People who are not familiar with complex and modern software products usually have a reductionist vision on how issues are solved in real environments… let me give an example: an intermediary contacts me in LinkedIn and tells me about a customer who has a problem in production and needs an expert in the product to lecture a course, not a “slide reader”. Yes, customers trying to solve production issues with courses, it happens.

“Slide reader” is argot for instructors who are clueless on the intricacies of the products they lecture, from time to time there a situation like this: a course is lectured by someone without a clue. Sometimes it is because the lecturer is an adventurous subject and sometimes it is because he is an expert in a related product but not exactly in the one he is lecturing and he got in a bad situation himself or was pressured to lecture.

Even though this problem of “slide readers” is real the truth is when you get a customer or intermediary to mention this kind of situation in relation with a course you should see a lot of red flags because usually this is denoting a situation with “clueless customers or intermediaries” that may get you as an expert in serious problems.

The intermediary who says things like “my customer has a problem in production and needs to get a course from a real expert” usually means the following:

1. The customer is not aware that the product he is dealing with is too complex for anyone to know it by memory… probably the customer knows little more than COBOL and still thinks software problems are solved looking at a manual.
2. The intermediary thinks that the customer is always right and is having no critical attitude towards the customer request.
3. The problem the customer has is most probably caused by a faulty implementation that was done by people who where not real experts and if the product is complex enough the customer implementation is way more complex than it should because of the bad decision making. This is not solved in courses, maybe not even in a one-shot consultancy.
4. The customer is not willing to involve the instructor in their previous mistakes in the implementation, probably the customer is a consultancy company itself and is not willing to give details to other external sub-contracted companies.
5. The customer expects to talk with an expert and get some clues on steps forward they can take to try to improve, but not really willing to give you any insights and surely not expecting to hire your services as an expert consultant, because that would imply that they don’t know how to do their job.
6. The customer does not understand that issues can not be solved this way in current software, it is not like the software has a 40 instruction set or is not a simple server you can administer with 3 commands… the customer basically is too far away from real knowledge to even being to communicate appropriately.
7. The customer probably expects a GUI to provide a button to get what he needs to happen automatically and he is not looking for real expertise, he is looking for someone who knows all the GUI intricacies (which is a dumbed down knowledge from an expert point of view and any non-expert can know about).

Recommendation: Try to pass on these red flags.