Fourteen years ago I started learning taichichuan. In my first encounter with my teacher, I did what he said, but I didn’t trust him. I asked myself “Does he know his stuff?” Obviously I couldn’t answer “yes” to this question with a single lesson—all I could do was being unable to reject him. Likewise in the second lesson. Likewise in the third. After a few months, I thought it extremely likely he knows his stuff. After a few years, I trusted him 100%.
It typically takes no more than a few months to trust that someone knows his stuff. With IT it’s different. You may hire a software developer or firm and, for the first few months, they’ll deliver excellent work. Feature after feature after feature, everything works great. After a few more months they might start to slow down. It might take a year, sometimes more, until they’d hit a wall, until the mediocre job they’ve done breaks and can’t be fixed.
If a truck breaks, you can buy another one. With software it’s not so simple. When your systems break, they may be too expensive to fix. Replacing software takes time, and it may mean a huge disruption across the entire company—it’s not just one driver that needs to be trained on a new vehicle (which isn’t that different from the previous vehicle anyway).
The way to move forward with automation is to trust someone. And trusting someone in IT is risky.
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