Cha Gascon Inexplicable Software Angst

Incompetent in Tech Support

This week I ended up doing mostly one thing: providing technical support for 2 projects which I was working on. I went horribly. I can either blame myself for being inept in expressing technical instructions to someone with limited technical capability, or I can blame that person for being such. Personally, I consider the first option to be the primary.

I encountered so many difficulties, some of which were my own doing, some was just inevitably natural.

1. Communication was challenged due to language barriers. Although English was used, the other party had poor grasp of it.
2. Non-technical people on the client’s side were forced to perform technical operations involving executing command-line operations in Linux. They get exasperated when typing in seemingly complex commands, only to get unsuccessful results. Patience is definitely not one of their virtues.
3. They don't want solutions. They just want it to work. Period. Just like magic!
4. Errors in the released software, due to lack of testing. I admit wholeheartedly that this is of my own fault. I should be beaten up and have my Computer Science diploma shoved down my throat.
5. Differences in hardware on my end, and on the clients’ end that resulted in unforeseen results that led to my own confusion.

Everyone was breathing down my neck, including both my bosses and the client’s. I felt like I was so incompetent and so inept. I wasn’t making anyone happy and I wasn’t fulfilling my obligations to everyone’s expectations. There were some instances that I wish I would get fired just to escape the humiliation and all the blame that would boil down on me. The worst part of it is that these clients are flying over here to Manila next week!

On a side note, I had fun working on these two projects. The first one involved a mobile Linux machine to be placed on police cars. It had 4-channel video surveillance, GPS with street map positioning, and although not yet implemented, license plate recognition technology. The second one involved a mammoth hardware intensive 32-channel digital video surveillance, running on a live Linux operating system installed on a 1GB Compact Flash card.

Sadly, all this coolness won’t matter at all if the clients can’t get these things up and running on their side. Sigh. L

I am a Senior Software Engineer and I am considered to be the resident “Linux Guru” in the company. I utterly detest it when I am referred to as such. Not only, does it add bearing on the responsibility of upholding to such a title, in the end I succumb to a realization that I might not deserve it after all.