Finish Him

tan dan tan dan tan dan tan dan.. Moooortaaaalll Kommmbaaaaat!

Never in my life have I imagined I would see a live human reenactment of the final move in a Mortal Kombat video game. As I’ve mentioned previously, I’m in Redmond this week getting the deep dive SBS 2008 training with some other fellow MVPs. This is a scene from earlier today, and in my opinion it is fairly remarkable. I never thought I’d be able to capture the very moment when the persons soul leaves his body at the exact moment he loses all hope for humanity and his vocational contribution to it:

SBS 2008 developer, who wrote the console.exe management interface for Cougar, checks for his pulse while Jeff Middleton, of SBS Migration fame, attempts to explain how a simple schema change would only require 3 lines of code.

Bonus points for the dev for keeping his carcass vertical 🙂

Microsoft MVP program, contributing to Microsoft Developer attrition since 1997.

Which brings me to an interesting symbiosis software developers (me) and very passionate users (MVPs) have when it comes to social interaction. In digital interaction (forums, bug sites, trouble tickets) the responses are raw and nearly primal – “This is broken – fix it” with the response “It’s like that by design”. In plain terms the users are telling developers that their software sucks, and the developers are telling the users to stop bitching and go away because it won’t be fixed. It’s a conversation that repeats often so today I asked:

Dana Epp: I bugged it and the bug was closed as “By design.”

Vlad Mazek: How come you guys never let me get away with that?

Dean Calvert: Because we know where you live.

There is something to be said about the personal connection the software has to the way business gets done and value is contributed to both the person designing the software to solve the problem, person implementing the software to help the end user be more effective at their task and the end user who ultimately makes a significant impact with the software to improve something else.

When all three of these individuals connect and are on the same page the results are astonishing.

This is why OWN invests so much in remaining a partner-only company and why Microsoft pours so much money and time in the MVP program and why people continue to put up with difficult problems and people to improve the entire chain.

At Own Web Now we have a picture of Nick Whittome, which I am not allowed to publish, that I put in my IM icon every Friday when we do code reviews. Nick is my residential code review scarecrow – every time you take a shortcut Nick will find it and kick you in the ass about it. Why? Because people like Nick Whittome and Howard Cunningham and Dave Sobel and a few thousand others constantly give us feedback on our solutions. They aren’t paid for this role, nor do their clients pay for them to work with us, nor does this go under the line item under any of the financial reports. And when my team looks at these kick in the balls tickets and bug tracks it is hard not to de-humanize the feedback as a complaint and reflection of personal incompetence. It is hard to differentiate where “you suck” starts and “this would fix the problem” begins.

This, in my opinion, is why working with the vendors, partners, end users and everyone involved in the software consumption cycle is extremely important. Once you get beyond taking the criticism personally you can move on to the positive side of what everything you’ve dedicated at least 8 hours a day goes to. It’s very motivating, in my opinion moreso than money.