> There's a typical amount of seething involved in any field where someone has a minor input or touch-point with your job and they can do something you absolutely cannot or would not do.
I'm not sure I buy into this theory. I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. Under such a system they certainly don't work to identify frictions along touch-points.
> I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes,
I agree with this.
> and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals.
The amorphous "other" is generally "IT" when it comes to anything computer related.
IT are the 'big evil' and the cause of most people being unable to do work, if you follow the common narrative.
For example, it's IT's fault that this machine is so slow...Not finance's for restricting budgets and using the cheapest RAM/drive configuration they can get away with.
It's IT's fault that I can't install this super important Outlook/Chrome/whatever extension that I saw on a blog somewhere. It's also IT's fault if Outlook/Chrome/whatever crashes or is slow because I've installed all these extensions.
It's IT's fault that I can't just use wordpress and put custom themes and unvetted PHP code on our main domain so I can do some promotion. It's also IT's fault if that Wordpress install gets hijacked and is used to phish/whatever customers/staff/etc.
It's IT's fault that I can't send 500MB attachments and cc 250 people at other companies. It's also IT's fault that the network (and my computer) is so slow when I'm trying to open an email.
It's IT's fault that the printers are locked down to only print in B&W, even though they have that colour option - and not because finance is sick of paying for me to print 500 full page colour birthday/soccer/wedding invitations every other month.
It's IT's fault that I got phished, even though I ignored the IT security warnings, and slept/skipped through the mandatory online training. It's also IT's fault for letting phishing emails come through, even though it was detected and put in my spam folder with a header clearly saying that it was a suspicious email.
It's IT's fault that I can't use an unencrypted USB drive to move files between computers, even thouh it's because we have had too many colleagues leave USB drives full of customer data in taxis or lost in the mail.
Don't you understand? IT just makes everyone's life more difficult.
I'm playing this up a bit, but these things happen, and people do blame IT for these things.
Thank you for explaining it in better terms than I could. I was just trying to point out that developers are also super susceptible to this kind of thinking.
I'm not sure I buy into this theory. I think most people have no idea what goes on behind the scenes, and so ascribe slowdowns, missed SLA, or other failing metrics to amorphous "others" rather than individuals. Under such a system they certainly don't work to identify frictions along touch-points.