Reminds me of an incident where I had to go pick up a missed delivery (an expensive photo printer) from the dispatch warehouse because the shipping company couldn’t get a signature after three attempts.

Whatever, I drove down to this set of huge industrial warehouses with trucks coming and going by the dozen and found the customer service office.

“That’ll be half an hour, I recommend waiting at the cafe.”

“Half an hour for what? Aren’t all the packages right here?”

“They are, but looking up the package ID in the system takes at least 30 minutes, maybe 33.”

“33!? Wait… don’t tell me, let me guess: it has been getting slowly and steadily worse over years? Predictably taking longer and longer, right?”

“Yeah, six months ago it was 27 minutes! How did you know?”

“Umm… isn’t this a bit of drag on your operations?”

“Absolutely! Everything takes forever, every shipment is delayed, … <long rant> …”

“I… bet. Why hasn’t anyone fixed it!? It’s a one line fix!”

“No budget!”

This was one of the biggest logistics companies in the country about to undergo a multi-billion-dollar merger.

Their core business software was missing database indexes even on primary key columns!

Madness.

Usability of internal tools is just never considered. Priorities are driven by management. They invariably just don’t care about feedback from the peons that actually have to use them in their day-to-day jobs, even when it results in tremendous inefficiency.

This also allows companies like Workforce to make billions selling the most godawful software imaginable.