This Negative Technical Person
Written by Gloria Metrick on . Published as written. It may not reflect how these systems work today.
I get all types of reactions on my blog posts. Some people give me strong words of encouragement to continue with exactly what I'm doing, while others think I'm entirely off-base. I do realize the comments I get strongly tend to come based on my own background and writing style. The bottom line is that I'm one of "those negative technical people."
What I mean is this - I'm more a technical person than a sales or marketing person. I'm paid to solve problems. So, what I tend to see are problems. People give me lots of problems and my work focuses around those problems. As such, my writing and the focus of my business trend toward moaning about problems, talking about how to avoid problems, and the words "problems," "bugs" and "issues" probably come up fairly frequently in my writing.
While it's not true in all cases, technical people tend to come across as abysmally negative and sales people as nauseatingly positive. That's why we hold our respective jobs - we work in areas that fit our personalities.
Also, consider this - part of my business lies in getting people initially working with their systems, either selecting them or implementing them, and in those cases I'm the first company customers think of - I love being the first on customer's minds! However, the other part of my business is to clean-up the messes others have left. When customers feel they have nowhere else to go, don't think they've been treated right, or have a horrible mess of a system that they can't use or maintain, they call me. In this second case, there's not a lot of cheer to be had. It's not that easy to fix a big mess. Sometimes, there isn't enough money to do it - just enough to make things less awful. Even with that, I'm satisfied being the person customers think of WAY after the fact - the implementation janitor, basically. Hey, it pays the bills AND I do like the feeling that I've made things better for those customers, so I'm not opposed to this kind of work.
In any case, I foresee that I'll continue to get some mix of what I call "desperation" projects along with the more cheerful ones. As such, I'm sure I'll continue to see problems and, as such, will continue to write about them.
And for those of you who claim that there's no such thing as a "problem" that they're all "opportunities," well, my guess is that you're in sales or marketing! ;-)
Gloria Metrick
GeoMetrick Enterprises
http://www.GeoMetrick.com/