One of the things that irks me most about a lot of the technology systems I’ve seen or heard about is just how badly set up they are. I call this the “brother-in-law syndrome.”
brother-in-law syndrome – n. – The belief that because your brother-in-law/husband/friend “knows a lot about technology,” he/she is qualified to set up your mission-critical systems.
Carriers of this disease have been tempted into making bad technology choices for a variety of reasons, and it ends up killing their productivity (not to mention their “flow” or their revenue) at the absolute worst possible time. But yet, the temptation remains.
Why is it tempting?
1. It’s cheap (initially). – Your brother-in-law/husband/friend is probably willing to set your site, your computer, or your productivity system up for free – or at least very cheaply. And you’re bootstrapping, so you could REALLY use the money for other things right now.
1b. You have irrational exuberance. – Setting up your stuff can’t be that hard, right? I mean, after all your hosting company promises a “one-click install” of WordPress, so by golly you can do it yourself and save money. Just install a theme, write your content, and – hey presto! – instant blog. (Which crashes incessantly when you get to 5,000 hits a day.)
2. You don’t know any better. – If you don’t know a lot about technology yourself, you don’t have a frame of reference for picking someone to do it for you. Therefore, you’re likely to see anyone who knows more about technology than you do as an “expert” – even when they’re not.
3. Even if you do know better, you don’t know where to go. – There are a lot of people and companies on the internet who promise to set up your stuff for you. Some of them are even legitimate. But with so many people to choose from, it’s very difficult to differentiate the signal from the noise. Enter your brother-in-law – who at least you can find again (and hold accountable) if there’s ever an emergency. The other guys? Maybe not so much.
4. It’s faster (maybe). – You have a great idea. You want to get going on it, like, yesterday. And for that, you need a website or a productivity system or a new WordPresss widget or whatever. Taking a quick look around yields you 500 people who say that they can “do it all.” And, maybe they can. But by the time you wade through the 500, the fire will already have gone out of your idea. Better to DIY now than to never do it at all.
All of these things lead to totally understandable, but very bad decisions about who sets up and manages your technology.
The truth, unplugged:
95% of the technical problems I’ve dealt with in my life could have been avoided if a capable technologist (and one whose business/reputation was on the line if the stuff failed) had handled the system’s setup in the first place.
These technical problems have caused their unfortunate victims lots of time, lots of money, and lots of pain/heartache/agita.
A Godalmighty Rant:
It frustrates the heck out of me to see a misconfiguration causing someone’s website to go down on launch day, costing them hundreds or thousands of dollars in lost sales.
It frustrates the heck out of me to see someone losing a year’s worth of data and perhaps the first draft of their long-awaited novel because nobody was there to remind them to set up full hard drive backups – even if their machine is a brand new Mac, which supposedly “just works.”
It frustrates the heck out of me to see people wasting the time that they could be using to work on their book or bring their product to market or play with their children in order to chase obscure server issues that they probably can’t fix anyway – and only exist because their brother-in-law didn’t know how to work the thing in the first place.
It does not frustrate me nearly as much as it frustrates the people who actually encounter these problems and are helpless to fix them themselves.
An analogy:
People tend to understand that unless they know something about plumbing or electricity, DIY plumbing or wiring projects are likely to cost them more time, money, and pain than hiring a qualified plumber or electrician would. They don’t want to flood their house or get zapped with a thousand volts (or one or the other of those things has already happened), so they call in a professional – someone whose business and reputation depends on the quality of the work they do – to do the job right.
I’m here to tell you that this is no different in the world of computers.
What hiring a professional doesn’t say about you:
This doesn’t mean that you’re stupid or incapable – any more than your hiring a plumber or electrician means you’re stupid or incapable.
What this means is that there is stuff in the world that only YOU can do. You have a unique voice, product, or perspective to bring to the world. And, recognizing that, you leave the technological side of the things to people who love doing that work as much as you love doing yours.
Why on earth are you spending your precious time, money, and other resources not in doing your thing, but in chasing technical problems, or chasing your brother-in-law to chase your technical problems?
A Disclaimer
This isn’t a covert sales pitch for inspirIT. It really isn’t. Just as Reese would probably want you to hire a fantastic designer – even if it wasn’t her – because she loves to see good design, or Dave probably wants you to do the hell out of your launch – even if you don’t hire him to help you – because he enjoys seeing new voices and products enter the world, I want you to do your technology right.
My goal here is to increase the amount of good technology (and the number of creative people freed up to create instead of manually removing dead links from their sites or whatever) in the world – whether that means you hire me or someone else to set up or manage your mission-critical stuff.
