Rethinking The Path to Management

The proverbial shit has hit the proverbial fan lately at FluxCorp. The FlyingFlux that we delivered to one of our customers has a 0.3% defect rate. According to them, that's way too high. One of their own large customers has returned products to them. This makes it a very, very bad situation. Our customer told us they have now shut down the production line with millions of products on hold. They won't restart production until we figure out a fix. We did figure out a fix only to find out they lied to us. They continued their production line with an experimental firmware change. When we indicated that the experimental change was not recommended and that our new recommendation completely and totally takes care of the problem, they then asked us to quantify the risk of having used the experimental version. And they want an answer in 4 hours. I don't think I can even provide an answer within 4 days.

Defect rate is one of those things that is very difficult to predict analytically, even less with a bug that is only half understood. Their executive VP has talked to our executive VP, who has talked to our VP, who has talked to our director, who has talked to the manager interfacing with the customer, who then talks to me. Luckily, I'm just a lowly engineer who's giving his technical opinion to the problem. I don't actually need to craft half-truths to tell the customers so they feel better about us an about their products.

But the story is completely different for the manager facing the customer. He gets berated every day from the disgruntled customer, sits in meetings until midnight, gets pressure from the higher up to solve the problem quickly, all with his hands tied as he's not allowed to reveal too much information. Just look at the inset graphic -- over 1800 unread e-mails in his Inbox (don't ask me how I managed to capture his desktop). And all he does all day is make up Powerpoint slides. Every time I get the urge to jump into management, something pulls me back. I think this is one of those moments again.