Courses shouldn't teach 'secrets'
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The knowledge should also be provided as part of the basic package for others to pick up as and when, if they've already surmounted the learning curve to a large degree. Ie in full manuals and other documents
I agree 100%.
As we grow, we learn more about the practice of "appliance philosophy." Secret commands is an area where we got confused.
Our initial idea was that, like many simple electronic items, NetApp appliances should have "no user serviceable parts inside." Why burden the customer with lots of information about situations that should "never" happen. For many of our customers, especially for customers with just a couple of boxes, I believe that this approach has actually worked well.
But it doesn't always work, and especially not for for "enterprise customers". (One might define an enterprise customer as someone who has so many boxes that it is no longer a question of whether they will fail, but when.)
Big computer users understand that all products fail *occasionally*. But when a product does fail, they want well documented procedures and commands to get them on their way as quickly as possible. And they want to understand what is happening in their environment to their equipment. When a technical support engineer asks them to run a command, they want to be able to check out the documentation to learn exactly what it does.
I believe that these desires are all sensible and reasonable, even for an appliance. But I confess (I might as well confess, since you already know) that this is an area where we have more work to do. We have "secret" commands that are not documented, and -- worse yet -- since we designed them with the mistaken notion that we would be the only ones to use them, the user interface is not always as clean as it should be.
These are things we need to fix.
(There will always be some secret commands that are used within engineering as part of our design and test scaffolding. We just need to take the position that when we learn a given command is useful externally, we should give it a face-lift and make it non-secret.)
I have to say I'm a little peeved when courses are products in and of themselves (ie where they teach things over and above the manuals) because it's just another way for vendors to screw customers for a few more bucks IMHO.
Previously I never thought NetApp was that kind of vendor. The Appliance philosophy seems to preclude this kind of thing...
That is not our intention, even if it looks that way! NetApp's mission is to make money by developing hardware and software that people want to buy.
I don't mean to be anti-social, but my fantasy customer is one who buys stuff that never breaks, and if it does break, he/she can easily read the documentation (or visit NOW) to figure out how to fix the problem without calling us. We are growing quickly, and in the long run, if we don't strive to help our customers help themselves, we will have big problems. I want to grow by selling more products -- not by building more classrooms!
Don't get me wrong: training classes will always be a very important part of "helping customers help themselves", and technical support engineers will always be necessary to solve those extra tricky problems. And of course, we can't give away these services for free. But our real focus, in terms of making money, is on selling more hardware and software.
So why all the secret stuff in the classes?
The answer is simple. It's much easier to teach secret commands in classes than it is to write production quality documentation. And it's even worse when some of the interfaces really ought to be redesigned before being documented. The "22/7" trick for floppy boot seemed really clever when the goal was to keep that stuff secret. It looks pretty silly as something to document.
So while we're trying to get our arms around this problem in engineering, and figure out the best way to solve it going forward, the folks teaching classes are doing the right thing by sharing what they know, even if it does make you feel left out for not having taken a class.
Sorry.
Dave