Re: Happy Users (was "Machine naming convention")

[Sean Kamath <kamath@pogo.wv.tek.com>]

[In a message on Thu, 06 Aug 1998 13:02:44 EDT,
	""Gittler, Xev"" wrote:]
>On Thursday, August 06, 1998 12:47 PM, Sean Kamath
>[SMTP:kamath@pogo.WV.TEK.COM] wrote:
>>>[In a message on Thu, 06 Aug 1998 09:58:07 EDT,
>>>	""Gittler, Xev"" wrote:]
>>>Its amazing, but naming machines tends to be a religious subject.
>>
>>Here comes one of the other subjects :) 

(Boy, I'm just in some bizarre rant mode this morning, but what better
place to discuss this sort of stuff?)

>>>What you really want is happy users.
>>
>> No.  I want productive users.  And so does my company.  Who gives a
>> damn if the users are happy?  Of course, happy users tend to be more
>> productive, but I can make users happy and very unproductive (give 'em
>> root ;-)).  I've rarely met an unhappy productive person, though.
>>
>> 
>> My point, and I do have one, is that the goal is not happiness, but
>> productivity.  Productivity (usually) brings happiness.  If you're
>> being productive, and are unhappy, you need a new job, and nothing the
>> person who admin's your box can do will change that.
>
>I knew that would be a comment that got people's attention. Maybe your
>company wants productive users,
>but to an SA, users that are happy because of things that the SA does
>makes the SAs life easier,
>as opposed to users pissed at the SA.
>Xev

You still miss the point.

SA makes user productive, user happy -> good SA, more money.
SA makes user happy, user *maybe* productive -> good SA, no money.

What I'm trying to suggest is that people stop focusing on "customer
happiness" as a metric of how well you do things.  When we make people
more productive, they almost *invariably* are happy with us, and it
makes our life easier.  In fact, it makes our life easier than making
them happy, because if we make user A happy, and user B suffers
because of it, our life is hell as user B explains how making user A
happy didn't do squat for the business, but was merely politics.

If you focus on productivity, you can explain to user B that we're
sorry, but user A can now do the large jobs that need to happen in
order to ship a product, and that when user B has a need, we'll meet
it, if we are able to.  It's a business decision, not a political one.

In other words, happiness is a ambiguous thing.  Productivity is a
little more concrete, and there is more understandable to everyone.

Sean