User's drive me up the wall. If you are building them a new system, they only want what they have seen on other systems. They don't think outside of the box, and when a developer suggests something as outlandish as "allow the computer to do some of that work for you" they freak out! "But we have always done it that way! What will we do?" Hopefully, you will look for other ways for our company to make money instead of the same old boring job you have been doing for the last 15 years.
I am going to go out on a limb on Monday... There is a peice of functionality that I consider "low hanging fruit" that I want to implement, but no one has asked for, but everyone will love once it is there. I have done this before... It is a pretty interesting story...
I was working on an operations floor, swapping tapes out of big IBM iron for the daily backups. That was my job, tape wrangler. During the shift we had to log everything that happened during the shift. The log was written in a special format so a nice little Perl script could rip that log apart and create a report for the big wigs. This was all before the Internet exploded, or web interfaces were "cool".
There were about 40 steps that had to be taken to change our log into the report and then email it out. One night, I looked at a linux box that one of the guys had been playing around with and a plan started forming. Over the next couple of shifts, I would write some code and test things out and see how my little plan worked. Sure enough, I turned our 40 step, 45 minute process into a 5 step 15 minute process and it only took me 8 hours to make it happen. I presented it to my shift leader, like a proud pappa. He was impressed and we started using it over the next couple of shifts to see how it worked. It worked like a champ. I was saving us 30 minutes a day.
The next weekend, we were turning the shift over to the weekend team, which was being managed by a real stickler for policy. I don't remember how he found out, but he went berserk. How could I waste precious time writing some new fangled script that might not work? Did I get approval for it before starting? Who gave me authorization to change a procedure that was part of the SOP?
I won't bore you with the details of how he spent the next week trying to get me demoted, reprimanded and punished. I will just summarize it like this... His complaints got up to the director of our division, who saw it the same way I did, I was saving 30 minutes a day that could be used to do something much more productive. The 8 hours that I had "wasted" over 4 days, during the midnight shift when there was NOTHING else to do had already been made up through the use of the script over the last 20 days.
I was looked upon as a rebel from then on, but was soon taken off of the operations floor and asked to revamp the help desk system. It seems their software was not doing what they needed it to do. The manager was never taken seriously again and soon moved on to another location. My shift leader now works for Cisco and has a CCIE. And here I am... a lowly developer trying to foist my ideas on unsuspecting users. I guess I have earned my rebellious label.
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