True story, I think:<p>One of the senior engineers at a past employer once worked for a government contractor.  Their product didn't work.  At all.  And everyone at the company new it.<p>However, their customers were all government agencies, and the work was classified.  Which meant that none of them could tell other government agencies that the product didn't work.  At all.<p>So they went on merrily selling the same non-working product to multiple agencies, one by one, until they ran out of agencies working on classified products that didn't already know they were full of shit.  At which point I assume the company went bankrupt and the engineers took their saved-up salaries and found other jobs.