Another reason the world won’t go Digital on schedule, heavily redacted and anonymized:

My wife is the {unspecified position} for a small, boutique {unspecified services} firm. As such, she has to process {unspecified business transactions} constantly. To help with all the needed {non-generic due diligence} (they do a lot of government work), they use a {non-generic screening service] from a fairly well known company in that space.

A few weeks ago, the screening company pushed out a new version of its software and portal.

It was a shambles! What had been a quick, routine part of my wife’s day had become a nightmarish game of frozen screens, endless time on hold, being shuffled around from one support person to another, and STILL not getting the needed {non-generic due diligence} done.

Of course, her sales department was yelling at her too, for being slow in performing the {non-generic due diligence} needed to perform the services they’d sold their customers.

About a week after the rollout, she received the following email, ostensibly from the {non-generic screening service} firm’s CEO:

============================================ 

From: {Name of CEO}

Sent: {sometime this summer}, 2018

To: {Helpless Customers}

Subject: {Our Flagship Product} Technology Update

Good afternoon,

On {date}, we released our all-new {clever acronym} screening technology. From development through implementation, our goal has always been the same — to deliver the best experience for you, our customers.

Last week’s release was the culmination of more than two years of development. It would be an understatement to say we’re excited. But with that excitement comes an awareness that this platform is far from perfect.

We fully understand that a release this ambitious and of this magnitude is bound to have issues, and you’re likely experiencing some of those issues first-hand. After the first week of wide release, many of the reported bugs have been minor. We are fixing and improving every day.

This initial launch is just the beginning of a new chapter for {company name}. We’re playing the long game — working constantly to fine-tune the technology through your feedback. We hope you already see the power and speed behind this incredible new platform. It’s only the beginning.

As we have for the past {number of years}, we’re here to help. Helpful tutorials and videos {link provided} are available in the resource center {link provided} of the {clever acronym} dashboard. And our friendly team is here to assist you in any way they’re able. Please don’t hesitate to reach out.

Thank you for your patience with us during this transition, as we work aggressively to fix bugs and improve the platform. 

Thank you for your trust in us to be your screening partner. We never take your partnership for granted and work every day to redefine value in {non-generic screening services}.

Sincerely,

{First name of CEO}

{Company logo, address and contact info}

{Inspiring quote from an old NFL football coach}

============================================

Where to start …

Communication: Groucho Marx once asked, “Who are you going to believe, me or your own eyes?” That was supposed to be comedy, not a serious business message. Don’t send spin to the people with direct experience. Send it to everyone else, to convince them the people experiencing the problem are exaggerating.

Software Quality Assurance: The first rule of SQA is that you always test. Sometimes you test before you put software into production. Sometimes you test by putting it into production.

Before is better.

Your customers’ SQA matters too. Just because you’re a cloud provider, that doesn’t mean you’re providing an “island of automation.” Quite the opposite, as SaaS becomes more important, integrating SaaS applications into the rest of the applications portfolio becomes exponentially more important (actually, polynomially more important, but let’s not quibble).

The consequence: A SaaS provider’s internal testing should be just the beginning. After that its customers should have a chance to regression test new releases to make sure they don’t break internal IT’s integrations.

Along the way, its customers’ end-users would be in a position to discover whether the new release is a turkey, before it’s inflicted on everyone.

The Cloud doesn’t change the rules. It makes them more important. For example, well-run internal IT follows a simply stated rule when it comes to implementing software changes: Always have a back-out plan. If, in spite of SQA’s best efforts, the software turns out to be unusable, internal IT restores the previous version to minimize business disruption.

Just because you’re a SaaS provider that doesn’t mean you get to ignore the basics.

You have to master them.

Snippets from an email exchange about the H-1B visa program, edited and paraphrased for length and suitability:

Correspondent: Have you ever weighed in on the H-1B Visa concern that bedevils American IT workers? If not, why not?

Bob: It’s a complex topic I know far too little about to express a useful opinion. As someone once said, better to remain silent and have people think I’m a fool than to speak and remove all doubt.

Correspondent: I urge you then to please do research the subject and then speak out, hopefully in favor of the American citizen IT worker. I fear if outsourcing continues this may inadvertently decimate the pool of available native STEM workers who may avoid pursuing STEM professions due to frustration, leaving it to cheaper non-immigrants.

Bob: I’ll think about taking it on, but I won’t promise anything (no, that isn’t ManagementSpeak for “No”).

Correspondent: More likely, it’s that you know who butters your bread, Bob. That’s right, management. And management is about profit for themselves and shareholders at anyone else’s expense, including the indentured servant Indians who suffer under near slave conditions; and your friends, neighbors, and possibly relative American citizens against whom you choose to be, shall we say, less than a champion.

Look in the mirror, buddy. You won’t like the cowardice you see. ^*&# you and your 1% crowd.

Sigh.

In case you haven’t heard of it, “The H-1B is a non-immigrant visa in the United States under the Immigration and Nationality Act, section 101(a)(17)(H). It allows U.S. employers to temporarily employ foreign workers in specialty occupations.”

Here’s what I, in my own, cowardly way, know, suspect, and conjecture about the H-1B program, divided into two parts: Public policy, and management decision-making.

Public policy first

I don’t generally do public policy, because KJR’s raison d’etre (pardon my French) is to give you something you can put to immediate practical use. Opining on public policy doesn’t achieve this.

Because I know too little about the subject to share a Strongly Held Opinion, I won’t. Instead, here are a few points to consider as you form your own:

  • Near-slave conditions? This is like calling your preferred political villain a Nazi. Slavery, and Nazi-ism, are far too deplorable to trivialize.
  • Econ 101: Worker visa programs are all a form of protectionism. In this case it’s the labor marketplace that’s being protected. The extent you favor or dis-favor the H-1B program probably depends on your views about protectionist economic policy.
  • Business ethics: Is the H-1B program immoral? I can’t personally come up with an ethical framework that makes hardworking foreigners less deserving of employment than hardworking U.S. citizens, other than the moral logic of protectionism — see previous bullet. From a moral perspective one might, in fact, plausibly argue that managerial hiring decisions should be purely meritocratic, entirely ignoring citizenship.
  • Recruiting goals: Well-managed organizations recruit the most talented individuals they can attract. Including H-1B workers expands the talent pool employers have to draw on, improving their prospects for doing so.
  • Unintended consequences: To the extent an employer wants to minimize IT labor rates, reducing or eliminating the number of H-1B visas issued would simply move the work offshore instead of moving the workers on-shore. If the work is on-shore, at least that means worker wages are spent here in the U.S.A.
  • Supply and demand: IT unemployment is, right now, very low (~3.9%), so demand exceeds supply. This explains at least some of the industry demand for H-1B workers. Reduced labor costs explain most of the rest.

Practical, immediately useful advice


For IT managers:
If you’d rather employ U.S. citizens than foreign IT professionals, embrace Agile. While colleagues of mine tell me offshore Agile is possible, there’s near-unanimous consensus among the Agile experts I know that team proximity matters, and matters a lot more than when using Waterfall application development methods. Having the team all in one place makes everything easier than when team members interact across multiple time zones and through purely electronic media.

For IT professionals: Recognize that you’re in business for yourself, and that what you can do for an employer constitutes the products and services your business has to sell.

Any time and energy you spend complaining about how unfair it all is is time and energy you aren’t spending making yourself more competitive. (Hint: Embrace Agile. Smart IT managers are looking for Scrum-worthy developers.)

H-1B workers are your business rivals. Your job is to figure out how to out-compete them.