T-Mobile: another IT failure

On another mailing list, I heard about a T-Mobile Web page that would tell you what kind of signal you are likely to get at a given street address in the U.S. Because U.S. Cellular offers nothing but bottom of the bin cellphones (they are not big enough to get deals to sell phones like the Treo 650), I thought I'd check T-Mobile.

The company has never had coverage in Blacksburg, but I thought I'd try again, since I have not checked with them lately. So I went to the page, typed in my street address, city, state, and zip code, pressed the button, and voila.

I got back a message saying "Input zip code is invalid."

Wow. That's interesting. Either T-Mobile is trying to tell me I live in an "invalid" place, or there is a bug in their code, or it's a really awful way of saying they have no coverage in my area.

Pick any one of those three choices, and you get to the same conclusion--somebody screwed up, either by not testing it adequately and/or by failing utterly to do a basic software ergonomics review to make sure the "error" messages made sense.

My guess: This little app was outsourced to a software shop in India, which did a bang up job of banging out the code cheaply and producing a slick little application. But you get what you pay for. Outsourced contractors rarely care much about little details like this; they are under the gun to get the work done quickly and cheaply for the client, and so they don't have the luxury of dotting the i's and crossing the t's.

At the same time that we see big companies getting bigger by relentless costcutting and globalization of production, why is there a parallel rise in small, entreprenuerial enterprises? Because the small entrepreneur has more skin in the game--he or she has to produce high quality stuff to be competitive. A two hundred person coding shop in India just has to get the next job. It's not either/or here....both have their place, and both can provide useful services.

In this instance, it's someone at T-Mobile who did not supervise the work properly. And really, it's no more than a college sophmore class project to throw together some code that validates zip codes. T-Mobile should be embarrased and ashamed.