Quality

The world is full of small businesses and services of one form or another who do work for hire. Many of these services and companies are excellent and highly professional and extremely competent.

Many, however, are not. I've had the unpleasant experience of working with companies which are staffed by incompetents, and believe me, it's no picnic. The results of doing business with unprofessional companies can range from mildly annoying to downright disasterous.

I've had to deal with moving companies that didn't ship my goods as promised (due to their error, for which I was supposed to pay extra before they'd ship my stuff!). I've purchased goods which cost enough to assume some quality in the workmanship but which fell apart, failed to function, or otherwise turned out to be junk in a very short period of time. I've had to go into client sites and clean up the mess left by other so-called web designers who simply had no idea how to write good code. The list goes on. Some of the things were minor. Some were very major, indeed, and could have cost me my life and/or limb.

The first thing that really bothers me about this is that I just happen to think that businesses have a responsibility to provide customers with a certain level of professional quality. If I hire a carpenter to make cabinets for my kitchen, I expect the doors to fit properly and the edges to be finished. If I hire a tailor to make me a dress, I expect the seams to be edged and pressed correctly and that the garment is going to fit. If I hire an internet service provider, I expect to be able to get online when I want and for them to fulfill their technical end of the bargain, just as they expect me to pay my bill and abide by the terms of service agreement.

The thing about quality service is that in order to do it right, you first have to know right from wrong. You need to know all the technical details of your field. If you're a photographer, you need to know how to use a camera correctly, how to pose people, how to deal with varying light, when to use a flash, all sorts of stuff. The same is true of any field, from bakeries to floral designers to computer hardware technicians. All professional fields have professional knowledge which must be learned and properly and consistently applied.

The thing is, though, some people seem to think that having some sort of equipment, tool, or software makes them a professional, and it's just not true. I own a sewing machine and I use it, but I'm hardly a tailor. Trying to sell my services to someone and claiming to know the technical details of making quality garments would be unethical at best and fraud at worst. I also know how to cook, but I'm not a chef and wouldn't try to get people to pay me for cooking for them. I can do a lot of things reasonably well, in fact, but I don't claim expertise enough that I feel I can actually sell my services in most fields.

For some reason, though, and this is specific to my own professional interests, some people think that if they have FrontPage or Dreamweaver, it means they're "web designers". They think that if they can point and click on an NT server, they're "system administrators" (I actually heard one particular idiot say once "I don't see what the big deal about system administration is. It's all point and click as far as I can tell."). They have little or no idea about the complexities and technical issues of the profession of web design or network administration, and yet they come out and offer their services for sale.

The problem with this is that sometimes consumers are taken in and end up getting shoddy products or bad service. It also contributes toward making life hard for others on the net. For example, badly formatted name service or network routing tables can mess up routing and name service for hundreds of other people. An open relay mail server can be abused by unscrupulous people to commit email fraud and waste all manner of bandwidth, causing some administrators to set up filtering systems on their own mail servers and thus increasing everyone's workload, the workload of the machines in question, and the stress on an already crowded internet with limited bandwidth.

There's also a large degree of arrogance involved with someone who knows next to nothing about the real workings of a particular career and yet comes forward with claims of professional expertise. I find that irritating and occasionally insulting.

I agree with Henry Ford about quality and I believe in paying for quality services. I hire professional photographers, I pay for meals in restaurants, I pay tailors to make alterations for me, and I respect their skills and abilities. I believe that spending the money for real professional work is a good investment.

By the same token, I happen to really resent it when people present themselves as experts and take my money and provide me with poor quality products or poor service. I do understand the notion of caveat emptor (buyer beware), and I try to research things before I make a big investment, but some areas are just so foreign to me and so out of my range of knowledge and expertise that I pretty much have to just trust that the business is professional because they say they are and they look good on paper and present a professional image. If and when they prove to be fly-by-night or unprofessional, I am understandably angered.

I'm also angered by people in my own field who operate on a less-than-professional level. They muck up the waters for everyone, make my life harder with their incompetence (see the aforementioned improperly formatted name service or routing tables as just one example), and generally give a bad name to web development. People like this are the ones who were responsible for the whole "Dotcom Revolution" which turned into the "Dotcom Wasteland". People like this are the ones whose incompetence and lack of knowledge allow spammers to bombard people on the net. People like this are the ones who rip off clients out of sheer ignorance and just plain incompetence, and then leave people like me to clean up the mess and try to convince the general public that not all web developers are incompetent jerks.

If I sound like some sort of technocrat (something of which I am occasionally accused), I apologize. I really don't mean to sound "superior" or "holier than thou" about this. The fact is, I am a hardcore technophile and I've been doing net related stuff for a long time, and I've put in hours of sweat, effort, time, and money. I take my professional responsibilities seriously. I just wish that everyone else would take their professions seriously and that they would come to appreciate what Ford had to say about quality and apply that sentiment to their own dealings with consumers and their own colleagues, and pay just a little more attention to what they do when no one's looking.

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