- bell jar
- Feb 25, 2009
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FW: RE: help
FYI
Sent from my iPhone
> From: Some Rando <neverheardof@yourorg.biz>
> To: Boss <yourboss@yourorg.biz>
>
> please help
>
> Sent from my iPhone
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Jan 2, 2023 11:48
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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May 15, 2024 05:06
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- bell jar
- Feb 25, 2009
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Whooooo boy. Let’s get into this, shall we?
For brevity, I left out all the contacts, but oh my yes did we reach out.
We contacted them via email.
We reached out on slack.
We spoke with them directly during our weekly stand ups.
The actual problem we face is that the people we interact with in the daily don’t report to their superiors about operational issues due to a culture of pass-the-blame. [Customer] has a toxic culture of assigning blame rather than being solution focused and we’ve literally been in conference calls during customer outages during which production was on fire and yet eight people on the customer side argued about whose fault it was while we listened awkwardly and tried to redirect the conversation towards fixing the problem.
In this case the biggest challenge was notifying customer leadership of this situation without letting that leadership know that all of their reports knew of this and didn’t say anything. Hence i get to send emails directly to leadership because we never get to talk to leadership directly. They just. aren’t. interested.
Again: I’m trying to notify leadership of this situation, not start a witch hunt to assign blame while Rome burns. It’ll come out eventually that their reports knew, but I’m not going to be the one to throw people under the bus because the people are my contacts and we can’t afford to alienate them.
On Thursday I replaced the aging ASUS WAPs in my house with a modern mesh system and that was the most technical thing I did all week.
I spend most of my work day navigating challenging customer landscapes and having difficult conversations with a customer who doesn’t want to acknowledge that we are here to help. For whatever reason we have not been able to convince the customer that we have literal millions of person-years of cloud experience and our best practices are a direct result of that experience. When we suggest following our best practices it’s because we know what the gently caress we are talking about.
But no. I get to play e-mail games.
Yeah, hell yeah. I've seen a lot of people play the pass the buck game (used to be like that myself) but honestly being willing to pick up the phone and talk to someone if there's a problem really changed my outlook on this type of thing. If they're unresponsive from that point, that's on them. I've lost count of the amount of customers I've dealt with that were completely unresponsive to increasingly urgent emails but suddenly cared a lot if you actually talked to them, but there are absolutely going to be toxic company cultures that encourage people not to give a poo poo.
bell jar fucked around with this message at 06:12 on Jan 15, 2023
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Jan 15, 2023 06:08
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- bell jar
- Feb 25, 2009
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Someone post the haiku
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Jan 28, 2023 02:30
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- Adbot
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ADBOT LOVES YOU
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May 15, 2024 05:06
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- bell jar
- Feb 25, 2009
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Low priority gets a faster response in my experience.
It's worth a shot
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Feb 24, 2023 05:29
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Jan 2, 2023 11:48
