Robert on Software Development

How many times have you heard the expression, “the customer is always right?” I’ve been giving this a lot of thought lately as I work very closely with my customer and make daily decisions that affect them.

On the one hand, there’s the issue of what the customer really wants and believes they need for their business. This can be driven by any number of factors, including political and financial (the two biggest). And on the other hand, there’s the issue of what level of service you can provide to the customer, most commonly impacted by financial drivers, commitments made, and the overall attitude of the customer involved.

All of that is to say that from the customer’s perspective, they’re paying for your service and should get what they want. From the provider’s perspective, there are limits as to what can be done and expectations need to be managed up front.

Unfortunately, no level of preparation can cover the odd and occasional problem. Service level agreements are fantastic for managing expectations, but when a server goes down the customer finds little comfort in the documentation outlining an agreement.

With this topic in mind, I found two very interesting blog posts today that provide different perspectives on the customer-provider relationship. The first, from Eric Lippert, is entitled “Customer Service is Not Rocket Science, Part Two.” Eric had an unfortunate experience with a bigoted lawn care provider and details his experience trying to get the middleman who set up the service to capitulate.

The other post is a reprint of an email Bill Gates sent regarding Windows usability. This is a very curious email because Bill Gates is both a provider (Microsoft) and a customer (user of Microsoft products), and as much as he’d like to, he’s not able to get involved at every stage of every product. So he’s a user just like us.

It is only with experience that we figure out how to best react to our customer’s demands.

Back when the dot-com boom was going on, anyone with HTML on his resume could get a job in the tech industry. When the bubble burst, those people were naturally weeded out of the industry as they couldn’t find sustainable employment in the post-boom and post-9/11 economy.

Fast forward to eight years later, and we’re in the midst of Web 2.0. Google is the undisputed king of search, and Microsoft does a lot more than just make Office these days. The people who work for companies like Google and the cadre of Web 2.0 startups are typically highly educated and highly skilled. This is a stark contrast with the previous boom of internet companies.

The disturbing aspect of this second boom is the evaluation of potential employees, both in the measurable (advanced degrees) and immeasurable (intelligence). There is almost a clique-like mentality emerging from these companies, all of which want to hire the best. FogCreek, Google, and Xobni are just a few of the companies who go on about how they’re looking for the best and the brightest.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting smart and highly educated people to work in your company. There’s nothing wrong with spending your time and money seeking out these people. The problem is the sanctimonious attitudes of the people who work for these companies.

Let me single out Steve Yegge, whose pompous post entitled “Done, and Get Things Smart” (a riff on Joel Spolsky’s “Smart, and Gets Things Done” mantra) is so full of self-righteous wank that it’s nearly impossible to wade through the whole thing.

Steve spends 5022 words telling us how we should only hire the best (superheroes, he says).

Ok Steve, we get it. Google hires smart people. Everyone wants smart people. Nobody wants to hire an incompetent and inexperienced person to do a job that requires significant skill and innovative thinking. But listen: you’re a search engine company. You’re not NASA. You’re not working on a cure for cancer. You’re not trying to find a way to end world poverty. You’re not trying to find a way to detect catastrophic weather in east Asia.

You make a search engine. It’s a damn fine search engine, but it’s still just a piece of software. Get over yourself.

One thing I do have to concede to, however, is Steve’s citation of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which proves Darwin’s assertion (and the conventional wisdom) that the people who know the least think they know the most. This is true in every industry, every society, every community, everywhere. Does anyone truly want to admit to himself that he’s incompetent, when we’re constantly told that we’re all special in our own way?

I don’t know if the Dunning-Kruger effect applies to me. I think I’m smart, but should I not? Am I actually incompetent because I think I’m smart? Or am I actually smart because I know what I’m not good at?

At the end of the day, I just try to do the best job I can for my company and my customer, and I derive personal pleasure from that success. And that, in my humble opinion, defines competence.

The subject sums up how I feel today, now that my employer has replaced my long-in-the-tooth Latitude D810 with a brand new Latitude D830. It may not sound like much, but it’s a massive upgrade. Now I can run Visual Studio 2008 and Microsoft Outlook at the same time!

The laptop was delivered to me pretty bare, with just the standard install (Windows XP and Office 2003). I knew I wouldn’t have time to get it set up tomorrow in the office, and besides, it wouldn’t be fair to bill my customer for my time spent setting up my own machine, so I brought it it home and got it all ready for work tomorrow.

After I finished installing everything, setting my desktop background, and organizing my folders, I leaned back in my chair with a smug sense of accomplishment. Then it hit me: I have a meeting tomorrow morning at 8:30, and I’ll need to use my PC in the meeting to draw network diagrams. I don’t have any of the supporting documentation for the meeting on this new laptop. I got so caught up in the excitement of replacing my old one that I neglected to think about the risk of trading it in on the new one the night before a big meeting.

This is the kind of risk I point out on a weekly basis in my role in the PMO. People want to make changes to production systems and they think the changes are minor and easy, so they don’t want to go through the formal process we have in place. But the smallest change can quickly snowball into the biggest problem. One little oversight can cause a massive headache. And that’s where I am now.

I’ll be ok in the meeting tomorrow because I’ll go in earlier to get the files onto my machine. That means I have to get up earlier, and have a more stressful morning. That bit of unpleasantness could have been mitigated by simply waiting a day. I’m mitigating my risk by sacrificing some sleep.

Since I’m not a morning person, getting less sleep risks a tired afternoon, and my technical review board meeting is tomorrow afternoon.

Do you see where this is going?