I had a very frustrating experience today where I suggested a very simple automated solution to a problem that would take the responsibility of dealing with a whole new category of customer support issues away from the company. My idea was to escalate the issue from one class of user to another and have them be able to quickly address the issue thus avoiding any need to have one of our employees spend time on it. This solution would be relatively simple to implement and would be done fairly quickly. Unfortunately I was shot down in favor of having developers handle these issues manually.

There are so many things wrong with this that I just had to write about it. I am venting in this way because I had to refrain from saying something I would regret after this decision was made.

First we are software developers not clerks in the 1950’s doing everything by hand. Our job is automate business processes not make them more inefficient.

We want to empower the users to address any issues they have rather than having to contact us. We want users to feel capable and that our product meets their needs.

The only way developers can fix this support issue is to go into the database and delete records since we have no superuser capability in the system. This is exactly what you never want to do unless it’s an emergency and then you better think twice before touching the database.

I believe once this solution is in place and the extra work is factored in we will end up developing a different solution to the problem so we won’t save any time overall and I wish we were doing it right in the first place.