I gotta share a little story with you guys. I could remove all the names to protect the guilty, but we do too much of that. Sometimes I think embarassing companies (or their IT people) for system failures is good. I know that if some of my past mistakes had been exposed to the world I’d think better of it the next time.
So as you know, my Dad just lost his wife of 37.5 years (my mom). My Dad really hasn’t done much taking care of bills and that kind of thing, so my wife is helping him. The first task my wife had to do was determine which bills Mom had paid. She got much of that figured out but there were a couple banks who wouldn’t talk to her (which makes sense). She discovered that one of these banks (Let’s call them CharterOne) had an online application (she’s married to a programmer who preaches the self service and ease of use… so she thought it was a good idea to try it). She had my Dad’s account info… she had to make one phone call to an automated system and it was all set up. Remember all she wanted to do was check to see if a credit card had been paid. After logging in she discovered that the balance due was 0; great this one was paid for the month.
About a week later, my Dad gets a call from the bank; why haven’t you paid us Mr. Kimble? You are way overdue! Needless to say, this upset my Dad alot… this is all still so fresh (even now). Anyway, luckily, my wife was there, and was able to settle things.
The moral
I know there could have been many problems for what happened to the system. Some update might not have happened; a system could have been down; the programmer was lazy and simple built a poor app; or some exec had to have a system on this date even though it was far from complete or tested (pick one).
The problem this affects people. And slice it however you want; if what you work on is used by people (which I bet it ultimately is) when it fails or displays erroneous info, it has the potential of harming people.
I know you say “Jay you used to work on a corporate reporting system. How could that hurt people?” Easy, my system was used to make layoff decisions. There were numbers in my app that I knew were there to help decide when people should be laid off. If one of my numbers was slightly off it could have caused a bunch of layoffs. If my numbers were too high it could bankrupt the company.
I could go on and on. What we do matters? Remember that? As Bob Reselman would say, we are the most powerful people on the planet… be careful with that power; don’t wreck it for everyone else..