You make me wonder if this isn't the marketing/sales vs dev/ops misalignment.
Marketing and Sales focus on the good parts of our software. Simple usability, high stability, great reactive customer support, ... Apparently, during corona, we were the only reliable vendor for a national support hotline by a massive margin, and chaotically on-boarded call-agents had the least number of issues with our system.
But then, I as a team lead in ops have to wonder why a single priority ticket didn't meet SLA. Why a routine update caused 4 minutes of downtime. Why a usually stable provider ripped a system away for 3 minutes. Why strange cache timeout interactions caused some class of requests to take 30s+ to respond.
My world is very much a world of shitty non-working janky software and it is my job to fix and improve it. It might be one of the better solutions in our market and other people may be able to sell it to happy customers, but in my world it's a janky and broken piece of shit with a million things to fix.
And looking at the nation I live in... that's honestly not that far away.
I run into this all the time w/ engineers I work with.
I always tell them the story of the mechanic. The mechanic works tirelessly every day fixing Toyota Camrys. For years on end, he stares at broken Toyota Camrys. He knows every bolt, and every failure point across decades of Toyota Camrys.
He is utterly and thoroughly convinced that Toyota Camrys are unreliable hunks of junk. After all, he sees them broken all the time.
What he doesn't see are the 100s of thousands of Toyota Camrys loggings hundreds of thousands of miles on the road, perfectly intact with no mechanical issues. His vision is completely skewed by his day to day responsibilities.
Same thing for us in software. It's our job to see the dirty edge cases. To notice when something goes wrong for 5 minutes. etc. Our job is to automate everything - so by definition, we don't see the thousands or millions of interactions between our customers and our software that go exactly as planned, because they're completely automated away from us. Completely invisible. We have a skewed vision because of our day to day responsibilities.
This is an important factoid - if you ask a mechanic for a vehicle recommendation you might not get the most reliable - but the easiest and cheapest to work on when it does break.
Marketing and Sales focus on the good parts of our software. Simple usability, high stability, great reactive customer support, ... Apparently, during corona, we were the only reliable vendor for a national support hotline by a massive margin, and chaotically on-boarded call-agents had the least number of issues with our system.
But then, I as a team lead in ops have to wonder why a single priority ticket didn't meet SLA. Why a routine update caused 4 minutes of downtime. Why a usually stable provider ripped a system away for 3 minutes. Why strange cache timeout interactions caused some class of requests to take 30s+ to respond.
My world is very much a world of shitty non-working janky software and it is my job to fix and improve it. It might be one of the better solutions in our market and other people may be able to sell it to happy customers, but in my world it's a janky and broken piece of shit with a million things to fix.
And looking at the nation I live in... that's honestly not that far away.