Wrong attitude

[sobrique]

I've just had a rather distressing conversation.
We've had some hardware installed at a site, and we've found that it's 'been having problems'. It's been working, but not reliably.

It was something I acted as co-ordination for.

I've just had a discussion that went roughly along the lines of "it's broke, who can we blame". The discussion of how to resolve the situation came second.

Now I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. After all, historically at this site, this is standard practice - be obstructive and passive agressive difficult, and then when it doesn't work, use the person doing it as an example of why you're fantastic and should be paid more.

In the past the 'local manager' has used this in his own point scoring against everyone else.

No wonder it's a site that no one wants to go near to help...

Now the problem is with an 'incompatibity' between OS and software, such that it's not on their software vendor's support matrix (not hardware, just OS). I didn't check, any more than I go check that the the latest version of Solaris is going to run on my Ultra 5. Neither did anyone else. Falls into 'oversight' category, but now we end up playing pin the blame on the monkey.

Comments

[zaitan.livejournal.com]

Ahh, the old culture of blame. Ours is slightly twisted, the person who should take the blame (the network manager) cannot do any wrong in the eyes of the HOD. He ends up blaming the suppliers of the kit. Even though he should be able to do the setting up in the first place.

And you do not need to check if Solaris 10 will run on an Ultra 5. You know it will. Although it may have some fancy cards in it...

[sobrique.livejournal.com]

This is relatively common actually. Incompetent 'techies' blame everyone but themselves for problems. Less (technically) aware managers accept this.

Real techies go 'yeah I screwed up, but don't worry, I can fix it'.