean that there is no problems. Individual problem are rarely the big issue. Colleagues help each others and solve theses issues to prevent problems.