Salesperson's tech dream delivered by ill-equipped consultant who charged for the inevitable fix
- Reference: 1662359532
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/05/who_me/
- Source link:
Towards the end of the 2000s, Norman left an in-house software development “join the ranks of The Consultants.”
“My tech credentials were solid… assuming that is The Consultancy put me on projects that actually required them,” Norman explained.
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And indeed, on his first job as a Consultant he was asked to work on “a technology that I had at best a passing experience in: - Microsoft Exchange.
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The Consultancy didn’t much care that he wasn’t an Exchange expert. In Norman’s telling of the tale “The salespeople had done a great job of selling The Dream and it was of marginal consequence to them that I had virtually no idea what I was doing and certainly not the experience to foresee some of the things that could go wrong”
“I had a sharp new suit and a misplaced sense of confidence and superiority though, so I was ready.”
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Norman’s consultancy task was to write a service that monitored an Exchange mailbox and forward certain messages to a document management system.
“The business logic was reasonably simple - if the email provided the required information in a specified format then it was sent on to DMS; if the required info was missing then the email was bounced to the sender with a helpful error message.”
Norman wrote the required code, which “flew through user acceptance testing with flying colours and was gaily deployed to Production.”
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Until it broke.
[7]Yeah, we'll just take that first network handshake. What could possibly go wrong?
[8]You can never have too many backups. Also, you can never have too many backups
[9]In a time before calculators, going the extra mile at work sometimes didn't add up
Norman had long since been redeployed, but as luck would have it was still at the same client.
He could therefore observe “absolute pandemonium as what seemed like the entire IT team running about wildly complaining that their entire Exchange infrastructure was on its knees, and nobody could get any email.”
This was not Norman’s problem. But as the IT team triaged the mess, he overheard a phrase that suggested the mailbox processing service he’d built could be the culprit.
A little investigation proved his work was indeed the cause of the problem – but not because Norman had messed up.
That honour went to a business unit at Norman’s client, which had created a new automated process that sent emails to the mailbox being monitored by the service he built. But the automated process misconfigured the emails, so the required info was missing and added an auto responder on the mailbox they were using to send the emails.
Thus a game of autoresponder tennis had ensued.
“Their mailbox had sent an ‘invalid’ mail to my mailbox,” Norman explained. “My service had found the message and bounced it back. And their autoresponder responded with an equally invalid message. My service responded.”
And how it responded! Instead of just removing incoming messages from the mailbox it bounced them. This meant that every time Norman’s service ran, it not only processed the latest mail … and all the prior messages.
Norman described the result as “an exponential mailbox timebomb that was enough to completely overwhelm the entire environment.”
Norman fixed the problem by pausing the mailbox monitoring service, purging the target mailbox, and temporarily disabling the autoresponder on the other mailbox.
With that done he was triumphant. “I had successfully resolved the issue… that my code had created,” he admitted.
And then he had another win. “The Consultancy rustled up another hefty sale in the form of the required ‘change request’ to implement a two-line code fix to prevent this from happening again.”
Ain’t consultancy grand?
If you’ve ever charged a customer to make them pay for your own mistake, or paid to fix a consultant’s incompetence, tell all with an email to [10]Who, Me? ®
Get our [11]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/Tag/Who,%20Me?/
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[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/08/who_me/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/29/who_me/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/22/who_me/
[10] mailto:whome@theregister.com
[11] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
I'm sorry but I dont believe Norman could ever have been a real consultant, or perhaps I'll concede this being his first consultanting position, he just hadnt developed the necessary "skills" yet.
Every Consultant I've ever met has lived by the motto:
"Consultancy - If you're not part of the Solution, there's money to be made prolonging the Problem."
(motto stolen from despair.com, but really does seem to apply to a LOT of consultants I've met...)
The give-away that Norman is not a consultant for me was:
Norman wrote the required code
Consultants in my experience provide a ton of documents but do not touch the implementation part.
If something doesn't work they'll find a document that can be interpreted that something was wrong/missing in the implementation. The documents contain enough weasel words so you can't point out that different documents contradict each other.
Once i figure out how to get the big bucks but not being responsible for anything I'll probably call myself a consultant as well.
a sharp new suit and a misplaced sense of confidence and superiority
An excellent summary of consultants.
It's all the same, innit?
In the early 2000's I did a stint as a "Systems Engineer" for a large reseller / integrator. We SEs were a chargeable resource with the responsibility of installing & configuring whatever the sales guy could flog. In other organisations we'd have had the title "Consultant", but I guess that title would have commanded a higher salary.
At the time, their sales crew were the very definition of "coin operated" - if there was cash on offer they were all over it like a rash, and obviously selling professional services was very lucrative indeed. The SEs were allocated to a particular sales region with a mix of abilities and specialisms with each team. With a few notable exceptions, most of the sales guys didn't have a clue about what they were selling - one had been selling fleet verhicles in his previous job.
This caused no end of problems as by and large they had no understanding of the skills needed to deliver a particular project. Culminating in me, a fully paid up SQL / IIS MCSE, coming back from holiday to find I'd been allocated as the tech lead on a country wide Unix / Oracle roll out. When I challenged the offending sales guy he uttered the never to be forgotten line - "it's just servers and a databases, you'll be fine".
Will next week's Who, Me? be about a journo who forgot to add a couple of important words at the start of the article?
I've never made a customer pay for my mistakes. But I sure as hell have made them pay for theirs (especially where said customers have been warned well in advance).
The best time was when I was in a meeting explaining that a system was unstable and needed to be migrated from ASAP. Said system had been running for a long time, was unsupported, and had been flagged as an issue for a very long time. Management scoffed and said it was fine. In the middle of the meeting phones started ringing. Guess which system had just fallen in a heap and was now causing a massive outage!