At the beginning of last week, one of our clients launched a fascinating exhibit. We’ve been supporting them through the opening of that exhibit and they identified some problems that they needed taken care of by this upcoming Tuesday. Even with the pressure surrounding these issues for Tuesday, our team has executed brilliantly. We brought our own goals to fruition and took care of our client’s problems, as well. We didn’t allow one to suffer for the benefit of the other, we did both.

NextShout and ComicShout were both released on-time, today. Go check them out.

Great job and many thanks to the team at Omega Vortex. You guys are all awesome.

So, here’s my attempt to tear apart an e-mail from a retarded business executive. Some people’s names, product names, and location names have been changed to protect the guilty … or the mentally retarded.

First, the full e-mail. Read and enjoy. My comments will follow.

From: Jimi Hendrix (jimi.hendrix@planetces.com)
Sent: Mon, 8/18/2008 1:39pm
To: Eric Cartman (eric.cartman@planetces.com)
Subject: South Park visit

Eric,

I am putting the majority of my focus on South Park this week due to my recent observations & disappointment from my visit last week. I truly believe South Park could be the top location in the market on a consistent basis & believe we are not capitalizing on our opportunity there mainly because of weak & uneducated sales personnel. I am stepping in to help you fix this situation & gain back control of your location. Here are some my disappointments I observed.

1. Sales Rep not in proper dress attire (no tie).
2. Sales Reps not mentioning POOPS to any of the customers I observed.
3. Sales Reps not mentioning Sewer to any of the customers I observed.
4. Sales Rep stating “I really don’t know anything about the sewer line service, you can just go online to get it” when customer actually asked about sewer products.
5. Sale Rep stating “I really don’t know much about Business accounts so I hope I’m doing this right”
6. Sales Rep processing 2 JUAN payments without reviewing customers account or offering weapons, pipelines, sewer etc.

I am leading this Thursday’s evening weekly store meeting to assists you in setting the tone for a “MAJOR” mindset change in South Park. I expect the following to occur for my meeting on Thursday.

1. All South Park reps in attendance or they will be terminated.
2. No kids allowed. They have 3 days to obtain baby sitters.
3. Meeting will begin promptly at 7:30pm. Anyone late will be terminated.
4. All reps sitting at the conference table facing me, no one standing behind or lounging around
5. All reps with pen & note pad.
6. No food
7. All wireless devices turned off, no checking emails/texts/missed calls during my meeting.
8. Whiteboard/DSR updated through Wednesday
9. ALL REPS MADE AWARE THEIR JOBS ARE NOW BEING EVALUATED ON A DAILY BASIS BEGINNING WITH THIS MEETING.

Thanks,
Jimi

I’m sure you all see the massive point at the bottom. Jobs are being evaluated! Oooh. Scary. Let’s begin tearing this open, shall we? Starting from the top.

I truly believe South Park could be the top location in the market on a consistent basis & believe we are not capitalizing on our opportunity there mainly because of weak & uneducated sales personnel.

This is a massive insult to your employees. I hate companies that believe in frequent negative reinforcement and infrequent and random positive reinforcement. You’re a business. You have a right to be concerned about the bottom line, it’s part of the territory, but the devaluation of human beings in order to do it absolutely disgusts me.

I am stepping in to help you fix this situation & gain back control of your location.

This implies that you have no faith in one of your most capable managers. I know “Eric” personally and have known him for a long time. He’s easily one of the best managers I’ve ever had the opportunity to work for, and this statement alone should be extremely insulting to him. Even if it’s not, it’s &#%@ing insulting to me, you pompous little prick.

1. Sales Rep not in proper dress attire (no tie).

I’m sorry, but if “no tie” is on the top of your list of complaints, you seriously need to re-evaluate your priorities. Putting “no tie” at the very top of your list of complaints is probably one of the most retarded things I’ve seen come out of a business person in a long time. It happened to be 85 degrees (hey, why don’t you shell out some money to fix the freaking air conditioner in that store?) when the sales rep in question wasn’t wearing his tie. I wouldn’t have worn mine either and you, sir, would’ve received my warm regards if you had mentioned it to me.

2. Sales Reps not mentioning POOPS to any of the customers I observed.

Maybe they should think about how completely effed up and over-complicated the “POOPS” process is. If it wasn’t too much hassle for the customers and the sales reps, maybe it would be mentioned more often.

3. Sales Reps not mentioning Sewer to any of the customers I observed.
4. Sales Rep stating “I really don’t know anything about the sewer line service, you can just go online to get it” when customer actually asked about sewer products.

Isn’t the “sewer” services through Planet sort of new? The people in these stores were originally trained to sell wireless devices and services. You’re expecting someone who was just recently hired and someone who works VERY part-time to know that much about an obscure set of solutions that you just recently started offering? Personally, I applaud the sales rep for admitting his/her lack of knowledge on the subject and offering an alternative solution, instead of trying to make something up or giving the customer incorrect information. We’re humans, folks, we can’t do or know it all.

5. Sale Rep stating “I really don’t know much about Business accounts so I hope I’m doing this right”

If I remember correctly, the entire system to work with business accounts was totally screwed up the ENTIRE time I worked there. We had to be hackish and go in through *redacted*’s login just to be able to do ANYTHING to business accounts. We didn’t even figure out we could do that until the later part of my employment there.

6. Sales Rep processing 2 JUAN payments without reviewing customers account or offering weapons, pipelines, sewer etc.

Did it happen to occur to you that with the sheer number of repeat customers the store has that the sales reps may actually KNOW these people? While I was there, we quickly processed repeat customers payments all the time, because we knew who they were. They were in there all the time, we knew exactly what they wanted, and we got them out of there as quickly as possible. You can’t upsell to people with a purpose. If someone knows exactly what they want to do, they’re coming into the store to do exactly that.

1. All South Park reps in attendance or they will be terminated.
3. Meeting will begin promptly at 7:30pm. Anyone late will be terminated.

I wish these reps would organize with each other to just not show up. Don’t accept threats. You people aren’t being paid enough to deal with this garbage. The lot of you are intelligent people who can easily find jobs elsewhere. Let them find their poo-slinging monkeys that they can convert into button-pushing drones who care more about pushing something into a customer’s face instead of making sure they’re satisfied.

4. All reps sitting at the conference table facing me, no one standing behind or lounging around
7. All wireless devices turned off, no checking emails/texts/missed calls during my meeting.

This guy seems to think he’s God. I don’t give a rat’s behind if you’re anywhere near the executive ladder of this company. If you’re paying me the dirt-crap wages that were seen while I was working there, you’re not that important.

9. ALL REPS MADE AWARE THEIR JOBS ARE NOW BEING EVALUATED ON A DAILY BASIS BEGINNING WITH THIS MEETING.

When you take the human out of sales people, they become drones. People don’t like drones. You’re going to end up making your sales worse and killing off this store. After that rant, I think there’s only one thing I can say for Mr. Jimi Hendrix.

Effing lol.

A runner up that I’m going to give a nod to is Omega Vortex. Jeremy Privett knows what he’s doing when it comes to setting up a good, fluid development shop. The only reason I can’t 100% vouch for their work is that they haven’t released anything yet, and I’ve not worked with their custom shop. Good group to keep an eye on though.

Admittedly, Omega Vortex fell into the “fake” category not too many years ago before I was swept off to Colorado to go work at Completely Unique and Peak8. I filed papers on GU² Services, Inc. before it was acquired and wanted to file papers on Omega Vortex but never really got around to it until after the Peak8 era.

We do have papers, though! They’re currently in the wrong state, but Alabama’s business laws are incredibly annoying compared to Colorado’s so I may try to put off legally moving the company out of Colorado until I move to NY sometime within the next year. Unless there’s some legal reason to do otherwise which I’m not aware of. We don’t currently have any type of office space, as all of our employees work remotely, so our physical address is pretty much non-existent.

We’re working on fixing that unreleased products issue in the coming months and I’ve been working on ramping up our software division for more progress, now that we’re getting to the point where we can look at it again. Since we have some new people on our team, consulting work should no longer completely bog us down so that no work gets done in our software. We’ll have to see how it goes from here.

Quite a while ago, Omega Vortex adopted a policy that we would refrain from announcing specific release dates. We won’t even narrow it down to a month for you. There’s quite a few reasons that we do this.

We’re a startup that’s bootstrapping from consulting work. At any given time, said consulting work currently takes priority over all other things, because we have to make money in order to pay bills and keep developers paid. That’s all fine and dandy, but while we’re having to focus so much on consulting, software isn’t being written. This is eating us like the plague. We’re presently amazingly profitable, but not in the way that we want to be. No matter how good our scheduling is, it doesn’t make a difference because we’re constantly having to drop everything to invest time in a new consulting project.

On the plus side, we’re about to simultaneously release a new product that hasn’t been announced yet along with updates to two other products that you may already be familiar with. No matter how close we get to that day, we’re not going to tell you when that day will be, in advance. All of our releases are marked by quarters. Any one year is divided up into three month quarters. Q1 is January – March, Q2 is April – June, Q3 is July – September, and Q4 is October – December. That means that when we mark a release as Q3 of 2008, we could potentially release that product at any point within those three months. If we’re expecting to release in September, we’ll actually really say Q4 so that we have three extra months worth of time buffer to use in the even that something goes wrong. If we happen to meet our goal of September, we just managed to release an entire month early.

Three months of buffer is a pretty decent amount of time. Sadly, because of time constraints with our consulting work, we’re still having trouble meeting those release dates. OmegaVerge has suffered considerably because of this and it has allowed competitors to get a jump on us. (Speaking of OmegaVerge, I’d like to give a shoutout to Ben Babcock who actually managed to help me with a SimpleXML issue by letting me help him with a SimpleXML issue. We now have type-safety/inference of IP.Converge methods in OmegaVerge since we solved that issue, instead of having to pass around SimpleXMLElement objects. Thanks, Ben.)

If you’re a software development shop and, like us, you can’t dedicate 100% of your time to software development, don’t announce release dates. Even vague ones. Surprise people. People get incredibly antsy / angry when you don’t meet release dates.

Oh, and if you have a historic trend of lack of ability to execute, don’t try to say things like “this summer” or “next month” … I’m guilty of this too, but this is a practice that really needs to stop. I’ve seen so many projects say “next month” and it take so much longer than that. Two in particular have me facepalming, right now …

Not Including Basic Information

Like, for one, your name. I had a resume show up in my inbox the other day that didn’t have a name to go with it. So, I figured I could get the name out of the resume itself in order to respond. I couldn’t find the person’s name to save my life. It’s really not smart to send in a resume without basic contact details so I can get in touch with you. If you don’t include something as basic as your name, I’m going to feel dumb trying to contact you without knowing it. The likelihood of me contacting you if I feel dumb about it? Pretty low. To the tune of 0%.

Not Knowing the Basics (Or Lying)

I got a “spectacular” resume from someone who had (claimed to have) been working in this industry for 10+ years. Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science from a very prestigious college and a laundry list of work experience that went on for a few pages …

First of all, I don’t need a seven page resume. That sets off some alarms in my head when I open up a huge document that’s supposed to be a resume. You’re either full of yourself or lying. I don’t need to know where you were working in 1991 if it isn’t one of your three or four most recent jobs. For this particular person, I’m inclined to say that they were lying. Against my better judgement, I decided to interview.

As part of my interview process, I like to ask some really basic questions. I do this for two reasons. One, it relieves tension. People like to get things right. As they get more things right, they become more comfortable and we can move on to more complicated concepts. For two, I know to stop the interview immediately if the person misses any of these questions … This particular person happened to miss all but two of my questions. These questions are some that my younger programming buddies who are still in High School would laugh at this person for not being able to answer. How can you have 10 years of experience and not know dead-simple concepts?

Massive Font to Extend an Otherwise Short Resume

Please, please don’t try to hide the fact that in Arial 12pt your resume is only 1 page. I just finished looking through a resume whose font was literally set to 23pt. That’s huge! And quite unnecessary. I’m not measuring to see who has the longest, but if your font is so big that I can only fit less than 1/8 of what would be the first page on my screen, I’m probably just going to delete it.

Not Knowing English

First off, don’t take this the wrong way. I’m a fan of equal opportunity, but you’ve got to meet our requirements. One of our requirements is “an excellent command of written and spoken English”. I’d just as quickly trash a resume from an white American man as I would from anyone else for not meeting that requirement.

Telling Me Too Much

Piggy backing somewhat on one of the other points, don’t tell me too much. If I’m looking for a PHP/MySQL developer, I want to know how much experience you have in those two things and maybe some other closely-related technologies. I don’t want to know or care to know about how much experience you have in Adobe Photoshop, MS Access, ILE RPG, CL400/CLLE, etc. Yes, all of those were from an actual resume. I don’t care. Don’t tell me all that crap, it’s not related to the position you’re applying for.

Lying by Omission

Or, concealing the fact that you don’t have a college degree by using phrases like “Attended X university”. Again, I don’t care, but don’t try to make me believe something by covering it up. People drop out of college all the time for various different reasons. Just couldn’t cut it? Ran out of money? Decide college wasn’t for you? That’s your business. I’m still in college. I haven’t finished my Bachelor’s, yet. I’m really not going to hold that against you. Some of the best programmers I know don’t have college degrees. Some of the worst programmers I know do. Interesting demographic. I’m more of a believer in cold, hard experience.

Telling Me Sensitive Information

If I’m not allowed to ask, I don’t want to know at least until I give you a yay or a nay. Don’t tell me your gender (if it’s obvious, I’ll figure it out), don’t tell me your sexual orientation, don’t tell me your age, etc. If you put that kind of crap on your resume, that puts employers in a bad position, because we’re not allowed to make decisions based on that information. That requires us to consciously ignore it. If it’s there, I’m not even going to bother. It’s not because you’re white, black, asian, mexican, 85, 13, gay, bi, married, divorce, have 37 kids, a woman, or a paraplegic. It’s because I don’t want to touch something that could put me in a bad position, because you gave me information that I’m not allowed to judge you on. So, I’m just not going to judge you at all and act like I never saw your resume.

Not Attaching your Resume

This is a good one. I’ve excused it a couple times and contacted people to have them send it to me, but I’m slowly starting to not give it a second thought. Make sure you’re thorough enough to remember to actually attach your resume to an e-mail when you send it off.

That’s just a few things. As I come across more, I’ll probably post a part two. You never know what people are going to do, after all …

Windows Advisor is an easy-to-use self-help tool that notifies users about problems on their PCs and helps fix them. Windows Advisor scans users’ PCs continuously, notifies them about important issues, and, when possible, suggests easy fix solutions. The program also provides users with self-help solutions, including a 1-click checkup function that enables them to check their PCs whenever they like; tips and tutorials that teach users how to perform certain actions on their PCs; and a toolbox that concentrates the important tools that are found in the operating system into one easy-to-find location.

I feel like I’ve heard of something like this before … but, I can’t for the life of me remember where …

$5 Million seems a lot smaller, now that Microsoft has stepped into this particular game. Only, Microsoft has a much wider scope in mind: “Windows”

I should’ve expected something like this would happen over a year ago. Of course, I also didn’t expect I’d be more successful now. Only … I don’t have VCs to answer to. Wink, wink.

In some cases, I wish that I was …

So Long … And Thanks for All the Fish

Yahoo responded to the letter from Carl Icahn, but I think this is the lead out before the final nail goes into the coffin. Microsoft has said they’ve moved on, though? What happens if this new board of directors can’t get the software giant to bite? I think Dvorak put it best. This squad looks like a great bunch of sellouts.

If Yahoo can’t fend off Icahn, it’s game over. If Icahn does manage this take over, selling out to Microsoft might actually be the best case scenario. Can anyone spot the irony in that sentence? So, we’re looking at the possibility of Yahoo being sold to Microsoft where the clash of culture and technology is sure to eventually doom all of Yahoo’s services … or Yahoo being cut up and sold to the highest bidders … which is sure to eventually doom all of Yahoo’s services. I can’t find the win in this situation, can you? Oh right, I’m not a Yahoo shareholder … maybe I should be.

I feel really sorry for some of the more prominent members of the PHP Community who are currently employed at Yahoo. I can’t imagine that they would have any trouble finding a new home, if they decide to leave after whatever ends up happening. Maybe everything will settle down and nothing will happen, then they’ll get to just keep their jobs in peace. Who knows?

Let’s pick on CNET for a while …

How much is your soul worth?

CNET says theirs is worth 1.8 Billion.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about this one, yet. CNET covers a lot of technology news. CBS is a major broadcasting company. While this could mean a lot of worthwhile tech coverage could make it onto any of the CBS TV Networks, which would be very cool, the transaction still feels dirty. It feels like a mainstream media buyout of something tech enthusiasts hold dear to them. What if CBS kills CNET? CNET Networks includes the likes of CNET itself, ZDNet, and GameSpot. All of which are frequent reads of mine and plenty of people that I know. I think the best return on this acquisition would be if a lot of this content made it onto the CBS airwaves. Anybody know how likely that one is?

I just hope this one has a happy ending. More tech and gaming content on TV is something I’m looking forward to. TechTV was great. The G4 deal was a disaster. G4 was better before the TechTV buyout. I can hardly stand anything on that channel, anymore. At least we have shows like This Week in Tech, Diggnation, Systm, and a few other cool shows from Revision3.

I’m not sure I like the deal yet, but I can’t wait to see how it plays out.

Wired Technica?

I don’t know about you, but I always thought of Wired and Ars Technica as being rivals. Now, they’re practically siblings. In-laws, of course. It’s hard enough thinking of the two sites as related, at least add the “by marriage” (or massive monetary exchange, whatever) part to soften the blow a little.

I’ll go ahead and stand right up to say that I don’t like this one. I dislike Wired and pretty much everything related to the site. Never been a fan. It might have a something to do with the fact that their website is an unmanageable piece of garbage that looks like a script vomited text onto a plain background. Or the writing style that just grates on my nerves everytime I (painfully) read an article there.

I like Ars. I enjoy reading Ars. The writing style is appealing and the visual style of the site is a lot nicer and easy on the eyes. I just can’t imagine that level of sophistication being shacked up with the likes of Wired. Hopefully this one won’t change too much. If I start to see the level of quality at Ars drop off, I’m going to be highly disappointed. Slashdot has been disappointing me lately, too. With Digg getting less and less tech news (it’s all carbon copied from /., or Reddit at this point), it’s looking like I’m going to have to pick a new tech news site to keep tabs on, before too long.

I’m really hoping to see happy endings from all of these different deals. The Yahoo issue is particularly interesting to me, because of Yahoo’s use of PHP. I think we’ll see some changes at all of these various sites in the coming months.

It’s really true, though. A couple years ago, I thought that in order to be successful I needed to make a big difference somewhere. Make huge changes and huge progress everyday. As time passed, I slowly came to realize that’s not possible. Things happen. Businesses aren’t developed overnight. Now, everyday, I wake up and contemplate what the next inch forward will be. Progress, any progress, is what it takes to be successful.

Don’t get me wrong. In today’s fast-paced global marketplace, being able to think quick on your feet and react faster than your competitors is what it takes to stay afloat. What benefit do you get out of reacting faster than your competitors and shipping a poor implementation of a requested feature? Take your time. Do it right. While your customers may complain about the speed, initially, you’ll certainly receive more praise for making it work properly, in the long run.

It’s a brand new day. Let’s see what kind of progress this day will bring.

1. Hire at least one professional

This point is crucial and will save you a lot of time and money. If you have at least one person on your in-house staff who can walk the walk and talk the talk, you’ve got someone within your organization who can look over the work that’s being done. This is very important for a number of different reasons. First, you’ve hired this guy. You know what he can do, you’ve seen his work, you’ve talked to his references. He must have done something right in order to stand out from the pile of resumes you received for the position. Make sure this person knows everything there is to know about the project that’s being worked on. He needs to be the point of contact for the consultants, because he’ll immediately be able to tell you when something isn’t right. This person’s salary will pay for itself on numerous occasions, especially if you do a lot of outsourcing.

2. Ask Questions, Get Technical

This is another place where your professional is going to help out a lot, if you don’t know enough about the technology. If the company you’re working with shows any signs that they don’t know what they’re taking about, run. Fast. If you don’t, they’ll suck you in under the premise that they know exactly what they’re doing and waste your time and money while they get little to nothing actually accomplished. Which brings me to my next point …

3. Transparency

Transparency is a huge issue. At Omega Vortex, when our clients’ don’t come with their own infrastructure, we bring them into ours so that everybody’s productivity is increased. If our clients don’t have their own concept of source control, we’ll place their code in our repository. This is complimented by our build system which will produce nightlies of the work we’ve done and post it directly to a specified location on our development server. Once the project gets farther along, we’ll enable continuous integration so that each check-in gets reflected in our development copy. This way, the client can always be sure they’re looking at the most up-to-date code.

4. Look for value

Unlike some places, we’re not interested in taking your money, doing the work, and sending you on your way. We like to form lasting relationships so that you’ll consider doing business with us again or referring people you know who need work done. A way that we add value to our services is to help them in ways that we believe they need to be helped. Bad code is bad code, there’s no two ways about that. When we can, we don’t throw away everything and start over, though. To some degree, the code works, and that’s more progress than what we would have if we just started all over. What we don’t like is when our clients get burned and come to us with code that is littered with security vulnerabilities. I mean brain-dead obvious security vulnerabilities. Like, say … Taking data directly out of $_REQUEST and feeding it directly into a SQL Query. In cases like this, we like to do a very light security audit. This isn’t anything extensive, just something we use to identify the extremely obvious stuff, and bring it to the client’s attention.

5. References – Recommendations – Required

This is a huge one. This is hard for me to say, because we were new once too (we still kinda are), but taking a chance on a company with no references or recommendations from other people is dangerous. For Omega Vortex, I can provide you with professional references of people I’ve worked with in the past and know me and how I do things. We also have a few clients that have spoken highly of us. Just make sure you get references and recommendations from real people. Testimonials on websites can be faked. While they’re a decent way to tell what a company’s done at a glance, when you can you should talk to people who have worked with the company in the past. Ask the company to provide formal references. Remember, you’re about to spend what could be a good chunk of time and money with this company. Would you hire a random person for your company without references?

Hopefully, this list will help you make a more informed decision about the next company you decide to do a project with. Even if we’re not right for you, we certainly don’t want you picking someone else who’s even more wrong for you. While this is obviously tailored toward programming, I’m sure you could adapt this list some for other industries, too.

What I think is absolutely fascinating (and maybe really, really stupid) is the fact that Twitter is receiving Venture Capital … To the tune of about $20 Million, for their third round of funding. For the uninformed, Twitter is a completely free service. They don’t even serve advertisements on their site. Again, for the uninformed, VCs are looking to see a return on their investment. A big return. In order for them to feel more confident about their investment, they usually place their own selected individuals in C-level or higher, often Company Board, positions within the company. That last point is the sole reason why Omega Vortex is against taking VC money.

I suppose I’m curious as to how Twitter expects to monetize a free service in a way that doesn’t severely anger their userbase and doesn’t include a buyout. Twitter has taken enough VC money at this point that buying options probably look unattractive to most would-be interested parties, because the price would have to be so high. Just serving advertisements on the website wouldn’t be enough income, because everyone that I know that uses Twitter rarely spend more time on the website than to start following new people. There are quite a few Twitter clients available, Spaz being the one that I use.

Speaking of severely angering the userbase, can you imagine what it would be like if Twitter tried the absurd idea of sending adverts through their own service? On second thought, would people even notice? Additionally, would they actually care? Spaz lets me keep up with all the latest from the people I follow, but if I get really busy and stop paying attention to it, quite a number of tweets can go by before I look at it again. Plenty enough for several advertisements, if they were to come every few hours or so, to go right by without my even noticing them.

People already hate advertisements. If they’re going to be there, they need to be mostly unobtrusive. I wonder how well people would cope with “Twitter Spam” … not to mention what kind of data mining it would take to send targeted advertisements, if the ads were to be targeted at all. Google’s done a decent job at serving up targeted ads that don’t get in your way or on your nerves, if implemented correctly. Ads that aren’t targeted are just annoying, these days. All ads are annoying, but those are certainly the worst.

Back to the thought of a buyout, what would the buyer actually be getting? Going back to the earlier mention of Facebook, neither Google nor Alexa seems to think that Twitter is all that interesting. Twitter’s traffic rank on Alexa is 780. Sure, that’s within the top 1000, but with still no obvious way to monetize the service, who’s going to throw a worthwhile bid at them? Obviously, Twitter isn’t going to take an offer that won’t make up for their investment money and leave plenty behind for the people behind the madness.

Twitter’s an interesting concept and it’s a nifty way to keep people in the loop on whatever it is you’re currently doing. Since mobile updates are as easy as a text message, Spaz easily lets me update without having to go to some webpage, and it updates three locations at once, it’s easy to remember and use.

With that said, I don’t think it’s worth $20 Million in Venture Capital.