How many of you don’t actually interact with end-users?

In my field if you’re good enough, I don’t think you ever stop dealing with end users.

Once they figure out that you can solve their problem in 5-10 minutes that the helpdesk might take a day, a week, or months to puzzle out, it is fully over. Even if it’s not the best use of your time and the company has other priorities. And often enough the “tier 1 emergency” is that they forgot how to unmute their headset.

The end users seem to be able to sniff out your problem-solving ability like some weird sightless creature from a cave in Guatemala. I don’t know how they do it, but they always find out and always ignore all protocols, escalation paths, good sense and etiquette to locate you and take you off a $10 million high-value high-impact project so you can spend time and company money researching why they cannot click a button in Microsoft Word.

A good use of time, certainly.