After dealing with devs, customers, account managers, security guys on the customer side and such a bunch, I'm starting to realize something that's tricky. If y

After dealing with devs, customers, account managers, security guys on the customer side and such a bunch, I'm starting to realize something that's tricky. If you don't know a concept exists - or it slips your mind - you cannot include and deal with it in your communication. This might be inconsequential in some cases, or lead to misunderstandings in other situations. For example - and it feels silly to type this because it's so obvious - as an ops-guy, I know we have to think about service downtime, its duration, our control over the downtime, user impact of the downtime and also the transitive impact of a downtime. This makes it very smooth for me to discuss a maintenance window with a call center manager, because even though our services aren't the same, we're knowing each other concepts. On the other hand, we've had developers who didn't understand how terrifying a rather uncontrolled downtime of unknown length is. Or another example, some developers simply don't know that we're running a couple dozen instances of their software for different purposes. If you don't know that, "doing an hour or two of tinkering" for this update seems fine, because you just did it once for your test system. On the other hand, we're suddenly looking at literally man weeks of work if we accepted this. Growing aware of such blind spots is doing good for me, and also growing awareness to the awareness of such blind spots. Some people who are very enjoyable to work with accept they have these blind spots and are happy to dig into them. Others are in fierce denial and more difficult.