There is a popular old story about a repair technician and we experienced a 2022 version of it in the software world.
Here is how the original story about the repair technician goes:
One day in a factory, the main machine has a malfunction and stops working. No worker or supervisor is able to figure out the issue or find a solution. They call the technician on staff and he is not able to get it to work either. The Supervisor then tells the Factory Owner, “I know a brilliant technician who should be able to get the machine working.” The expert technician is called who comes in, studies the malfunction for a few minutes and then takes out his hammer; he taps a particular part of the machine twice with the hammer and the machine almost magically starts working.
When asked about his fee, the technician replies “$2000.” The factory owner is shocked and demands a justification “$2000 for a couple of hammer taps?” To this the technician replies, “It’s just $50 for the tapping, the rest is for knowing where exactly to tap.”
You might have heard similar versions of this story, but what we experienced helped us make sense of the remaining $1950! So here is what happened:
We had an important software release scheduled in 2 days and the front-end developer got stuck with a strange issue. The hour was late but since the schedule was tight, the team lead had no option but to call all hands on deck. 3 front-end developers + 1 QA specialist + the team lead jumped on a call to diagnose and fix the issue. An hour later, they figured that it’s a server-related issue which is not really their cup of tea. They needed someone who understood server coding and configuration.
The server engineer however, wasn’t available due to the late hour and so they called an IT administrator who could only run tests and execute limited server tasks with proper directions. This team of 6 worked non-stop for 4 excruciating hours but could not diagnose the issue. However, they noticed that a second “test” server was not having the issue and the code was working fine on that server. Not wanting to lose any more time, they decided to use the second test server as the solution and not worry about the original problem. Another hour was spent to move the entire backend to the test server followed by the front end being pointed to the test server and the problem was temporarily resolved.
The next day, the server engineer logged in and spent a few minutes diagnosing the problem. In a mere 15 minutes, the problem was both identified and resolved. An Apache server configuration was changed and voila! The problem was gone.
Coming back to the technician’s fee and what we learned about the $1950! When the right person resolves the problem quickly and with ease, a large sum looks steep. But compare this sum with the cost of the 6 team members who toiled for 5 hours – which is the cost which we often do not recognize.
