When “can’t be done” is not an option

When your boss, under fire from his boss, tells you “this must be done by Monday morning…” and you feel / know it can’t possibly be done the way you think it should be done what do you do?

1. tell your boss “yes boss I will take care of it” and then when Monday morning comes you tell him “sorry, I tried but I couldn’t get it done...” and then wait for him to fire you?
2. tell your boss “yes boss I will take care of it”, throw your professional standards and pride off the window and “proudly” deliver a shoddy piece of work on Monday morning and wait for him to shower you with appreciation before he realizes that what you delivered was crap and fires you?
3. tell your boss “this can’t be done” and that he is an idiot for trying to impose such an unreasonable order and just resign from your job?
   
   OR
4. you assure your boss that you understand the urgency of the matter and politely ask for permission to go sit down in your corner, come up with a game plan and then meet with the boss to go over your plan?

Well, this is a no brainer you would say – yes, I know I don’t need to tell you that #4 is the best choice but I have seen enough programmers choose 1 and 2 and less frequently choose 3 that I believe a reminder can’t hurt. While number 4 is the obvious choice it is not necessarily the first thing that comes to mind when you are under pressure.

A small clarification - when I say that all three options 1, 2 and 3 will result in you getting fired I am exaggerating a bit to make the point but even if you don’t get fired at the very least your reputation will be severely damaged.

Choosing option 4 is a testament to your professionalism and experience. It gives you the much needed time to break the job down into more manageable and easier to estimate tasks. While doing that you may discover that it is possible to get it done by the deadline if certain resources are made available to you which would be great! But, even if your initial intuition / estimate is proven right and the job can not possibly be done you go back to your boss with an action plan that details what can be done by the deadline and when the whole job can be completed. At that point your boss has the ammunition he needs to go back to his boss and secure an extension of the deadline or modify the requirement / scope of the job so that you can deliver what may be the most critical part of the job by the deadline. Details aside, this approach leads to “happy endings” – the boss will respect you a lot more and chances are that he will never again tell you that “it must be done by Monday” but will rather ask for your professional opinion on what maybe doable and what not.

Tell me what you think – feel free to leave your comments here.

User an idiot no more!

Not more than 10 years ago it was not unusual to hear programmers vent their frustration about the users who were all “idiots“, and see users sheepishly admit of having clicked the “wrong button”. During those 10 years things have changed dramatically in both sides – the users are increasingly savvy and their expectations have increased significantly while the programmers, no more shielded by the mystique of the profession, dread hearing a user proclaim “who is the moron that wrote this code!”. Nowadays it is common to see puzzled users tell their programmers “what do you mean that can’t be done…?”, nowadays there is no such thing as “the wrong button”, nowadays if something goes bad with the application it is not the user who is the idiot but rather the programmer is the inept moron.

Not trying to make any point here – just an observation on one of the aspects of the evolution of the profession. Do you agree with this observation?

Getting a programmer's attention – winning idea gets $1000!

Software programmers, database administrators, systems engineers etc, whatever the title may be, are somewhat different from the rest of the people. One can quickly build a social network of teenagers, college students, professionals etc. but try building such network of programmers and you will see what I mean! Most of the people I know from this group don’t have an account on facebook, linkedin or myspace – they are the people who build such systems but they don’t often participate as users in them. Chit-chatting, sharing feelings or otherwise socializing for the sake of socializing are not something that they enjoy much (I think). They are willing helpers and contributors, readily sharing the knowledge they have despite how much they may have invested to gain that knowledge. Recognition of professionalism and cleverness by peers is more important and enjoyable than any other form of recognition.

Now, of course we could spend years exploring the peculiar characteristics of this group and speculating about it but I would prefer to leave that work to professionals. I am interested in a much more practical matter, that is, how to get the attention of these people when you don’t have gazillions of dollars to “blanket” the relevant web destinations and print publications with advertisements?

Here is the situation in more concrete terms:

• we at xSQL Software have spent years developing a few very helpful SQL Server tools – tools that can save the programmers and database administrators many hours of work and “tons” of frustration;
• our licensing is very generous – we give our products our for free for SQL Server Express and also give them out free for other edition of SQL Server in case the database is within certain size limits. That really translates into the products being free for the majority of SQL Server users.
• the people who do get to use our products love them

So what’s the problem? The problem is we don’t have enough people trying our products.

What I am looking for is an ingenious approach to tell them about our products without annoying them. What do I mean by annoying – here is an example, we once ran an attention getting banner on a popular SQL Server site; we thought the banner was very clever, it used falling blocks from the classic tetris game to get attention and then it conveyed the message that we don’t play games when it comes to our tools, but it backfired – it distracted the visitors from reading what they wanted to read.

It only takes 5 minutes to download, install and try our products but 5 minutes is a lot in today’s World – we may at best get a few seconds of their peripheral attention during which we have to convince them that those 5 minutes we want them to spend with our products will really be worth it.

Email us your ideas at the sales address – our domain is xsqlsoftware.com – the winning idea will get a $1,000 and more… (email us if you want to know what the more part is).