During the past year I’ve come to a conclusion about many IT professionals that make up their departments. I’ve begun calling this archetype: five button guys.
A quick definition
Your local five button guy walks into work and presses the same five buttons in the same application everyday. As a result, a knowable and recurring problem does not happen that day. While five button fixes are quick and many times necessary, they are always a cop out. Five button fixes never get to the root of the problem.
Five button guys are defined not by the fix they are named after but by the lack of preventing the problem again. They are happy to take the easy way out EVERYDAY. Five button guys don’t take initiative to UNDERSTAND and PREVENT future five button problems.
Why this is a problem
Five button guys are a single point of failure in your organization. Five button guys own a system in that they are the only one with the knowledge of the quick fixes required to keep the system afloat. You have to wait for a specific five button guy to get un-busy to press his five buttons to solve a problem on HIS system. What happens when he goes on vacation or worse yet leaves the company?
Five button fixes don’t scale. By definition, they never fix the underlying problem. Five button guys promote a company culture having an ever increasing pool of persistent problems. Having a collection of problems that only gets bigger is itself big a problem.
Five button guys don’t promote solid system development. The lack of solid understanding of underlying technologies and willingness to take the easy way out means they will produce more five button situations. Obviously this is going to put your future projects on a shaky foundation. Businesses whose foundations are laid in understanding instead of Magic are light-years ahead of their counterparts.
An aside on Magic
Five button fixes are just one example of Magic. Magic is an assumed response to a set of poorly understood actions. Magic is restarting your computer when your network card can’t connect to your home network for no reason. Magic is accepting ‘it just does that sometimes.’ Magic is bullshit.
Magic is a problem because it doesn’t leave you with a lot of options when it fails. You end up trying to the same Magic solution, but increasing the level of applied hope. Computers respond much better to logic than hope.
Fixing the problem means fixing your culture
Eliminate five button guys by eliminating five button fixes. Identify your organization’s persistent quick fix problems. The quick fix means five button problems can fly under the radar. We can only fix problems we know about so ask around. Put some time into sharing your organization infrastructure with another group to hash out persistent reacquiring problems.
Give people time to solve the problem the right way. Allow time for root cause analysis of their five button problems. If you don’t have time, allow for analysis as they come up again. Still to many? Fix one a week. Don’t accept cop outs solutions.
Give your people time to understand the technologies they work with. Focus on shell/regex/glue languages, automation technologies, and a heavy understanding of your core technologies. Side projects and hack days are a great way to give people a different perspective on tech they work with every day.
At the end of the day we eliminate five button guys by increasing THEIR knowledge base. We tip the scale of the quick fix vs root understanding a little each day towards root understanding to make real fixes easier.
And remember there is a little five button guy in all of us. Nobody knows everything or has all of the answers. We are in all in this together.