majorbloodnock (4/12/2013)
TravisDBA (4/11/2013)
Any answer the man seem to give was not the right answer, so either the question was not plain enough up front or the interviewer was playing games with the candidate. at least it seemed that way to me, and that is deceptive in my opinion. "Tell me PLAINLY what you want and I will try my level best to give it to you, but I left my crystal ball at home today..." is one of my favorite responses to people who make nebulous requests. 😀And you expect every request from the user community to be plainly put and that they know exactly what they want?
Um, yes I do too. I know I won't actually get that all the time, and maybe not even that often. However what is wrong with expecting people to actually have some idea how to do their jobs!!!
We all know that the end user who is capable of communicating thier actual needs is as rare as an honest politician. OK, maybe not quite that rare, but you get the point. Why should that lead to accepting apathy on our part? The biggest issue I see with us (technical, educated, intelligent, creative thinking, logical group that we are) is we gave up on end users years ago. They think we don't care about their needs. In reality we do, we just know that they don't want to spend 5 minutes thinking things through, they expect us to understand what they need simply by bumping elbows with them once in the hallway. If we want the organization we work for to understand our value, we need to fight against their unwillingness and show them why and how we can help them.
For almost everyone I work with at the company I am employed at, their initial reaction to my questions is annoyance.
For almost as many people, after they see what I do with the information I obtain, the next time I have a question they are ABSOLUTELY EAGER to provide the information to me, in some cases before I even ask!
Those that don't get it will never get it. Still, I prefer to focus on those that I can train, rather than those I cannot.
Dave