Justin J.
1/5
In my 15 years of working with people and companies Kevin Chugh is the single most incompetent person I've ever worked with. And the Main Street Computing team was absolutely atrocious. We contracted them to build a program that was supposed to take 3 months, he never fully completed it in over a year. The only thing Kevin ever made well in over a year were excuses. We’ve since worked with multiple developers who were much cheaper and lightyears ahead of Kevin and Main Street Computing in every single aspect of development. Avoid Kevin Chugh and Main Street Computing like the plague.
Some highlights:
1. He blatantly lies about almost everything to get your business and during the build process: Our core functionality relied upon Dwolla integration. The reason we chose Main Street was because Kevin said that he had intimate experience with Dwolla integration, even stating he knew the CEO of Dwolla. These were all lies. The Dwolla integration never worked consistently (in over a year of him working on it) and when I talked to all of the higher ups at Dwolla after we fired Kevin, they said they had no clue who he was.
2. He either has zero knowledge of what he’s doing or grossly overcharges, or both: Upon reviewing his work later with other developers, we found this to be a consistent theme. We had a developer build a section of what Kevin was supposed to build as a test. They built the same functionality in 1/10th of the time at 1/3 of the hourly rate. The most egregious example of this was when I asked him to change a keyboard type to an email friendly input for our iPhone app and he gave a quote of 4 hours. We later learned that the change simply involves checking a box, a two second activity.
3. He is completely inept at managing a project: Kevin hardly ever knew where we were at with the project, how long things would take, and absolutely never delivered a single part of anything on time.
4. He blames everyone but himself for his incompetence and will constantly tell you how you are slowing things down even when you remove feature requests that should speed things up: He built a main part of our system around an incorrect business flow, something that was spelled out plainly and stressed on repeated calls and in print. He then took 3 months to fix the error and blamed me for making changes the entire time. Then after that fiasco he would constantly blame other changes as reasons for delays. While changes can delay things, the problem is that the “changes” we made were not changes in functionality. The changes were us REMOVING features to accommodate his inability to build things in a timely fashion, meaning they should not have changed the timeframe of the build other than speeding it up. However he constantly used this as reasons for being slower.
5. The program he built constantly broke: The program never worked for more than a day. We took the version of the program Main Street Computing built to another developer to review it immediately upon firing Kevin. They found over 100 errors in the code that were patchworked together to fix the one-off problems we encountered instead of fixing the underlying issues. Upon learning about how iPhone apps are developed, this should have been staring the developers in the face every day, meaning they knew they were building a “house of sticks” and willfully ignored it.
6. We had to call the FBI on him: Upon firing Kevin we wanted the code we had paid for. He sent us old versions of the code and told us that was it. After taking the code to another developer we learned he withheld what we had paid for, an amount of work that added up to felony wire fraud. After realizing it and contacting the FBI he finally released the appropriate code.
I’m sure he will have excuses about this post, as that’s his thing: excuses. But if you are ever even remotely considering working with Kevin or his team, you are more than welcome to reach out to me with questions. I’ll be happy to answer them as I’d hate to see anyone lose money to this guy the way we did.
