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by touisteur
1729 days ago
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I worked as 'the software guy' on a big customer infra project where I'd be 1/4th of my time on customer sites reproducing problems, narrowing their cause, asking users to show me how they broke it, testing exhaustively and exhaustingly new releases or quickfixes w/ specific complaining person at customers' site, writing detailed descriptions of new versions, relentlessly opening tickets as a customer advocate but also triaging my time and tickets. The rest of my time would be fixing some, pushing colleagues to fix others, documenting, reproducing, proposing changes to avoid whole classes of problems... And implementing features (either asked by customer and I had time, or new feature idea that we'd fit in customer's budget twice - once as a prototype/PoC and once as a qualified feature). It was one of the best experiences in my life and 'software' in that system was quite the gamut. I loved over anything being the voice of the customer, bringing back some reality in an org that can be quite bureaucratic, myopic to real needs and forgetful of problems. It also was the time I spent the most political capital and when I discovered I was appreciated but to a point and that you can be right and lose, and that some people feel the customer is 'the other team' and you play 'for them'. Quite eye opening about what happens when words (customer obsession) meet KPIs or actual incentives... |
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