I spent years as a consultant following a basic pattern: a subject matter expert wrote a tool or series of tools in something like excel or access. The tool got popular but didn’t scale. My firm would get brought in to “fix that and then automate all the processes.”
When I was a junior consultant I’d get angry at how kludgy and inelegant the original solution was. After a few projects I’d realized how hard producing software that business users actually use can be.
My response now is “this is amazing, look how far you’ve come. Let me help you go further.”
Yeah it stinks and yeah I often did from scratch rewrites, but the work done proving the idea/system was valuable was why I had a job in the first place and had delivered more value then I could as a developer.
When I was a junior consultant I’d get angry at how kludgy and inelegant the original solution was. After a few projects I’d realized how hard producing software that business users actually use can be.
My response now is “this is amazing, look how far you’ve come. Let me help you go further.”
Yeah it stinks and yeah I often did from scratch rewrites, but the work done proving the idea/system was valuable was why I had a job in the first place and had delivered more value then I could as a developer.