Users that piss off IT and software developers
February 06, 20090 comments
- The No Detail Guy. He has a problem, and you have an even bigger one because it never occurred to him to try to help you out by getting you diagnostic data, recording exact error messages (if possible) or anything else that could be construed as a symptom. Usually you can identify this person on a forum or a support email quickly because they will make damn sure that you know that they have a problem, but they'll be damned if they'll tell you much without having it pried out of them by a crowbar and the threat of waterboarding in a Mexican public restroom.
- The Know It All. This is guy has very, very strong opinions. He either loves something or absolutely hates it with the intensity that Satan hates puppies and kittens. When he has problems, he'll be quick to assume that he read everything, and there is just no way your piece of trash can do it. If there were, he'd know about it and be lecturing you about how it is really poorly designed. The more that these people know a tiny bit about programming or system administration, the more they'll make it clear that things suck. Again, they'd know. One of the worst things you can do with this person, though amusing, is to point out to them that this general market is not a democracy, it's a meritocracy. If he can't deploy something or get it to work, but somehow thousands or even millions of others can, hate to break it to you chief, the only ignorant dumbass in the room is you.
- The Butterfly Effect User. This is the user who thinks that clicking on any button or doing anything slightly ahead of what they already know will result in the complete reduction of their PC to a molten pile of slag. Yet for some reason, they can drive a car without worrying about the extremely remote possibility that the road wear on their car might damage the safety mechanisms that prevent the igniter from lighting up the entire gas tank. In short, this person believes that like the butterfly effect, the slightest action of their clicking or typing the wrong thing can lead to utter catastrophe.
- The Lazy Good For Nothing Who Wants It All. This person thinks that there is no dichotomy between raw power and ease of use. If they were in the military, they would insist on running a world war from behind a stream-lined, kid-friendly, Fisher Price-like simple user interface without sacrificing any features or power nor having to learn how to use it.
- The Amateur-Expert Architect. This user insists on jumping right in there and designing everything with you. Though they have neither formal education nor practical work experience in network architecture, database architecture or software architecture, let alone the most basic tasks involved in implementing them, they believe they are qualified to dictate actual design and implementation. They will draw out what they think are master works of interface design and system integration on the drawing board, but in reality, most of the technical staff actually look on their work the way they would a baboon flinging its own excrement at the board because invariably, it is that ugly and nasty. The truly advanced versions of this user not only manage to completely miss the very requirements they were charged with getting the IT employees and software developers, but they will actually create an elegant path that causes their work to completely miss anything remotely usable to the actual users.
- The Pathologically Impatient User. This user has a click-finger with the rapid firing motion of a machine gun. No task is too complex for the computer that they think about getting up and getting a coffee while it processes their request. It doesn't matter that a system might have to send a request to, say, a database server or a GIS application to crunch gigabytes of data. A computer is no good to them unless it gives them instant feedback. The irony of it is that when software developers are rushed, they often forget to disable certain user interface elements while the software is processing data, making old machine-gun-finger here able to reduce the system's speed to that which one would get from running JavaEE on a Commodore 64.
- The Cheapskate User. First, an example. This user expects quality support for a product they either didn't spend any money installing or that didn't get sold with a support contract. They're the sort of user who doesn't want help from the hoi polloi. Nothing less than official corporate enterprise support or a full-time developer doing a Q&A session with them is good enough for them. Feel free to disregard them, as they aren't lost business, and no paying customer in their right mind would expect you to give them the time of day between their attitude and their inability to caugh up enough money to buy a latte at Starbucks for all of the trouble they are bound to be.
Categories: it work ,
random thoughts ,
software engineering
