Stop ! Or your Mom will shoot !!

Stop ! Or your Mom will shoot !!

Right right right.

Collect thoughts. \”Respond, don\’t React\”, as my therapist would say. Find Happy Place.

OK, here we go…

I wrote a post a bit back about why DBAs and Devs don\’t get on. If you didn\’t read it, I can summarise here by saying \”If you stop doing crazy stuff with my software, we\’ll get along just fine.\”

But I appreciate that it\’s not all the Devs fault, so I\’m going to have the SAME RANT at software vendors now. And it\’s a Friday, I should be in my local sports bar watching the game, but I\’m here, running 3rd-party upgrade scripts. And getting more and more hacked off about it, I can tell you.

Here\’s the construct that has been really grinding my gears this evening….

CREATE TABLE dbo.myStupidA**Table…..
(add your own column defs here)

INSERT INTO dbo.myStupidA**Table (BizarreCol1, BizarreCol2……)
values(\’I\’\’\’ve given up caring at this point\’, \’more lame text\’, ……

Followed immediately by:

DELETE FROM dbo.myStupidA**Table
WHERE BizarreCol4 LIKE \’%I SHOULD NEVER HAVE INSERTED THIS ROW IN THE PRECEDING BATCH !!%\’

Long pause…..

Deep breath….

Exhale….

Respond:

Imagine the scene….

It\’s late on a holiday weekend. Your boss rings you up to ask if you could do a favour for a small project / client. You agree. Your boss tells the vendor / client your mom\’s address, where your kids go to school, how much you\’ve got in your 401K, and your partner\’s vital statistics.

You\’d feel a bit violated, right ? Like, no-one has the right to do that to you ? No way, no how ??!!??

OK, so STOP DOING THAT KIND OF STUFF TO MY SERVER. Or I\’ll feel I like I have to come round there, and hit you. With your mom.

It sounds like I\’m being a bit proprietorial here, but if you treated everything with this kind of contempt, you\’d end up in prison fairly quickly.

Why should normal societal rules apply when it\’s only software ?

I\’ll tell you why – because it makes you look like you don\’t care, and the last thing that anyone wants to be told is that other people don\’t care about what they do.

Try this on for size… Imagine (again with the \’imagine\’ thing – what\’s with that ??!?). Whatever you\’re doing right now is worth less than a gnat\’s toot in a hurricane. And everything your mom and pop did. And everything your kids will ever do. And their kids.

Bleak, huh ?

Hold that thought.

Yeah, that\’s pretty much what I felt when I eyeballed that code. Tumbleweed through my career, through my life, through the lives of those I care about.

Vendors, please play nice with your DBA\’s emotions. Don\’t forget that behind the voicemail, behind the insincere auto-signature and the slightly aggressive attitude, there\’s probably a very insecure and hurt professional who can\’t understand why others seem to want to do him harm, who really just wants to come to work and have fun, and who (but for an accident of education) is almost EXACTLY like you.

This is EVEN MORE important to if you actually sell stuff to large corporations. Your customer is not only the guy who signs the check – the tech support team behind that guy are pretty important too, especially when it come to renewal time. I\’ve seen vendors come in with a bad attitude, and leave at the next renewal because the client didn\’t want to have to take their kind of BS any more, and their app was replaced with a home-grown solution.

Nothing in this world is perfect, but if we all treat each other with the respect we deserve, we could get pretty damn close. And let me be the first to say that I\’m as guilty as anyone else in being dismissive and intractable, but, to be honest, I\’m tired of that now, and I\’d like to move on to a place where true magic happens because people just accept each other for what and who they are.

Care to join me in that ?

Back soon…