| « The Four Dutchmen | Planning for the Past » |
After spending his first three years out of college in an entry-level position with Ask.com, Erhen was ready to move on to something with more responsibility. One day, he received a phone call from a company that wanted him to come in for an immediate interview.
The following day, Erhen arrived at the company’s place of business. It was a sports equipment supplier, operating out of a building that might have been built entirely out of asbestos. On the inside, there wasn’t a piece of furniture or decoration that had been built post-cold war.
“It’s great to have you here, Ehren!” a nice older gentlemen in his sixties said. He was the hiring manager. “We’ve been looking for a project manager for this huge job we have, and it looks like you’ve got the experience we want. Now you say that you’ve worked with the internet before?”
“Well, yes.” Erhen replied, a little put off by how vague the phrase ‘worked with the internet’ was. Technically, one could classify downloading porn as ‘working with the internet.’ Erhen elaborated, “I currently work for Ask.com.”
“I see…” he said. “And what do they do?”
Erhen wasn’t quite prepared for that question. While Ask is hardly a search engine juggernaut, they’re still fairly well known. And he had just assumed that the Ask.com name was the main reason they had interest in hiring him.
“They’re a search engine like Google.”
“Well, you’re going to enjoy the security of working for us,” the manager said. “We’re a ‘real’ company and probably bigger than anything you’ve got experience with. We’ve got almost 60 employees here. How many people work at Ask, 15? 20?”
“Ummm” Erhen paused, “they have a few thousand people working for them.”
“Really?” the sexagenarian questioned, “that doesn’t sound right. I thought most internet companies were run by college students in garages?”
“Well I think that’s how they started,” Erhen replied gently, “maybe, like, fifteen years ago. But they’re pretty big now. They have real offices and everything.”
“That’s great!” he said. “I’m looking for someone who understands the internet, because after voting down my suggestion that our company launch a website each of the past eight years, they’ve finally agreed to let me put one up!”
Erhen let that sink in for a moment. “Your business is supplying sports equipment to companies, schools, and individuals, right? How are you having customers fill out orders now?”
“Oh, we do everything by catalogue and mail,” he responded, “the board has let me try out having a website as a way of supplementing our current ordering system. But I have this hunch that we’ll be able to save money on printing and postage if we use the internet. The idea is to have people check our catalogue through the web, print out order forms, and then mail them in.”
Erhen checked his watch. Yes, it was still 2007 and there hadn’t been a time-warp.
“That’s where you come in,” the interviewer smiled, “we need someone to take this idea and run with it. The board has designated a budget of almost two thousand dollars. You’d be in charge of using those funds to build us a top-of-the-line website!”
He just stared in disbelief; by that point, Erhen was waiting for a candid camera crew to jump out and yell “surprise!”
“And” he added, leaning in. “I have this idea that’s kind of our ace-in-the-hole.”
Erhen blinked. It was the only response he could think of that wouldn’t convey his opinion of him, the board and the interview. He fully expected to hear the manager explain his invention of horseless carriages that would one day put the railroads out of business.
“I want our site not only to have an up-to-date catalogue of our products available for free, but I think that we could figure out a way to have people order products and pay for them online as well. Think about it: we could be the first sporting-equipment supplier in the world to offer this service.”
Erhen decided not to take that job.
|
I've had dealings with a variety of clients, and occasionally I'll get a client who's so far behind the times that it scares me.
I've taken countless hours, both billable and non-billable, to explain the merits of the internet and the associated costs to obtain those merits. These people need to know that either they go all in to create something they're looking for, or they have a very simple "We're here, this is us, hello, come to our store and see our stuff!" website. I billed $4500 for a website once - I couldn't talk the client out of it. Beautiful website, had all the stuff that programmers love - Fully dynamic, database driving the flash animation and page creation, playing with some neat tech to get it all looking fantastic... I loved doing it, but felt guilty. I just could not talk the client out of it, convince him it was overkill for his needs. He ran a service that cleaned dog crap out of people's yards. He had 4 employees. $4500 website and I did it on the cheap. Can someone please tell me how lucrative the dog-sh*t market is?? |
|
I believe this story, absolutely.
Back in the day, I was doing some work as a systems administrator for a small regional ISP. One of my clients was a guy who had a microscopy supply company - they sold lab equipment to schools, research facilities, basically anyone with a need to look at reeeeeeally small things. They were fully on board with what they used to call "internet commerce" back when we still felt like we needed a name for it: the cost savings they'd realized on not having to ship a paper catalog anymore was more than enough to justify hiring a few college kids to maintain their site. At the time, it was powered by a horrible mix of CGI scripts which drove an order-form based (read: no shopping cart) which sent credit card information around in unencrypted e-mails. (When I raised this concern with the owner, he looked surprised. "Most people I know are comfortable buying things on the Internet," he said. "That's because they know that the companies they deal with are taking steps to protect their payment information," I replied. "You're not. I know because I run your site for you.") But the owner was convinced that his site was truly groundbreaking, and one day he called my office on his cell phone to share a big new idea with me. After about fifteen minutes of lead in where he basically tried to warm me up on how great the site has been for him so far, he said, "So here's my idea: I want to be able to update the price of an item in my database, and have it show up on the web, in real time." I managed to get out the word "Well," before he cut me off. "I have to go now, I'm getting an MRI done on my brain and they say I need to turn off my cell phone. But I'll call you back about this later." He never did. Another time, he sent me a very angry e-mail demanding to know why his site was down. I tested accessing the site from my desktop, and Google Translate, and glanced at the server logs - all suggested perfectly normal activity. When I told him so, his next email became indignant. "Well, I'm in Beijing right now at a client's site, and I can't get to the site at all." When I asked him if he'd tried speaking to any technical support resources there, he responded, as if speaking to a child, "I can't talk to anyone here. They all speak Chinese." Oh, and about those college kids - the head college kid called me up in my office one day, sounding a bit sheepish, and said, "Um, the boss asked me to call you. Do you have any reason to think that the server has been hacked?" I grew alarmed, immediately started watching system activity, looking for alarms, anything - but everything looked normal. "Um... no. Why?" "Well," intern replied, "we have these pictures on our site - they're jpeg images of the products." "Yeah?" "Well, we have a few of them, and they're supposed to be in color, but they're now in black and white." I paused a few moments to wait for the next sentence, but it didn't come. "Um," I said, "are you asking me if someone broke into your web site and replaced your color images with black and white ones?" There was a long pause, and when he spoke again, he sounded even more sheepish. "I told you," he said, "he told me to call you." |
|
The dog poo market is probably more lucrative than the web design market is. Lots of people want it gone and no one in the dog poo market is complaining about the wannabe's picking up dog poo for free.
|
| « The Four Dutchmen | Planning for the Past » |
