Let ‘er Rip!

I used to work with a guy who was knowledgeable and quick thinking, but not particularly cautious. Whenever we planned a change to one of our computer systems, he would blurt out, “That’s easy! You just have to...” followed by whatever idea popped into his head immediately.

The guy’s proposals were generally sound, but his rushed conclusions didn’t inspire confidence. He wasn’t good at thinking about what could go wrong or what might be impacted by a change. He rarely suggested a method for verifying that things would work as expected or a blackout plan if things went awry.

We realized quickly that his off the cuff solutions were merely a starting point for our planning process. He was a subject matter expert and we had to depend on his insights, but we knew that we had to think things through rather than counting on his word that everything would be alright.

 As a team, we would discuss the process in detail, identify all known impacts and contingencies, and in the process build a detailed, step by step plan that listed every task, who would do it, who would verify it, how the handoffs would be managed, and how we would back out if necessary.

Writing the plan was usually my job. In addition to being deliberate and detail oriented, I’m highly pessimistic when computers are involved. I don’t believe that something is going to work until I see it demonstrated.

The final version of the plan was always more intricate than the guy’s proposed solution.

As a team, we always managed to get the job done, but it was never as “easy” or “simple” as this guy would have had us believe. It always took a skilled team to make it happen, and their actions had to be carefully coordinated.

The guy never learned from this process. He never developed the discipline of thinking through problems carefully. The next time we needed to resolve a problem, he’d blurt out another quickly hatched solution. Luckily, over time, we stopped trusting his judgment.

We even came up with a nickname for the guy. We used to call him “Let ‘er Rip!” as in “why don’t you ask Let ‘er Rip how he would do it?” or “give that project to Let ‘er Rip, and he’ll have it done in five minutes.” It was a good reminder to avoid letting the guy do anything hands on before first talking through the details.