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Ask Slashdot: How Do You To Tell Your Client That His "Expert" Is an Idiot?
Esther Schindler writes "It's a danger for any consultant, and for most inter-departmental internal project staff: To get the work done, you need to work with someone else who supplies expertise you lack. But when the 'expert' turns out to be the wrong person how do you tell the client (or boss) that you just can't work with that individual?"
Tell the truth?
If its your last day on the job. Just say, "You're an idiot and so is that moron you hired."
Just remember though, burning bridges isn't always a good thing.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
Many years back a CEO of a subdivision of a company wanted to know why his email service was disrupted. I told them that it was because their idiot webmaster took control of their DNS and did not copy the MX record. The webmaster defended himself claiming that a document was not in place explaining how to handle the client's DNS. This went back and forth a bit between the three of us, and ended with me calling the two of them incompetent and irresponsible. I never spoke to the webmaster or the client CEO for better or worse.
A few years later, the CEO of the parent company called wanting to know why his network was suffering intermittent downtime and demanded it be fixed immediately. I explained that his outage was caused by antiquated equipment that could not do debugging, and there was a proposal already on his desk for replacement gear. He was in a huff, but he knew I didn't mince words or advice, and that quote was signed in minutes.
While you can't always directly point to a net gain after a net loss, your experience and attitude will help define how other perceive you. You can go in quite politely, or you can be very blunt. I have been both depending on the situation.
Either way, if you can't call out losers, you'll wind up being one.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
Most experts are idiots at what they claim, but an expert at earning trust regardless of their knowledge. So be careful of these people, as they are quite aware of their lack of expertise and their fragility. Gain trust of the client first before taking on people your client trusts.
Oddly enough, I never had to work with anyone who was completely incompetent. Some didn't know squat about the technical side of things, but their business knowledge was impeccable, and that was what they brought to the table.
Maybe the problem isn't whether they're an expert in the field, but whether you know how to communicate with someone outside your field.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
I don't know, but I'm sure if I read the free eBook that the article is advertising I'd become a management expert literally overnight. !!! DOWNLOAD NOW !!!
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
it's been done before
How is this an Ask Slashdot when the article answers the question. Are we supposed to argue that the author(expert) of the article is an incompetent?
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
Just read, Dealing with Dummies for Dummies...
Figure out what you'd need to get the job done. That might be an additional person, not a replacement person in order to make up for the deficiency. There may even be someone else in the company that could "assist".
Go to your client and tell him that this is what you'd need to get the job done because you'd assumed a certain skill set.. If the client won't go for it, regretfully let him know that you're not the right person for the job under these circumstances and that his "expert" might be able to suggest someone else. Or maybe you can and then you've solved the problem, even if you're not the solution yourself.
In any case, walk in with a solid proposal for fixing the problem that doesn't paint the "expert" as a complete idiot - just say that the skill sets don't line up right - and be prepared to lose the client. But if it's really that bad, you might be better off losing it now than getting dragged into a giant fight over breach of contract or cost overruns.
As a consultant it is *my job* to work with the client and their people. Incompetent or not, it is still my job to work with them.
If you are complaining about this as a consultant, you have no business being a consultant.
I'm using the slas^H^H^H^H a website's beta and its designers have the same issue.
Near as I can tell, they don't plan on listening....
-- Political fascism requires a Fuhrer.
Come on, be honest. But before you open your mouth, THINK carefully.
I have a policy of ALWAYS assuming that any problem somebody brings me is MINE to fix. I most likely caused it and it's my responsibility to fix it. Problems are not always my fault in the end, but until I've proven to myself and more importantly to the person who brought the problem to my attention that it's NOT my fault I'm taking personal responsibility to see it gets fixed.
With that in mind, before you go off and start calling somebody you don't know well an idiot to his face you better be darn sure. And before you go tell anybody else about your suspicions they are an idiot you better be doubly darn sure you can back up the claim with absolute, you'd bet the farm on it, proof. Otherwise, you are going to be shot full of holes because YOU are the idiot.
Given that you obviously are NOT the subject matter expert (or why would you need one given to you) I would say that what we most likely have is a personality clash between you and the expert. There is a non zero chance this is not true, but unless you are ready to make yourself into the subject matter expert and PROVE it, you really have two choices...
First choice: You can suck it up, stop complaining and start working with the expert regardless of how you feel about them. You don't have to like them, but you need to respect them and stay professional about any disagreements. This will involve trying to figure out how you can best approach this person and doing things you would consider wasting time by taking their advice. Get their advice in hard copy, just to CYA in the future, but do your best to play in the sandbox with them.
Second choice: You can go in, guns blazing and shoot the idiot full of holes, preferably in public in front of management. If you are wrong, you will go down in a blaze of glory, fully burning the bridge behind your hasty departure. If you are right, and manage to prove it without stepping on a land mine in the process, nobody will ever want to work with you and the disgraced "expert" is still likely to be there, possibly on your team, which puts you back to your first choice where you will eventually have to work with them. When they start like this, such relationships don't go well and your life will be a mess.
So, I suggest you suck it up and do what it takes to work with the idiot and if you really just cannot make it work, look for another job.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
[EOM]
If you find yourself always having terrible roommates, guess what? You're the terrible roommate.
Structure contracts, fees, tangible goals so if the "expert" slows you down, you get paid more.
The idea of avoiding idiots is lunacy, you make due with the cards dealt. If they have an "idiot" as an "expert", this speaks a lot about them and they probably need your help quite a bit.
If they didn't need your help, they wouldn't have hired you!
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
...and doesn't know the first thing about the job the people under him do.
Actually this is NOT a reason to trash your boss. I've had a number of managers who didn't have a clue how to do my job who where extremely effective and great to work for. We had a mutual understanding and respect for each one's roll. With one, he didn't have a clue how to design a network and stand up the equipment because it was MY job to do that for him. He just pointed me to the project and we would discuss the details he needed to know (cost, schedule etc) and I did what was required. He knew I was going to tell him what I really thought about the cost and schedule and trusted me to do the work within the cost and schedule I gave him. I knew he would insulate me from the management garbage and wasn't going to throw me to the wolves if there was some unexpected slip or overrun. We did status reports on large projects and he would stop by regularly to talk about things, but he NEVER wanted to tell me how to do this or that, and if we where behind schedule or over cost I WAS TELLING HIM about it. We trusted each other to do their jobs and it worked great.
So, I actually think that the most effective bosses don't have to know all the ins and outs of what his employees do. But what they DO need is the ability to surround themselves with people who DO KNOW what needs to be done and empowering them to do their jobs. Bosses that know all the details are sometimes way to eager to try and micromanage their underlings and it takes a rare talent to let your employees do the work for you. I'll ALWAYS take a manager with the talent to delegate over one with perfect domain knowledge.
"File to fit, pound to insert, paint to match" - Aircraft Maintenance 101
Years ago I interviewed for this hot up and coming company. Their stock was on fire and after a series of interview with all the top guys they had me in a meeting where they presented a pretty damn good offer. But in that same meeting they finally dished on their "secret weapon" Lotus notes. I just about threw up. They had this PhD CS guy who was their "Expert" I basically said, using Lotus on a project of this nature is like building a car out of sand. In the first few hours you might make something that looks like it is going to be a car but you will never drive it one inch. Their "Expert" made a face like I farted and told me that I knew not of what I spoke; even though I just just finished a project that required digging the guts(business logic and data) out of a lotus notes database and making it actually work in a sane development environment. So they basically said that it didn't look like it was going to work out and I said something like, even without me rethink your choice of Lotus.
About 2 years later they flamed out in a huge stock and legal disaster. The lawsuits and criminal investigations are still moving along after many many years. A critical part of their disaster was their complete inability to deliver what they promised to their biggest customers/investors. Not that they were unable to deliver exactly what was promised but basically deliver anything.
Another PhD CS "Expert" I later dealt with was a fan of some stupid browser and insisted that any development be done for that browser and not others.
But my favorite PhD "Expert" shoot down was one that worked for a company that I worked for, she was an expert in DSP. But after years of working in a dark room somewhere basically everything she knew could be purchased in a chip. In the end she was doing paperwork audits.
I am not saying that PhD CS people are all useless. I know many who are damn good and doing cool useful things. Just that many people in the business world are blinded by a PhD, they assume that the person has some sort of magical ability to make things happen. A PhD basically indicates that they know a whole lot about some certain thing at a certain time. If your business is that thing and their knowledge is recent then great. The reality is that things move so damn quick in the CS world that anyone who is good is always keeping up to date and doubtfully has any paper to show that.
This happened to me. The boss man had "taken the initiative" and brought in a new consultant. The guy was an idiot. He opened tickets with the software vendor asking things like how to set the date on a Linux system. He told one of my co-workers that if the root password was lost, he'd need to boot with a rescue disk and do some trickery with /etc/shadow. Tasked with building a cluster, he failed miserably blaming it on poor documentation and other nonsense. I tried many times to tell the boss man that his consultant was an idiot but was told I was being "combative" despite the guy's obvious failings.
It all worked out though. As this guy's contract was being renewed, we asked him to show what he'd done. All the lies he'd told the boss man evaporated when it was revealed that his cluster was just a cluster fuck, his vaunted "remote management" system was really just a "yum install webmin" (left unconfigured), and he'd informed another co-worker not to reveal where he was sitting.
Even years after, the boss man still insisted that the contractor "had fooled everyone."
So no, if the boss is an idiot, you may as well just distance yourself from the idiot. Let him dig his own grave.
Your other option was to play nice like the dummies are advocating, and have a failed project as a black stain on your resume.
You did the right thing. So did they. Good people are incompatible with idiots.
Futurist Traditionalism
You are correct!
I wish I had some mod points but unfortunately I don't
I have some! Oh, wait. Crap.
My best advice for anyone in this situation is to document everything .
I spent a few years working customer service handling orders for manufacturing company. One particularly customers was a consistent problem. This company believed one of their personnel shat gold bricks, but I realized right off that they were incompetent and used lies & intimidation to cover this up.
This person would routinely fax their orders at the end of the day (right before they would leave) without confirming that they actually sent me the files necessary to start their order, and that their orders were almost always "rush" orders with very very short turn around times. Another thing this person would do, would be to call me up, tell me they had an order and ask me what the latest day they would need to receive the order by a specific date and time. I would tell them, then they would wait well past this final submittable date, submit their order and then claim that I had promised to turn around the product by that time. Over the years, the turn around time necessary to complete their orders shrunk to impossible expectations and their customer began getting upset as my customer started blaming me personally for the delays.
The irritating part, is that whenever I some how failed to live up to this person's errors (i.e., I was unable to cover for them), they would call up my boss and complain about me. My boss only believed half their bullshit, but it was still enough to impact my career.
Unfortunately for them, one of their customers wasn't an idiot, and had remembered me when he came along to our plant for a facility inspection prior to us beginning production of their product. This customer set up a meeting between our companies and asked me point blank when I received the purchase order, when I received the files and when I delivered the product. Thankfully, I had records of the time and date of every purchase order that company had ever sent, along with records of the time and date of receipt of every file to begin production, as well as the delivery date of the product to their warehouse.
It turned out that the end customer was sending the purchase orders to our problem person up to three weeks before the problem person would send me the PO and files. The problem person would sit on the file for weeks before submitting it to their production and farming out our part to us. The problem person ended up losing their company around $2million in sales yearly when they lost their client.
We ended up being directly contracted by the end customer to continue manufacturing our part of their product.
You get them both in a meeting, and when the "expert" presents an idea, you point your index finger at your temple and rotate it in a circle around your ear.
Rolling your eyes and bursting out laughing is also good.
When the expert starts his powerpoint presentation, sigh loudly, raise one butt cheek and give an audible fart. Look around the room and say "Is he serious?" in a stage whisper.
There, I think that's a good start.
You are welcome on my lawn.
This programmer guy I know who works for Verizon, calls himself "The best of the best of the best" . He has no problem telling people he works with, people in other departments, and even clients, that they are morons. When he has a mouthful he never holds back. If he can(and has), he will go out of his way to get people fired for being stupid. He will berate people to tears. He says he just can work with morons, and he lets every one know that. He thinks he's the Dr. House of programmers. I ask him if he can get in trouble or fired, he says how he is the best programer ever known, and verizon would fold if he was fired.
What is it with programmers? Are they all arrogant?
I was a consultant for a while and trained more than a few FNGs. I would always advise them that the choice was theirs, but that the chances of a positive result were slim to none if they took their concerns to the customer. Sure enough, I saw several otherwise excellent consultants get shown the door because of this exact scenario.
Part of your responsibility as a consultant is to "work magic". If you run into roadblocks, you find ways around them and that includes the occasional professional vegetable. What typically isn't in your domain is giving advice on personnel, unless you were specifically hired to do exactly that. In the end, almost nobody wants to be told that one of their chosen workers is sub-par. It's negative, it's dangerous, and it's usually pointless.
Just work around them, document everything, and communicate that sort of stuff with your own manager behind closed doors. You should also be sure to have customer "witnesses" in your emails and meetings. Team distribution lists and direct managers are excellent for that.
In my experience, a good boss who isn't technically minded will take advice and just let the tech-heads get on with it, and look forward to a viable result*. If there's more than one boff in the mix, a good boss will take regular updates and stir the pot as necessary. Sometimes that will involve some firing and hiring of new blood. If it takes an unsolicited approach by an employee to make the boss aware outside of a regular departmental meeting that something is wrong, then he isn't a very effective boss. This goes both ways: if you have a complaint, document EVERYTHING, who did what when and what the result was, summarise it, summarise the summary and take it to the next meeting.
*that's what I do. I'm no code monkey, if I need something to spin I don't know or particularly care about the mechanics behind it, I just want the spinny thing to spin. That's why I surround myself with people who know the shit I don't.
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
It is like using references, I have learned that if a company asks for them, they are idiots. Nobody EVER calls them and if they do they are basically saying "I have no clue from interviewing how good this guy is, so I got to ask someone else". Stellar performance right there!
The solution is relatively simple, see job interviews as a two way process. They are interviewing you BUT you are ALSO interviewing them. And gosh darnit, you can reject THEM as an employer!?! Shocking ain't it.
When I read a site like clients from hell, (not linking because it has an annoying nag script) I can't help but feel that a lot of the time all the problems could have been avoided if the complainer had just said at the interview "you are an idiot, I am not going to work for you".
If you spend sometime in your field you should know the warning flags. If a client/employer for instance is looking for a lead developer, the existing code base is a pile of steaming shit such as you have only seen in every single job before where the existing lead had to finally admit he needed an extra hand (translation: needed to be taken outside and shot for the good of humanity). If they are looking for a replacement team for the software project, the existing code doesn't (exist that is, what is there is maybe some scripts that on some days, does something but nobody knows what). If they are considering a rewrite, the servers are on fire and the the sys admin has slaughtered the entire office and is sniping from the rooftop.
You get to regonize the signs after a while. Does the boss spent the entire interview bitching about what gone wrong before? Translation: He is to busy still raging and hasn't yet learned from the mistake which was HIS, for hiring the wrong people.
There is no handover period because the previous guy already left? Translation: Make a sentence with rats, ships, sinking. Question: Do you want to come on board? Consideration: At least the ship is rat free.
If the ship is on fire and they are haggling over budget with the fire-fighters, translation: they spend all their money on flammable lifeboats and have nothing left for you. Another form of this is if they talk about how much money already has been sunk into the project and/or whining about recovering investment. Fact of life: money sunk into a project that has failed is lost, deal with it. A projects worth is NOT measured by how much money has been lost on it.
And hey, you can ignore all of this and think YOU are going to be the perfect employee who can deal with idiots... and I will point to you and say "this guy is going to be on a rooftop someday, sniping at the police while chewing on someone's leg". Either that... or... you are one of them... got an MBA?
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.