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As a programmer, you have to interact with your users/customers in some way to both develop and support the software they pay for.
What did you learn from that experience? Why did this situation happen? How can you to avoid it in the future? I'm also interested in best experiences you have, and why they were different from the worst. and how you can reproduce them. |
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I interned at a financial firm my first year in college. At that job, I wore many hats: programmer, help desk, network admin. One day I had to hook up a printer for the secretary of the SVP of Investments. This SVP worked 15 blocks away and wanted the printer hooked up in a back room, 50 feet away from the secretary's desk. This was nearly 20 years ago, so wireless wasn't an option. To keep everything tidy and out-of-sight, I had to run serial cables into the ceiling, down the wall in the back room. Wires had to be spliced together. A faceplate had to put over the hole I punched into the wall. You get the idea. I finished the work and went back to my office. At 5pm that evening, as I'm getting ready to leave for the day, I got an urgent phonecall from the secretary: "The SVP just asked me to stay late, because she needs 20 copies of a 20-page report printed for a Board meeting tomorrow morning, but the printer you installed won't work. She wants to see you right away." I had to take the subway 15 blocks to SVP's office. Inside, the secretary was getting ready to leave, saying, "Since the printer won't work, I guess there's no point in me staying late." With that, she left. Now for the worst part: the SVP walks up to me, gets right in my face and starts hurling profanities at me at the top of her lungs: "Why you little 5#1t#3@d! Why the 9^ck did you leave us without a working printer? You g0dd@mm3d 9^ck1ng @55#073..." I was embarrassed and humiliated beyond belief, even though mostly everyone had gone home for the day by that time. But I kept my cool, and calmly asked her to pull up the document she was having trouble printing. I clicked the print key (Shift-F7), the print menu came up, and I hit "1" to print "Full Document." I heard pages printing in the back room. Walked in, and there it was. No problem after all. At that point, the SVP must have realized what I had guessed as soon as I got there: This whole "printer problem" was just a ruse so the secretary wouldn't have to stay late, and wait for 400 pages to print. (What did I learn from all this? The eternal truth: "Hebel Hebelim..." Translation: "Absurdity of absurdities... Everything is absurd. What profit does man have in all his work for which he toils under the sun? (Qoheleth 1:2-3)" All is absurdity, vanity, meaningless--hebel.) |
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I wrote a fairly complex custom web application for a Federal Regulatory agency once with an IT Manager who was seriously ADHD, had administrator rights, and an itchy trigger finger. So one day she calls me up for support on the app. It was a fairly minor issue that was only experienced by a couple of users and I think ultimately was probably the result of an improper configuration setting somewhere. Very routine. Well, it would have been routine if I weren't troubleshooting it with this IT manager over the phone from across the country. It was my first exposure to the "Scorched earth" troubleshooting approach. Every time I'd ask her to check something, I could hear her furiously typing in the background for a lot longer than it seemed like would be necessary for what I was asking. Me: Can you restart the web service by running the command "IISReset" from a command line? [Phone Rings 45 minutes later] The story ends with me on a plane later that evening. There was absolutely no way I was going to talk this person through a full install of a complicated multi-tier application over the phone. I took another developer with me to the customer's site with the express task of distracting this person while I re-installed the software. |
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I know I answered already, but I have a few of these as I work in web development. My favorite (least favorite?): I was hired to build a website for a relatively high-profile name in the sports world, so all of the communication was done through his lawyers who obviously knew not a single thing about web development. I got the job because a friend of mine recommended my services to them and she actually became my liaison to them who were my liaisons to him. This created a wonderfully horrible "telephone" type communication process where I would lay out all of my plans (pretty much as plainly as I could due to the audience's understandable ignorance of the process) and they would get muddied en route to the actual client and vice versa. It was, how you say, frustrating. Anyways, part of their requirements were a news section. No big deal. However, when I told them they probably wanted a way to update said news section (and that I would have to build them a tool for it), they balked, because they didn't want to have to pay me for another two or so hours. I said, ok, that's fine, no update tool, here's my estimate. Signed off, built the site, I get paid, everyone is happy. Two weeks later I get a frenetic call from my friend who has apparently just taken a lot of heat from the client because the news section isn't being updated. She wants access to the code so she can go in and update it herself (because they don't want to pay me to do it). I say ok sure, no problem, and I wrote out very long and detailed instructions (for someone with 0 HTML experience [also didn't charge for the 45 mins or so it took me to write these instructions]) on how to do it and not mess up the site. After she and her boss read the instructions, I got a freaked out call from her boss asking why I made it so complex to make changes (honestly, all it took was a text editor and an FTP client. Just change the text in a Haven't heard from them since. Needless to say, the news section is four months old at the time of this writing. |
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"I can't buy anything off your site!" "Oh, I'm sorry to hear that. Which browser are you using?" "I think Internet Explainer. The Microsoft one." "I see. Do you happen to know which version?" "What do you mean?" "Err... how old is your computer? I mean, when did you purchase it?" "I think about 1999 or 2000. I actually got it free from a co-worker. Still runs great, too!" Turns out the guy wasn't using IE6, but IE5. This was in 2009. facepalm |
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I need you to just make a minor change...only take a second... Any experience involving wanting me to do excessive work for free because it's seen as a "minor change". Their asking can be either awkward, uncomfortable, or sometimes just downright insulting. By insulting I mean when it's a blatant attempt to take advantage of me or a company I work for. We're all professionals here. Pay for quality services. |
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Many years ago I worked for a company that sold an upgraded system to a customer. Part of that upgrade was an agreement to upgrade the version of Informix that the customer had, including making any tweaks to the client's programs written against the prior version of Informix. The salesman didn't have a clue as to how much this could entail, and as such guessed at a flat-rate price to charge the customer. I was not that experienced of a programmer at the time, but I wasn't too worried about updating the code (naively) because the client was a much worse programmer. Most of the "programs" were really nothing more than extended scripts. So I sit down to work, figuring it wasn't going to be too bad of a project, just tweak the programs to handle the differences between the versions. The problem is that once I started working on the project, every other program I encountered just wouldn't work, and I had to go through a lot of gyrations to get them working as expected. I thought I was losing it, and my crappy programming skills were getting the better of me. I expected trouble because this "flat rate" project was taking much, much longer than expected. Finally I stopped and admitted to the client all the troubles I was having. He just shrugged and stated that most of those programs he could never get working in the first place. Not only that, he knew this going in and never bothered to tell the salesman, but he did hold the company to what was agreed, all programs upgraded and working. |
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The stupidest was a phone conversation back about 1993:
The worst was a little complicated. Our company had had a very good relationship as developers for Company A, and a fast-talking entrepreneur I'll call JR was interested in selling their patented software into a new market. JR came to an agreement with company A to do some enhancements to the software, for which he'd pay my company directly. So we got the check, did the enhancements, the check cleared, the whole nine yards... and then JR decided a good way to put negotiating pressure on company A was to stop payment on his check to us. I'm not sure how this worked, since the check had cleared, but it managed to suck thousands out of our bank balance and we had to scramble to make payroll. The guy always seemed shady, and I learned... trust my gut around things like that, and three-way agreements suck. |
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When I was a civilian working as a computer salesman at the local Naval base’s Naval Exchange (Think: On-base department store) I was asked as favor by the store commander - hook up a new PC for the secretary of the commander of the Commissary next door (where the Commissary was the equivalent of a grocery store). No problem - I get everything hooked up, and leave. The next day I get a panicked plea for help from the secretary - the machine isn't working! I head over to take a look, and on the screen are these words: "KEYBOARD LOCKED. UNLOCK AND PRESS ANY KEY TO CONTINUE". The keys were in the lock, on the front of the PC, which was on top of the desk with the monitor on top of it and the keyboard right in front of it. It hadn't been locked when I left it. I turned the key, pressed enter, and told her it was fixed. In fairness, she was just afraid that she'd broken something. Then there was the time, when I was in the Air Force, that I had to drive to the next base over to fix their PC, and found that someone had managed to plug in the VGA monitor cable upside down. Yes. Yes I know. Upside down. Totally mangled the "D" connecter to do it, too. |
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My worst customer experiences are doing 3rd party B2B integrations. When a business-customer can't meet their requirements/expectations it almost always results in them slinging as much mud at you as possible. The sad part is how often it works; I'll be pulled off a project just to cover due-diligence and ensure there isn't an issue on our end. If they uncover any crack in your defense then it's back to step-1 (more fact-checking). Usually by the time the senseless emails, conference calls, and other fallout are at an end they've bought enough time to hack together their end. What's worst is that with a non-technical customer in the middle you have to play along--otherwise it's just their word against yours, leaving you looking uncooperative. If they find something you could change to supposedly solve their issues ("can you do a |
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A couple to pick from:
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I took over the maintenance of a desktop application without developer licensing to some of the third-party widgets. There were large parts of the application I could not recompile. Any requests for changes to these areas were denied, but I was ashamed of the reason I had to give. Most users hated the application/company so much they actually felt sorry for me. The company didn't care and would not pay to renew the licenses. I should have begun immediately to replace these controls with standard ones. All of this happened because of office politics. The company did several buy-outs. They purchased the application with no contractual obligations on the source code. There was a project to hire a consulting firm to replace the application which was easier to justify as my app was made to look worse. One of the best experiences was a place where I was a part-time programmer and worked in office operations and billing for the other part. My goal was to be a full-time developer, but I took this as an opportunity to learn more about the industry. I would start taking over some tasks for other people (we were a little short-staffed). It wouldn't take long before I could automate what they had to do. Even if the job was given back to them, the additional amount of time was insignificant. Sometimes it was better since they didn't have to coordinate any efforts with me when they did it themselves. I wrote the documentation and training guides. I would just hand them the instructions and watch over their shoulder to see if they could learn to do it with no training. I corrected the instructions. This helped to create an office manual that was relevant and helped get new employees up-to-speed much faster. If felt a very strong connection between the code I wrote and the performance of the company. We tripled the amount of money we managed and maybe hired one or two additional staff. |
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"It doesn't work" "Did you follow the install directions?" "Insta... Yes." Nope, no you didn't. Not only didn't you follow them but I got written up. Shouldn't have to spend 2 weeks because you decided to download your own versions of a library that were 4 years old instead of the redistributable that was sent with the application install package. (Then again, I should have been allowed to write an install script.) |
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I once worked in a small company where I was the only employee whose last name started with Z. The company had a phone number with an IVR system where you could spell an employee's name by pressing phone keys. Once the match was unambiguous, the phone rang at the employee's desk. We had millions users worldwide at the peak and a well-publicized 1-800 number for tech support. But a tiny fraction of users called the corporate number instead and pressed "0" at some point to speak with an "operator." The IVR was set up such that 0 spelled Z. So I got to talk to human users from time to time. Sometimes it would be a great conversation starting with "Let me walk you through this", but sometimes people clearly had no intention to solve any problems and just wanted shout some insults. Those were probably the worst experiences. |
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I worked at a pizzeria when I was a teenager, and there was a guy who came in once a week and ordered two small half-plain half-pepperoni pizzas, and he wanted the pepperoni half on the right side. Yes, I know it is not programming-related, but I figured that the crowd here would appreciate the insanity of this order. Oh, and what I have learned from it was that there are people out there who will try to intentionally drive you nuts, and the only thing you can do about it is get a job where they pay you enough for it. |
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If you don't mind an internal user problem, a long time ago I worked at a company that sold a product that needed customization. I was in charge of doing what was necessary back at the office, and somebody I will call Joan (because it isn't anything like her name) was the customer engineer at the customer site. Joan reported a bug in a certain utility. I'd written the utility, so I knew what was wrong. As it happened, the configuration for this utility was really messy. (Originally, I'd protested writing the utility that way, but was overruled. I figured it wouldn't really matter that much, I just hated doing it that way.) From the error message, I could tell what was going on, and it was a configuration problem. I emailed back, saying this, and offering to supply the configuration if she gave me a few pieces of information. I got back a reply saying that the configuration was correct, and she'd had another CE look at it. I sent an email pointing out that I could tell from the error that it wasn't, that it was tricky, and that I was perfectly willing to help. Next communication I got was from management, telling me I wasn't to communicate directly with Joan any more. I never did find out anything more about that. Anyway, the next bug report I got was that our main application demo ran for half an hour, and then stopped. That was it. We didn't have a standard demo, since the customers were all different, so I couldn't try running it, even if I'd had all the configuration and data available. I told my liaison that I'd be perfectly happy to dig in if I had more information, and asked him to get it from Joan. I never got anything more out of that, although I heard the complaint several more times. |
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