One of the things that intrigued me most about the rat infestation of a New York KFC restaurant was reading about Robert Corrigan, the expert that was brought in to help clean up the mess. Corrigan (from nearby Richmond, IN) has been called “the Elvis of the pest control world” for the research he’s done on the subject. An Indianapolis Star article describes one of the ways Corrigan achieved his expert status:
The key to Corrigan’s success is understanding how bureaucrats and rats think. He learned about the latter during his graduate student days at Purdue University, when he once spent 30 days in a rat-infested barn in Indiana. He lived the nocturnal life of his subjects, watching them eat and reproduce. They crawled all over him. The more he watched the animals, the more he liked them.
As someone who’s been terrified of rats ever since I saw the movie Ben as a little kid, the image of Corrigan living 30 days in a rat-infested barn makes me want to crawl into a fetal position atop the highest piece of furniture that I can find.
But it got me to think, how far would I go to become an expert in my field? I think a great web developer does more than just learn a few programming languages and try to keep up with the latest technologies. I thankfully don’t have to live in a rat-infested barn, but what kind of immersion is necessary in order to become better at what I do?
- Spend a day watching a novice users work with a web application so I better understand usability?
- Ask script kiddies on IRC to hack my website so I better understand security?
- Build complex applications that never see the light of day so I learn how to fully implement a particular technology component?
- Work on a 5-year old PC and 33.6kbps Internet connection to learn how to optimize web pages?
- Spend a day with my monitor turned off so I understand how a visually impaired person uses the web?
What do you think — what’s the rat-infested barn of your industry?
3 responses so far ↓
1 Ed // Mar 27, 2007 at 2:16 am
The perpetual neverending stream of customers who either have no support agreements with their customers or admins who take care of their technology properly. Since last Wednesday I’ve got almost 80hrs helping a customer recover from serious system problems. Burning the barn or closing the restaurant seem more appealing to me at the moment.
2 Ed Illig // Mar 28, 2007 at 10:08 pm
Okay, other Ed here.
I’ll take a pass on my own experience and offer up a friends instead. Years ago as an owner of a sizeable ISP he talked of hackers that roamed his servers on occasion.
Said he would track their movement but decided not to disturb them unnecessarily lest he awaken their miscreant natures—i.e., challenge them. He didn’t use the word rats but rather likened them to cockroaches. Alluded to living in peace with them… a sort of chess match and/or co-habitation.
I got the sense they lived with him during his sleeping hours as well as his waking hours. Akin to Ed’s recent experience perhaps.
3 Doug Karr // Mar 28, 2007 at 10:33 pm
Mine is having to deal with hundreds of unquantified opinions. I consistently see poor features make it into applications based on the bias or authority of an individual. I do not believe in consensus software development, nor do I believe in biased or authoritative development.
The job of a great product manager should be to weigh all of the variables and come up with the best solution. Sometimes that’s not a popular solution - but it’s the best one to utilize resources, compete in the marketplace, or to encompass flexibility, usability, accessibility, etc.
Those are my rats. They drive me crazy.
Leave a Comment