@Breffni-Potter said:
What do you do when that recommendation was a disaster? Do you reach out and say "Well, that was a bad call, sorry I recommended that to you"
That one is very tough. But, I think, one of the most important jobs of IT professionals is to have used and evaluated a wide array of products (not for helpdesk people, but at a certain level and job type) and understand much of their technical strengths, quality differences, support value and the integrity of the companies that stand behind them (or the communities that do, as the case may be.) Our job is to determine what is the best chance of success for someone, what is cost effective, what is likely to work out the best. Companies change, products change, some things cannot be foreseen.
Sometimes it is on us for actually making bad recommendations. That's a given. I see completely insane and reckless recommendations given regularly. Recommendations that I think should fall into a "fire them and consider pressing charges" category - like overspending by six figures without any technical or business reason for the spend, just because the recommender thinks that a product sounds cool, they like the brand or, often, they are getting some cool toy in exchange for selling the company down the river. This really happens, and industry wide it happens very often, this is true in any industry: the average person giving recommendations is not well prepared or capable to be doing so.
But assuming we are competent and honestly attempting to give good recommendations, hopefully good customers or businesses understand that we are not just being asked for a very complex recommendation in the moment (knowing all relevant products or approaches on the market) but also gauging both those products' futures as well as the business' future. Being asked to predict the future comes with risk, always. Even the best possible recommender, with the best possible intentions, with the most unlimited research budget and time can't get things right every time because that's not how predictions work.
When we make an honest mistake and recommend something completely wrong, yes, I think it is good if we own up to that and/or somehow fix the situation. But should we apologize for the times when we did the research, tried hard, used the available information and simply could not predict the future? Probably not, it sets an expectation that we are responsible for things we cannot be responsible for.
In many cases, one of the worst things about being in IT is that other people push impossible demands upon us as if it is acceptable. In what other job is nearly every single person in the field expected to be a fortuneteller, even without them claiming to be, and often held accountable for having failed to predict the future accurately?
