Ask Slashdot: How Do You To Tell Your Client That His "Expert" Is an Idiot? 384
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?"
Replace Idiot with Incompetent (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:It's never happened to me (Score:3, Interesting)
Well, I have worked with a complete idiot. However, he was very good at buttering up the boss. His mode of operation was to get you to do the work with him, and then see the results. If it was successful, he would be in the boss's office claiming the success. However, if it had issue(s), you got blamed for any issues occurring, and somehow, the boss would be blind to what was going on.
Working with this person started me on learning about office politics, and peoples personalities. In terms of how to handle the situation, I had to divorce myself from the project, taking on different responsibilities, and then allow the idiot to unambiguously fail on his own (so it couldn't be blamed on me). Many years later, I ran across the wikipedia definition of a sociopath, and decided that a sociopath was what I had been working with.
Fortunately, he was the exception to people I've worked with.
Re:You Don't (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Old fashioned idea... (Score:5, Interesting)
You're facing a problem here:
Your boss hired this person, most likely for a lot of money. He has to justify that expense. Admitting now that he fell for a snakeoil peddler is not something that will further his career.
Right, and for that reason asking your boss to choose between yourself and golden boy (aka, 'the expert') is a loosing proposition. If you feel you absolutely can't work with the new guy under any circumstances find a new job and then quit your current one. Be polite about it and don't tell them it's because of the expert if you can at all avoid it, just give them some blurb about 'personal reasons' or that you feel 'your career is stalling but that you have grown as a professional at this company... blah blah blah....' management loves that sort of verbal diarrhoea. Leave your boss to fall on his face with the new guy or succeed (it is after all possible that you are wrong). One thing is for sure, nobody will derive any advantage from an acrimonious dissolution of your employment relationship, least of all you. Another poster here suggested being blunt about your gripe. I have to disagree since I have always thought that making an angry speech where you go into details about how you feel other employees or management are a bunch of morons when you quit your job is a bloody stupid idea since I am generally not in favour of burning bridges. Of course other people's experiences with bridge burning may be more positive than mine.
Job interview (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Oh Hell (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Most likely you'll just have to deal with them... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:You Don't (Score:4, Interesting)
Sadly, educating the "idiot" often is part of the "job description" -- wanted or not --- and with enough patience or tact, you usually can prevail.
If not, the old adage applies: beware of what you ask for, you might just get it!
Re:You Don't (Score:2, Interesting)
How very ethical of you. Someone caught doing that should be sued.
Re:Old fashioned idea... (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: You Don't (Score:4, Interesting)
I think I speak for everyone here when saying...I would really like to read that report.