One of them mentions a shutdown from Amazon because they ship too many orders late. That rang lots of bells for me, because it sounds like IT at an independent fulfillment company, which will usually have its own web store and sell through many other companies besides Amazon.
432 projects are a lot to you? Imagine your boss is someone who reacts to every business challenge and opportunity by creating a new project. Imagine that every vendor you ship for has re-invented EDI, without ever having heard of EDI, and it was designed by one of:
A) Someone they found on Craigslist
B) A kid they hired who doesn't comprehend how you can write a program without wrapping it between <% and %> and loading it in a browser
C) A guy who thinks he's a programmer because he once wrote an Excel macro
Their mechanisms can be so bizarre that you can't really support them by configuring an existing fetch-n-post, or Extract-Transform-Load system. You just have to fire up Visual Studio and write Project 433, AKA "Overstock.com Is Tripping On Acid And Now Requires That We Convey Order Status Via Modulated Carrier Pigeons".
Some of the weirdest I've been asked to support:
* Moving the order file between different subdirectories on their FTP server to convey status (ie: we log into their FTP site and issue a MOVE command on the file to put it in the /shipped folder). Did I mention that each file contains multiple orders?
* We have to implement a SOAP API to _their_ spec and expose it on the public internet for them to call at-will to send orders and query for status.
* CSV wrapped in XML, but it's CSV with a sub-delimiter because one of the columns has to be treated like an array to convey the status of each line-item.
* Orders that come in an Excel file, but they never order or name the columns consistently from file-to-file.
Oh joy. Sounds like dealing with telco billing. On one side you get excel tariff files which change in random ways every month, on the other you get silly billing data. Can you imagine ITSP getting an itemised bill for a month of calls from upstream provider? I think it was 3 rather large boxes filled with printouts. Still not sure why that happened.
I once worked for a company where our tech chief made various hacks to FreeBSD to allow it to have very large number of groups and users could belong to a lot of groups. This allowed each project to have a gid, so that people working on a particular project could belong to that group and the file permissions can be set accordingly. The company would have hundreds of projects per year, and this was used for many years. This was fine until Linux and NetApp technologies were being introduced, it did not play very well with the hacks to groups.
