It's quite unthinkable that I have survived 9 months in my job, and when I look at the amount of work I have, it was easily twice as much throughput as my previous job for the same time span. As the months go by, I am getting more and more challenging work, not that I am complaining, just that I don't want to end up stealing other people's work and being called the boss' pet.
Recently, I have been working on a single sign on project which had been preambling for half a year, and then one fine day, the AD (active directory) guy told me, "next month we will implement one-way-forest-trust". My immediate reaction was WHAT!!! only give me 1 month's notice? After making a huge fuss, the project was jammed, and then for another 3 months, the witch and wizard re-chanted their spells and kept getting ingredients from us. However, we didn't know what they were brewing until 2 weeks ago. One-way-forest-trust is the name of a type of AD setup that enables single sign on.
Everyone, well almost all the vendors, felt that they had been given wrong information. As for me, I had never trusted them because of the multiple versions of stories they had been telling us, so I didn't feel cheated. *evil me* While they were brewing their soup, I was asking google to impart knowledge of the whole alien topic of one-way-forest-trust to me. Servers, domains, network connectivity, connection protocols for AD, internal mechanisms of AD, etc... almost everything that I never had to know.
It was only 2 weeks ago that they scooped out the soup for us to drink and let us see the pot. We only had 4 weeks to figure out how to get the whole single sign on to work. Everyday we were trying to decipher the code because it was new to all of us. As I had a few systems to work on, I focused on my monster scampoint because that's the most important to everyone. For scampoint, I am very lucky to have a vendor who listens to everything I say. I tell him what I want him to code, he codes it in a few hours, I check, tell him the changes I want, after a few rounds and within a week, we were done.
After he completed what he had to do, we were just short of doing thorough testing, and I am quite sure that we are almost done for our scampoint, I decided to give him a 5 min motivational talk. ... You see, now that we have more or less tested our code and know it works, what risks do we face? We face the risk of an incompetant AD team who may bring us down. If they fail, all the apps will suffer, including us, because we are assuming that they are going to go a good job. If they fail, no matter how good a job we do, people see that we failed, they won't see that the AD team or the SSO project team failed. Do we really need to be at their mercy? We are definitely better than them, so to reduce the risk of us failing because of them, we will need to have a back up plan that can take over their work. And you must also not trust me, you must also think because I may be wrong. After that I told him to code more things for me and he was willing.
As I can only trust myself when I am faced with the ticking clock, I inadvertently create work for myself, like this one. I decided to make a call to the other vendor who was managing other scampoint apps, I didn't have to, and he will most probably fail if I didn't ask.
Me: "Are you assuming that we will be doing anything for you?"
Him: "We are assuming that scampoint will continue to sync users from AD."
Me: "Are you assuming that we are going to sync the users for you?"
Him: "This one we haven't thought about it because we are just using scampoint to build our app, we are not maintaining scampoint."
Me: "Ok, so now I am asking you, are you assuming that I am going to populate the users for you?"
Him: "We don't intend to change the sync mechanism, so we just need you to point to the new AD."
Me: "Do you know that it won't work?"
Him: "Why?"
Me: "Think again, then you tell me."
Him: "No change is needed."
Me: "Are you sure? You will need more than that."
Him: "Oh..." then he yadda yadda yadda, he got it.
Me: "I am not going to solve that problem for you."
Him: "It's not in our scope."
Me: "You didn't tell me that it's your assumption, so it's also not in my scope."
Him: "Then you need to bring it up to your boss."
Me: "It's your app that is affected, but nevermind I can bring it up as well. If it's anyone's fault, it's definitely not my fault for asking you whether you are assuming anything."
Him: "Yes, I know, it's our mistake, we didn't think of that."
But I still helped him after scaring him over the phone... lol
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