One thing I didn’t realize being the CTO of a company that provides a software application to other companies is how often you have to fix — unpaid and way out of scope — the IT infrastructure of third-party companies so that your software application works correctly.

I’m not talking about minor brokenness here. I mean we have to routinely go in and fix out-of-scope areas for entire large companies with whole IT departments bigger than our entire company when they say “Your application doesn’t work and it’s definitely your application. Fix it.” And then we go remote in and look around and see that their DNS is entirely non-functional, their Citrix does not work, their network is set up in a way that could never function correctly, and their “failover” does only the first part but no “over.”

Note again that we are not an infrastructure company. We provide a single software application (that can be customized to do many things). Technically, our contract is for the provision of that application only and absolutely nothing else. But functionally, we are on the hook for correcting poor infrastructure because inevitably our application gets blamed for other IT departments’ completely broken environments. So far in the new job, I have done a few hundred hours of unpaid infrastructure consulting so that other companies don’t blame us when our application doesn’t work because their infrastructure is so terrible.

Like I said, I wasn’t expecting this. I knew a lot of IT departments were horrendous but to this level I had no idea.

I was semi-joking with the CEO yesterday that we should start an infrastructure consulting business as well, since we already spend so much time doing it for free. However, these companies rarely believe their infrastructure is the problem, and instead insist it’s something to do with our application. But so far, it never has been because it’s just a small application that requires very little to work correctly.

I can really see why users tend to hate IT because all the users that we end up helping are very thankful that for once someone fixed something after we remote in and correct or work around all these out-of-scope infrastructure issues.