Today I came across a blog post from a developer who describes a project he worked on that failed spectacularly. This project was a web database query to sort real estate brokers for an insurance company. If you want to see the results of the project in the way the original author intended, then you should visit the link above. It turns out that the insurance company provides the contact info of real estate brokers solely to collect a referral fee for that service. The database query in effect bypassed the referral procedure so that clients would be able to locate brokers without the company collecting a fee. In the end, all of the information from the database was removed so that the user was just given a list of names, each with the referral number for the company’s referral hotline which would allow the company to collect the referral fee. If this developer had figured out what the company actually wanted at the beginning, then it would have been easy for him to just place the phone number on the website and call it a day.