the random thoughts of a programmer

I have a few pet peeves when it comes to dealing with vendors. First is the vendor who does his design specs in the form of a completed system and continues to improve said spec while you are looking at his competitors thus creating a moving target. Those vendors get fired in my book.

The next class of vendors are the good ones who have very friendly support but are very condescending. These are the guys who want to help you out and are very nice about it but they just don’t ever think you have a clue. Take for example the real estate software vendor Rapattoni. These guys are probably some of the nicest support people you will ever work with but they have this fixation on doing everything their way.

I spent a significant amount of time on the phone with our support rep troubleshooting why our clients could not connect to the SQL server. This was a classic case of the plumbing working but no flush. Our network worked well, the server worked well, and the app talked to the server but there was still no database activity. After explaining all of this to the support person (we shall call him John) I told him that the database had been migrated successfully from the old server and all permissions restored correctly. He tested this with some internal tool in the software and was able to verify what I had said. We proceeded to troubleshoot this error until I suggested that perhaps the software didn’t like named instances of SQL server, he didn’t agree and proceeded to apply a bandaid fix.

The bandaid fell off later that day and one of my colleagues called up John again to ask for help. This time, since I wasn’t around, he decided to restore the database, which was completely unnecessary, and ended up breaking things a little more. It ended up that after they re-did the entire migration that they had screwed up by restoring the database; I was right, their software doesn’t like named instances of SQL server. Why didn’t we just assume that in the first place? Why did John not trust that I knew what I was talking about when I said the database migration was not the issue? Why are their support people so damned condescending? Lets try to trust the network administrator in the future guys, there’s a good chance he’s smarter than you.