Employees need to push back sometimes
Posted: Thu Feb 10, 2011 10:28 pm
With the recent rant by Jonsey on the removal of features like Linux on the PS3 or the screensaver on the Kindle, and my own comment about programmers accepting non-compete clauses, I think I'll start another rant: failing to push back when management is acting stupidly.
I had my own incident. I was doing tech support back in 1995 for a company named INET, we provided level one tech support for customers of Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions (Bell Atlantic had a further level of tech support if we couldn't handle it) and all tech support for the small number of customers of SNET (Southern New England Telephone); if we couldn't handle it they were SOL.
Some times you get a problem in which a certain area loses service. If some guy runs into a telephone pole that's carrying your main cross-state internet cables, or some contractor backhoes into your underground cabling system, or a rat chews through a conduit, someone's going to get an outage; even I can understand that. Or your techs replace something and it doesn't go right, it's going to take time to fix.
The problem is in making the estimate of how long that fix is going to take. My problem was that BAIS' estimate of how long the fix would take was always wildly optimistic, they essentially always underestimated how long it would take, and we were always telling customers that it would take X amount of time (an hour, two hours, whatever) when it was more likely it could be anything from 2 to 5x or maybe longer. To quote Buzz Lightyear, "to infinity and beyond."
It kind of hit me when a customer, when I told him that we had a two-hour estimate for repair, more or less said, "Yeah, right, I get answers that are wrong so often that I never believe Bell Atlantic anymore."
That's when I kind of had a Jerry McGuire epiphany; I realized the guy on the phone was right, and it was time to stop. So I did. I told my supervisor it was ridiculous of us to lie to the customers, and that from now on I was going to tell them the truth: Yes, we do know about the problem, we appreciate you telling us because it allows us to know where the problem is and we can potentially warn customers, and while we do know what the problem is, we can't give you a time frame on when it will be fixed because we don't know and anything we say would, frankly, be a wild guess.
And you know what, not once did a customer ever complain because I couldn't give them an estimate, if anything, they appreciated my candor.
Something else happened too: when we closed down the office because INET moved its operations to Houston (they offered me the opportunity to go but I decided I didn't want to move) I was literally the last tech support person, everyone else was let go as they closed down, and they even asked me to stay over a couple extra days.
So my decision to push back didn't cost me anything and made me feel better about how I did my job.
I had my own incident. I was doing tech support back in 1995 for a company named INET, we provided level one tech support for customers of Bell Atlantic Internet Solutions (Bell Atlantic had a further level of tech support if we couldn't handle it) and all tech support for the small number of customers of SNET (Southern New England Telephone); if we couldn't handle it they were SOL.
Some times you get a problem in which a certain area loses service. If some guy runs into a telephone pole that's carrying your main cross-state internet cables, or some contractor backhoes into your underground cabling system, or a rat chews through a conduit, someone's going to get an outage; even I can understand that. Or your techs replace something and it doesn't go right, it's going to take time to fix.
The problem is in making the estimate of how long that fix is going to take. My problem was that BAIS' estimate of how long the fix would take was always wildly optimistic, they essentially always underestimated how long it would take, and we were always telling customers that it would take X amount of time (an hour, two hours, whatever) when it was more likely it could be anything from 2 to 5x or maybe longer. To quote Buzz Lightyear, "to infinity and beyond."
It kind of hit me when a customer, when I told him that we had a two-hour estimate for repair, more or less said, "Yeah, right, I get answers that are wrong so often that I never believe Bell Atlantic anymore."
That's when I kind of had a Jerry McGuire epiphany; I realized the guy on the phone was right, and it was time to stop. So I did. I told my supervisor it was ridiculous of us to lie to the customers, and that from now on I was going to tell them the truth: Yes, we do know about the problem, we appreciate you telling us because it allows us to know where the problem is and we can potentially warn customers, and while we do know what the problem is, we can't give you a time frame on when it will be fixed because we don't know and anything we say would, frankly, be a wild guess.
And you know what, not once did a customer ever complain because I couldn't give them an estimate, if anything, they appreciated my candor.
Something else happened too: when we closed down the office because INET moved its operations to Houston (they offered me the opportunity to go but I decided I didn't want to move) I was literally the last tech support person, everyone else was let go as they closed down, and they even asked me to stay over a couple extra days.
So my decision to push back didn't cost me anything and made me feel better about how I did my job.