At what point in our glorious national history did Americans stop being problem – solution oriented, opting instead to focus on a problem – excuse oriented strategy? I grow more weary with each day when I approach someone with a problem, that they are actually paid to solve, and the reply I get is something like “Let me explain something to you…” ending with something about how this problem came about because of X, Y, Z and how they are M, in other words, they had nothing to do with the origination of the problem.

Let me give you a ridiculous example:
You are the captain of a spaceship, the SS SupercoolnWhatnot, something like the Millenium Falcon. One day you are walking around the ship when you notice a hole in the side of it leading to open space. Let us pretend for a moment that the vaccuum of space doesn’t instantly yank you out of the hole in a spaghetti like fashion, leaving you a twisted wreck of gooey space debris. Instead let us pretend that only your air supply is gushing out of the hole. You make a hasty call to your Scottish engineer whom you explain the situation to. “Shamus! There is a hole in our hull through which our air supply is gushing out!” Shamus replies with “Here is the thing – I didn’t do it.”

Nevermind that you are all on the verge of suffocating. Nevermind that you will perish any moment and that it could have been prevented if only the problem were solved. Nevermind that the only reason Shamus is part of your crew so that he may fix hull holes. NEVERMIND THAT SHAMUS CLEARLY DID NOT FIX THIS HOLE. Instead let us focus on the fact that Shamus did not create the hull hole! In fact, let us talk about it until we are literally blue in the face FROM A LACK OF LIFE SUSTAINING OXYGEN instead of solving the real problem, that being that you are LITERALLY DYING.

So my issue: I work with software engineers, in fact I have been one for years. More and more in the technical world I encounter “techies” who don’t actually want to fix the problems that they are paid to fix. Instead they would rather amaze you with their intellect delivered via example through a series of misused vocabulary words and dead end explanations that result in you giving up and walking away. More and more this is becoming the norm -  instead of fixing the problem we can just explain to the person who discovered it that they are mistaken by thinking that there actually is a problem. Meanwhile said problem still exists.

As Microsoft put it – “That is not a bug, it is a feature.”