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I decided a week or two ago to sell one of the businesses/products that I run as a side project. The software business is in a very niche market and makes a few thousand dollars each year - enough to buy some hardware. It has been fun working on the project and the clients really like it, but it has become a distraction from my primary focus - another venture with a partner.
After doing a little research online I was directed to a few places that deal in IP like this. One was sitepoint.com.
I listed my web site, the source code, etc. and paid $10 to do so. I did not get any emails about it until today.
Here it is in its full glory:
DO NOT REPLY TO THIS EMAIL!
***************************
Dear tim,
You have received a new private message at SitePoint Forums from favourbaby, entitled “Hello”.
To read the original version, respond to, or delete this message, you must log in here:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/private.php
This is the message that was sent:
***************
Hello,
(aliiyufavour@yahoo.com)
My name is favour Aliiyu i am tall ,good looking, perfect body figure and sexy. I saw your profile today at and was delighted to contact you, I hope you will be the true loving, honest and caring man that I have been looking 4, And I have something special to tell you about me, So please contact me directly through my email address at
(aliiyufavour@yahoo.com)
so that I can also send my picture directly to you.
regards
favour Aliiyu
***************
Again, please do not reply to this email. You must go to the following page to reply to this private message:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/private.php
All the best,
SitePoint Forums
Well, as you can imagine I am pretty annoyed at this. Basically I was duped into paying money and providing my email address. The only benefit I have gotten so far is this spam message.
I wrote to sitepoint via email asking for a refund, though I have not heard back. If I do not get a refund I will call my credit card company and dispute the charge. That kind of nonsense is intolerable.
[UPDATE - I received repeated, defensive emails claiming that this is not their fault that people get spammed all the time and that they will not refund my money]
I’ll just live with the niche side business and ignore it for a while, while I we finish up the first release of this other software.
[UPDATE - Somehow via the magic of the internets some guy in Australia has agreed to buy my product. We settled on a little over 2X 2009 revenue (which is also basically 2X 2009 profits). I'm just waiting for the funds to clear and then I'll release the source code.
I went to the DevDays event in Boston with my startup partner. I’ll describe it briefly - though bear with me because I am writing this from a laptop at a public library in the middle of Massachusets in some hippie town.
We drove up from Long Island the night before. We took the Port Jeff to Bridgeport Ferry and arrived at a friend’s house in Cambridge. My employer gave me the day off since I paid for the event myself.
Getting to the event was easy - we took the T from Porter Square to Park Street, then switched lines and the subsequent walk was pretty short. (A good thing, since like an idiot I didn’t bring a rain jacket, nor did I check the weather before packing and leaving from NY)
Registration was a breeze and of course there was some swag from FogCreek. We sat down in the auditorium and had our eardrums blasted out by the rock music for a few minutes, then we decided to wait in the lobby until the music was lowered or until the event started. The volume remained ridiculous so we went in just before the start.
Introduction
The intro was almost painful to watch, but funny in some places (Joel and Jeff did a little video clip with some self-deprecating humor.) I give it a B for effort, but overall it was a little off. It was riddled with inside jokes for those people who listen to the stackoverflow podcast.
Ned’s Python talk was really good, though I expect that if you knew Python it might have been a less than time well-spent. I am not a Python developer so it was a great eye-opener for me for the power of this language - especially if you want to get some non-trivial work done quickly. He walked through code that showed how a dictionary spell checker and word-substituter worked. Succinct code and impressive functionality. I learned a bit about Python. (Monty - not the snake)
Dan Pilone’s iPhone talk was good. he gave his view on the hype and the reality of making money with the platform and dispelled the bad press/rumors about the evil empire that Apple (may have) become. He described the process and answered some questions about the process. I was able to ask him some questions during breaks as well and he was happy to spend the time answering them. For iPhone developers this was probably lots of review, but for me it was not wasted time.
The first break brought more of the abusively loud noise. People had to yell to be heard (while standing next to each other). I think Joel got a few complaints and made a joke of it later on. Someone rational had the sense to agree and eventually lowered the volume for subsequent music breaks.
Joel gave a well-prepared and slick walkthrough (amazing how much functionality he covered in the short time) of FogBugz 7.
Joel dropped a bomb and announced that he is going into competition with one of the sponsors of the show. Yep - FogBugz will have something called Kiln which allows code reviews from within the FogBugz browser as well as hosted Mercurial repositories.
I wonder what smart bear has to say about that - I wonder if they’ll pull their ads and sponsorship, or perhaps I am reading more into this than is there.
Joel gave a good demo of FogBugz 7 and I earned a few little shortcuts and time savers and one or two features. It almost makes up for having bought the last Fogbugz book (about 6.x) just before 7.0 was released.
The Microsoft dog and pony show could probably have been dropped. Perhaps I am being overly critical - especially given that:
- I was not interested in the topic
- It was getting really warm
- I needed to use the facilities
I went outside and told the staff about the heat problem. They were on it in a jiffy. Kudos to the event staff for that. I also have to say I was impressed with the toilet facilities. It was able to handle the load of all those developers pretty well. I was also very thankful for the proximity given the result of some food I had the night before.
John Resig gave a talk about some pretty impressive stuff, though I have never used java script and probably never will. It is clear he and others have done some great work in that area.
Miguel did not disappoint - he put on an entertaining show full of impressive Apple-defying feats, ObjectiveC bashing, and general humor. It was worth coming to Boston just to see him. Novell is a lucky company.
All the speakers were well-prepared and informative, though I suspect that if one worked with the technologies presented for a little time they would have known most of the content. I had assumed I would only be interested in hearing Miguel and Dan speak, but the python talk and the java script testing were really eye openers for someone not familiar with those worlds.
Although the internets was supposedly available through some magic wireless network I was not able to get on. Apparently only 1 byte of IPs was available. Not a big deal - I went outside with my iPhone to get emails and phone calls.
Lunch was yummy - there was a choice of three sandwiches with an apple, chips, soda, water and a cookie. A granola bar was available at the first break and cookies were served in the afternoon. It was at least as good as kindergarten. The sponsors and promoters did a great job at providing value for the attendees! For $99 you got fed, entertained and got to learn a bit of stuff . At the very least you had access to the presenters for more advanced discussions during breaks.
It was a good day and we followed it with a business meeting the next day with a vendor since we were in the area. I’ll try to post more about this when I have time, though there is not really much more to say.
Thanks Joel and team for the opportunity.
An old nitpick of mine just resurfaced with a vengeance, and since the most compelling things for me to write about seem to be annoyances and complaints, this will fit right in.
I am working on a start up with a partner. We’re going to be supporting some hardware cards with our software application. Well, we thought we were going to support hardware cards. It now turns out we’re going to support only one card manufacturer. Unfortunately the other manufacturer thinks it’s better to restrict access to its API than to give it away for free. You can’t get their API unless you buy the card, and we have not yet bought their card.
We’re software developers. We’re a startup. We’re staying clear of investors for now. Our startup is bootstrapping itself and exotic hardware is an expenditure we’re going to live without for now. We don’t want to spend $10,000 right now on a piece of hardware just to get access to an API.
We’re not losing sleep over this – the more reasonable manufacturer’s cards are a fraction of the cost, and deliver the same, if not more functionality. In fact, if the unreasonable company let us use their API we wouldn’t have found the competitor with a better value, so we are happy this has happened. However, that doesn’t change the fact that the policy is dumb.
I have seen this kind of idiotic thinking in the past - for some reason some companies selling a service or data or hardware think that they should keep their APIs/interface a secret to protect something. Protect what, exactly? From people trying to use their products? I would have imagined that you’d WANT to give people access to it - even offer to help them with writing applications for you API and hardware or service. After all, the more developers that write software for your products the more access you have to end users. (read $$)
APIs shouldn’t be revenue generators – the services or data they provide are the revenue generators. Provide easy access to the APIs and help developers.
We weren’t trying to get something for free. We were hoping to provide value to our customers who already own the hardware cards and wished to use our software as well. Most likely now they will see our solution, look at the vendors we support, notice the price difference, perhaps ask why we don’t support the other vendor (yet) and likely switch to the cheaper hardware we selected. So, in not allowing us access to an API, the intransigent manufacturer has cost themselves many sales.
We have every intention of supporting the one who rejected us - eventually. They are a big name in the field - the name everyone seems to know. But they are going to lag in sales for our solution and market because of this stupid, screwed up posture.
There is no business justification for putting up roadblocks to your APIs. None.
If you are selling services, products or anything else and you have an API to access them: please, think about your policies. If you don’t allow third party vendors or anyone else access to the API for free, you are putting up HUGE barriers and likely costing yourselves business.
Remember Romeo and Juliet? Never was there such a tale of woe …
I think there is a quote in that play about names. Something like “What’s in a name”?
I sometimes have a problem with names. Not only do I have difficulty remembering peoples’ names, I take lots of time figuring out what to name things– objects, classes, function calls and variables.
I wish I could share the carefree attitude of many of my coworkers who just pick any old name out of a hat. I don’t mean that I care about things like an iteration variable name. I is just as good as J or K or Q. But some names are better than others. Ishmael for example was a good name. Astyanax is another. Carl the Greenskeeper was perfect. And don’t get me started on the Bond Girls’ names…
It took my wife and me a long, long time to name our son. I think we were filling out his birth certificate name card as we were checking out of the hospital after the delivery. The nurses would bug us for a name every chance they got during the three days we were guests at the maternity ward.
This naming story is about a developer I once knew. His name is Peter. (Ironically enough he’s aptly named, though he was actually promoted far beyond his competency level)
Peter was one of those people who wrote things like “for all intensive purposes” and then would defend its use when someone pointed out that perhaps he meant to write “for all intents and purposes”. He also did a great many horrible things trying to write code and manage developers. He is likely to figure prominently in my blog posts, and not in a good way.
Peter was a busy developer. He had lots of code to write – well, when I say write, I mean he kept busy copying and pasting. And pasting. And pasting. Sometimes he had to rename the things he pasted. After a particularly busy day of copying and pasting, he wrote a class that did something “generic”. He also generalized that. Being the extremely bright guy he was, he named his creation GenericGeneral. And it was good. And on the seventh day he rested. (thankfully)
From that day on, whenever Peter walked by in the hallway, Alan and I would salute “The General”.
Please avoid being mocked like we mocked Peter; it is not a good for anyone. Do your team a favor and take the time to name things properly.
Originally this post was going to be titled:
“Everything I needed to know about software marketing I learned from my drug dealer”
but I didn’t want to attract the wrong element to my little blog.
During the course of my career I have heard lots of analogies. Maybe it is peculiar to our world, perhaps not. Apparently you can make analogies between anything. Try it; it’s fun. The analogy I am trying on for size today is that selling software is like selling smack. It pays off (big) in the long run if you give a little free taste. While I won’t say that selling software is EXACTLY like selling crack to a 13 year old, hopefully I can get away with advising software companies to consider the oft-used ,“first one’s free” marketing plan.
This is nothing new, even in the software world. (Nor am I the first to make reference to it.) I only bring it up because the lesson really hit home again recently. At first I felt guilty – guilty for taking advantage of an offer and feeling guilty that perhaps I was doing something sneaky. I was going to take advantage of a great deal with no intention of paying any money, and I was planning on milking it for as long as necessary. But, I soon realized that maybe I should feel manipulated rather than guilty. I’m not the one in control of the situation – it’s these guys – they are the dealer who is after my soul.
So how exactly should you apply the wildly successful and hugely profitable practices of cigarette companies and corner drug-dealers to software development? That’s easy. Do what all the other little software companies do – provide free trials.
The freeness of FogBugz is a bit different than the usual try/buy. Many companies provide free services or software for personal use, but Fog Creek will host your two-user solution for free. You get to join with a buddy! This is good reasoning – I can’t recall the details exactly, but I seem to remember that there was a software company that started out as two guys in a garage, or was it in a dorm room, or perhaps at a bar. Hmm. It will come to me.
Back to FogBugz — At first I was unsure about the offer. (If you want another bad analogy then I guess you could say my other issue and defect tracking system was like a gateway drug? It opened up the door to more possibilities.) So after the first foray into issue tracking I started doing some investigating. And what did I find? Can you imagine automatic email responses and magic project estimation for free? It was so tempting. And so easy. It felt so good.
Everyone knows about the free giveaway. In fact, this blog post is mostly useless because that model is the standard for small companies. Examples of good, free software are everywhere. These guys just signed me up with no questions asked, and let me park some useless bits on their servers. (Now if only I had customers who would use it…)
The real news is that I took a HUGE company to the cleaners; I am really milking them. Yep, I took Microsoft for a ride. One has to wonder who’s in charge over there – giving away $3500 worth of software like that! What are they thinking? I’m selling my Microsoft stock.
That’s it. That’s the big tip. Sell your software for $0. (I don’t know what that is in Euros, so if you know, put it in the comment section.) Oh, and get in on the Microsoft deals.
If you come back next week I might have something more worth your time.
By the way, I love FogBugz. And I can quit. Any time. Really.
I downloaded baby smash today after listening to the latest Startup Success Podcast. I tried it out on my laptop and I loved it. After playing it and getting really good at it (I got to, like, level 5 in under an hour) my wife made me let my 18 month old son use it. She mumbled something about him being more mature than I was too. (I didn’t hold a grudge against him though, he loved the program. Plus, I get to stay up later than he does, which is nice.)
But let’s get back to baby smash!
The thing about laptops is that there is a power button next to the keyboard. Predictably, my son was able to turn off the laptop within a minute of using babysmash. I can’t blame Scott for this though - there’s not much a developer can do about the location of the power button.
My son rarely gets to use daddy’s laptop - usually he can usurp the iMac that my wife uses. He can’t wait to try it again. I’ll install it on the desktop since I can’t figure out how to use Vista anyway. He can bang away on it all day.
I am going to bring in headphones to work tomorrow so I can play babysmash most of the day. I am getting really good at it! Besides, I think it is actually more productive than constantly hitting refresh on my browser and looking for questions to answer on stackoverflow…
By the way, I lied, I didn’t really get to level 5. But I hope to get there soon.
In all seriousness, if you have a baby at home and they seem drawn to your computer/keyboard, try this out. It’s great! And you just might get hooked on it too. Like me.
One side-benefit is that there is a lot less mess to clean up after. So, instead of picking up 21 puzzle pieces and a wooden tractor and various little farm animals and DVD boxes and trashed DVDs and crayons and my watch and some books and plastic spoons, all I have to do is power down the computer. It’s also free.
Thank you for sharing, Scott!
P.S. Please add multi-player mode to it so I can verse [sic] my son while I am at work.
I try not to get too upset with poor use of language, improper spelling or grammar mistakes, but the little language devil on my shoulder is always there, hopping up and down, poking his pitchfork into me and daring me to laugh – especially when the offender is someone in a position of power and is attempting to impress his minions with big words he saw somewhere. (Perhaps in the latest management book lying in his superior’s office)
In my world words, syntax and grammar are important. Imprecision, ambiguity, overloading and just plain improper use of words causes problems. Lots of problems. So perhaps you’ll forgive my penchant for precision in language use.
I had a manager by the name of John – we’ll call him John for this little story. John had a bit of a complex. He was a smart guy, but he didn’t go to college. He was a self-taught computer programmer and worked his way up the ladder of a well-respected software development company. He had many bright (and some not so bright) programmers working for him. While he normally was easy to get along with, he did carry a chip on his shoulder to try to prove to all the college educated folks that he was at least as smart as they were. I don’t think most of us cared one way or another, but John cared. He cared enough to make sure he used the biggest words in the office. Apparently big words are impressive and mean more than little words. It didn’t particularly matter if the words were correctly used or if they were pronounced correctly. The point was to use them. And use them he did. This is a story of one such word.
John ran weekly Monday morning meetings. I never really thought they were useful meetings, (but that is for another rant) and I went, because, well, we all had to be there. John was excited about a new project he had just been told our team was to engage in. He was visibly excited about it. Obviously he had big plans for us and for how much overtime we were going to put in so he could look good for his bosses. His right hand did the usual twitch/tick/twirl of the cell phone holder clipped to his belt, and he rocked back and forth on his heels as he told us the plans.
Apparently beside himself with excitement over the project and lost in the moment, he told us that to him, this was the ‘penultimate’ project. Some people nodded, fully grasping his meaning – that if ultimate was the best, then penultimate must be even better. Others just stood or sat waiting for the meeting to end. Still to this day I regret not raising my hand to ask what the last project was going to be, and could we just skip to it instead of having to do this next to last one. Perhaps it is for the best. I did not want to lose my job at that point. It was the ultimate.
Since 1998 I have been looking for and sometimes landing freelance development contracts. These are after-hours moonlighting things that unfortunately have never been able to support all my financial needs. But it keeps me entertained and allows me to survey some problem domains and technologies I would not experience in my regular day-job. I also get a great perspective on marketing, customer interaction and plain old lunacy.
I am not poking fun at any of the customers or potential clients I have worked with. No, I am talking about the apparent idiots who think they can pay some schmo who just read “Learn C++ in 21 days” or “Headfirst Java” or some nerdy high schooler to re-write the equivalent of MSWord or Outlook Express or Firefox or something else that contains thousands to millions of lines of code.
I regularly check one or two freelance sites as well as craigslist for projects, but this has tapered off a lot given my existing projects. (not to mention my day job)
The following is an example of the lunacy I referred to. Note the time-frame requirements. I can’t imagine how many man-years are invested in the programs he wants to compete with.
Anyone want to take a shot at it? I am sure it is just a matter of using scrum or TDD or even continuous integration. Or all three! Surely it is a simple matter…
(Again, I am not making this up. This was an actual posting on a freelance web site.)
Title: Commercial grade software for US income
Category: Programming / Software / Database Development
Description:
I need a Commercial grade software made for US income tax preparation and online gui income tax preparation software example are like:
1) Taxact.com
2) Tax Cut
3) Turbo Tax
4) http://www.internet-taxprep.com/plindex.asp?welcome=RR1375356
5) http://www.taxhead.com/
a) must also capture customer info; name, address, email
b) need a free look at software: a free dummy trial or video demo (must show how easy it is to do by customer himself)
c) need to ask questions that would determine what papers they have in hand, to determine forms to be used from IRS.gov
all forms are avaialable at http://www.irs.gov/formspubs/lists/0,,id=97817,00.html as formfill
I would like this project completed in 1 to 3 weeks maximum
The comedy doesn’t stop there. What is even funnier is that people actually bid on this stuff. And they go big. You too can have a clone of Quicken written by some team in India for only $2000. I wonder if they factored in the QA bit. That might eat into the profits…
There is another aspect as well: marketing and market share. Do these guys (forgive the gender specificity please) really think that even if some yahoo could write a competing product that they will be able to displace the other established software? Perhaps “overly optimistic” is an understatement…
I can’t think of a way to summarize or make a funny comment about this entry. I think the bid request speaks for itself. So, goodnight, Gracie.
No, I didn’t work for Nike. I did work for many people who seemed not to understand logic and were not impressed with doing things the right way. After getting lucky on my first real task at a software company, I was told we absolutely had to have a this great new feature put into the code. The required assembly language part was all done. My job was to make the call to the assembly language and put it into the product. Somewhere. Anywhere. Now.
This “must have feature” was the greatly hyped Intel® Pentium® Processor serial number. After getting the secret orders I ran back to my office to plan my whiz-bang implementation. But. There. Was. One. Minor. Problem. There was no context for this information. It was meaningless. It helped no one. So I made an ass of myself and raised the question, “Why are we doing this? It isn’t used anywhere in the product.” (I didn’t even get to the part where I asked what we should do for multi-processor machines)
I needn’t have worried. A careful, well-thought-out argument came back my way: “Just do it.” Apparently having the Intel® logo on our box in the stores would make the product boxes fly off the shelves even faster. At least that is what the marketing and product geniuses claimed. So I “just did it.” It was as useful as an ice cube in Antarctica. And I had a hand in it. What a proud day that was for me.
But wait. It gets even better. The objections started slowly and imperceptibly, but as momentum gained the apparently super-duper-useless feature became a liability. People were afraid of the serial number. It could identify them. Products that touted being able to take advantage of the serial number were seen as Big Brotherly, and not in a Philadelphia loving kind of way.
I don’t recall what became of the code I put into the product, but hopefully it was removed or quietly optimized out of the product by a compiler that was smarter than my managers and knew the code wasn’t getting called.
Just Do It. But first, make sure it is useful.
I always seemed to disappoint my manager when I was a development manager. He seemed not to approve of the time I wasted all day when I should have been writing code or updating documents in Microsoft Project. Aside from playing Red Alert 2 all day and staring out of my window, I spent time inspecting chairs, stealing chairs, stealing memory, stealing drives and playing hide the developer. I know, I know, that sounds criminal and it probably was. So let’s explain some of them.
Hide the developer
Hide the developer was a game I played only once, but over some period of weeks. You see, Alan reported to me and when we moved our company down to VA from NY he was told he would have an office at least as good as the one he had in NY. What he got was a cube in a fairly high traffic area and Alan was allergic to distractions. He begged and pleaded to have the situation fixed. So did I. We were told it was not possible. So, since Alan actually knew how to debug and code and get things done, and I was a useless wart on the company who couldn’t even figure out how to track revisions in MS Word, I told him to use my office. I even gave him my new laptop as it had just arrived for me and he needed a newer machine more than I did. Well, that didn’t last long. Managers have offices for a reason. I had better get back in there and get to work and by the way, why is Alan using the new laptop?
So, Alan had a taste of the old freedom and it suited him. The noise of course hadn’t stopped. People like to talk about reality shows and football and all sorts of crap during the work day. Alan and I preferred for him to actually get work done. So we came up with our next scheme. I had spotted a “visitor’s” office on the floor below us and since we rarely had visitors it seemed a perfect place for him to hide out undisturbed and get work done.
That worked great. Until my boss noticed that Alan was not around and people were looking for him to help them. I told him not to worry – Alan was extra productive and he would help anyone who needed help. I would see to it. That did not fly. The visitor’s office was off limits. It was needed for visitors. (I guess Elijah makes office calls too). We had had a bit more success with that plan, so we didn’t let the grumbling get to us. I set him up in a conference room after that and he had some more productive days, but they were on to us by then and shut that down too.
We did obtain one small concession - the company reimbursed him for noise-canceling headsets. He was happy with them I think.
Our next plan was even better and had the aura of permanence - once he was promoted to Senior Developer he would have an office! I figured it was a shoe-in. He was productive - very productive. He helped others. A lot. He was in demand; people with grander titles than his went to him for help. But he was still perceived by some as his former self - a gung-ho, self-taught, enthusiastic follower. He also had some traits that people thought of as negative. He did take more time managing than others, but he was a gold-mine. I was happy to have him reporting to me. He taught me more about being a manager and being a developer than I ever would have learned in such a short time. But we still had this problem - he was being blocked from a promotion. So we identified the perceived weaknesses and he addressed them. I left the company before he got his office, but he eventually did get the promotion and recognition he deserved. Unfortunately he also got a dose of cynicism that I wish I could have spared him. Some of his love for the company and the job was beat out of him.
Stealing Chairs
OSHA has some things to say about work environments. I think they also have recommendations about chairs and desks for office workers. Poor Dan had a mangled chair with stains so nasty that he had a towel slung around the chair to keep himself and his clothes from becoming infected. He had shown up late to the party and by the time he was hired most of the non-repulsive chairs had been taken.
Then, to our wonderment, a new shipment of chairs arrived. These were the cool, neato web material chairs and we thought they were the bestest. The problem was they were on the second floor in all the empty offices. They were destined for TBH. There were lots of TBH and TBR (to be relocated) offices on the second floor. To the best of my knowledge those TBs weren’t happening for quite some time. The accountants had already started their depreciation calculations on the chairs, so I figured we might as well actually depreciate them. I saddled up a posse and we liberated some chairs. Right out of their packaging - it was glorious! Well, the sheriff was none too happy a week or so later. It seems that chair rustling was not looked upon favorably. Those chairs were needed and the asset management people were very upset that actual people who needed chairs were using them. Their office plans showed those chairs to be on the second floor, and having them on the third floor was somehow screwing up the universe. So they took our chairs back – but they did it without telling us. This cowed a few, but some others of us longed for a battle and we went back on a night raid to take some chairs again. This was successful, but now we were clearly habitual criminals in the eyes of The Man. An official email was sent out. Those who took chairs from the empty offices downstairs would return them and if it happened again, we would be punished. I think the threat included termination. Wow. Fire someone for trying to make themselves more productive and being proactive. I was truly horrified. To make matters even more bizarre - not only were the desk chairs off-limits, but each of the offices on the second floor had two “guest” chairs that were also the new awesome chairs and those could not be swapped either.
I wasn’t about to give up. Our lumbars (whatever those are) had tasted comfort and we longed for the feel of the webbing under our butts. I resorted to the tactic that arguably works for a major religion and old-world mothers and grandmothers. I played the shame tactic. I informed my manager that I was going to buy chairs for my reports out of my own pocket. He was incredulous. I was serious. He had a meeting with HR apparently and he told me to hold off for a week. We finally got our own chairs! And they were bliss. I spent many hours in that new chair pretending to do work and staring out windows.
Stealing Memory and Drives
Keith was a good guy. He rode his bike to work sometimes like I did. He walked around the office in just his socks. I liked him. He didn’t report to me though. I had to ask him to come into my office anyway when some files he checked in broke the build. (I noticed before anyone else because it broke stuff I was working on) I quickly and quietly reverted his changes and called for him. I asked him if he knew there was a problem. He said something like he thought it might be a problem. After asking some questions to figure out why he checked it in without testing I discovered the real problem. He couldn’t do a build on his machine. His machine was a second hand leftover and he had never gotten a new computer when he was hired. I was appalled. We went back to his cube and I noted the memory and drive details. Then we went on a hunt. We cannibalized a spare machine from my boss’s office and with the promise that we would return all hardware components if they were ever needed. (I think he even made me sign a receipt for it. Note that there was a stack of idle machines in my boss’s office which weren’t being used.). We bandaged up Keith’s machine so that he could actually build the entire product. It was a slow, slow build, but now at last he could build. We eventually shamed my boss into getting him a machine after that. I couldn’t believe I had to convince him that spending $1500 for a machine that compiles our product in 1/10th the time as his old machine would eventually pay off by allowing Keith to work while we paid him rather than paying him to sit and watch a complier’s progress.
So, all that time running around, talking to people, NOT working on code or the project plan was absolutely wasted. I am ashamed of myself. That is time my company will never get back from me. All you managers out there - learn from me: don’t waste your time helping your team be productive or comfortable - your time is better spent looking at Gantt charts.
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