Bob Slydell:
What you do at Initech is you take the specifications from the customer and bring them down to the software engineers?
Tom Smykowski:
Yes, yes that’s right.
Bob Porter:
Well then I just have to ask why can’t the customers take them directly to the software people?
Tom Smykowski:
Well, I’ll tell you why, because, engineers are not good at dealing with customers.
Bob Slydell:
So you physically take the specs from the customer?
Tom Smykowski:
Well... No. My secretary does that, or they’re faxed.
Bob Porter:
So then you must physically bring them to the software people?
Tom Smykowski:
Well. No. Ah sometimes.
Bob Slydell:
What would you say you do here?
I deal with this regularly. We have engineers that can never deal with the clients without it becoming a fiasco.
We've had engineers and programmers build intricate and expensive programs that are useless because they miss the mark the client needs. Actually they're usually worse than useless because they handcuff the users to a terrible system.
The engineers are also guilty of building the perfect solution to the problem in front of them while at the same time screwing up several other systems in order to work. It's a mental block where they just can't grasp that other people and processes are in the universe and the other systems need to work as well.