As Gerry Weinberg wrote in Secrets of Consulting, "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." It's situations like this that keep getting

As Gerry Weinberg wrote in Secrets of Consulting, "No matter how it looks at first, it's always a people problem." It's situations like this that keep getting me sucked into management issues. I join something just wanting to build good stuff. But the problems are so rarely technical ones. I remember once when a friend of mine had joined a company with terrible bug problems. They brought me in to solve a particularly nasty one where a key client's key users were having regular web app failures that presented as network issues. And also to give them my take on the devs. After a week of late nights, I discovered that certain versions of IE had weird Keep-Alive behaviors, which then had a bad interaction with their load balancers and their web servers. I changed some configurations so the older IE versions had each HTTP collection closed immediately, which was slightly slower but always worked. Victory achieved, thorn pulled from paw, etc, etc. That sounded like as technical a problem as they come. But the root causes were really people problems. The key client was a large company with an IT department that was overloaded and underfunded, so lots of users were stuck on ancient Windows versions. And my friend's company had a salesperson as a CEO, one who would promise new features to close deals without ever checking with the development team. They were massively overloaded. They had to ship and ship and ship, leaving no time for testing or debugging or polishing. They were just drowning in bugs, so the CEO thought they were bad developers. But given time and room, they could have figured it out just as well. So I told my friend the developers were great; it was the dysfunctional relationship between the CEO and the overstuffed backlog that was the problem. I never heard how it turned out, but I have my suspicions.