Tuesday, January 18, 2022

Huge snow accumulations and frustration working with a software developer

On Monday, my area got a blizzard warning and a lot of snow. 

Snowfall estimates were bumped up to between 40 to 60 centimetres. Toronto got 47 cm. Oshawa got 55 cm. Where I live is midway between the two. I'll take the median and say that we got 51 cm. It was a lot!

I don't think that my street has been plowed yet. It's so quiet. One neighbour tried to drive on the road and was highly unsuccessful.

I got annoyed with a software developer yesterday for a few reasons:
  • He sent me a Word document that was on his personal SharePoint site. I couldn't access it because he didn't share it with me. I told him to send the file to me as an attachment.
  • The details in his document were vague. I had to ask him about specific parameter names. Some had global as a prefix. Others did not. Highly inconsistent. He said to follow what the old parameter names were as a guideline. Um, no. That's not how it works. If you give me a list of new parameters, I assume that they apply to all hyperlinks that you have mentioned in the same section.
  • I asked which software releases these changes were for. He guessed at it. I asked him to confirm.
As patient as I am, I got more annoyed with the number of questions that I needed to pose because he took shortcuts to give me in the information. Horrible! If I have so many questions because the content provided is unclear to me, how is a customer going to understand the information that I am writing about?

I let him know that details need to be more explicit in future. Telling me that he can have a call to explain stuff was ridiculous. Just give me the correct details right off the bat and save us both time and frustration.

Here's hoping that I'm not snowed in on Tuesday.

2 comments:

  1. Oh when people are unclear it is most annoying to me. Today i had a patient ask for one thing. That was done then he came back to me and said, could he also have another thing. We sorted that out and then re-billed his insurance for both the things, which is a pain because his insurance co. doesn't accept TWO bills, they need it all to be ONE bill per day. So there was a lot of undoing and redoing. And then he came back in and said, oh one more thing... Argh. I lost it. Can't they just be more organised? HOpe you're not snowed in again!

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    Replies
    1. OMG! So frustrating with all that effort with ever-changing requests. I'd lose it, too.

      I gave this developer a sample of providing accurate information so that I can do my job without posing a ton of questions. He wrote his document to himself. Only he understands it. To me, it was pretty useless. Here's hoping that it's better with the sample that he has.

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