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Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

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Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#121

Post by taneq »

Jugurtha wrote: post #116
vcool07 wrote: post #27

I never disagree with a client. Even if I internally feel it won't work in reality, I always start my response with "That's an excellent idea you proposed, let me try if it works and get back to you". I come back after a day or two as to why the proposal won't work (if it was a bad idea to begin with) with sufficient data. Client is happy you that you considered his proposal and you've avoided a potential standoff th…

That's a classic. While working on the David, Michelangelo had the unwelcome visit of Piero Soderini (statesman, sponsor, etc) who suggested that the nose was too thick. Michelangelo feigned reworking the nose and some say sprinkled a handful of marble dust to make the trick credible, then asked Soderini if he liked it now. He said it looked better.

A very early example of adding a duck. (See http://bedtimestoriesforengineers.com/the-duck/ )

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#122

Post by orly_bookz »

lb1lf wrote: post #94

Whenever I find myself at my desk not knowing what to fill the next few minutes with, I tend to call a more or less random customer - the ones who USE our products, not the ones who procure them - and ask them what they think suck about our current offerings. Most educational, and it has resulted in a number of improvements to our product line (subsea handling equipment - used for deployment and maintenance of subsea…

I used to work with this programmer who would get free beta testers by doing this.

Set up a meeting with endusers in one of our training labs and tell them they can complain about whatever they want. Then walk them through a 15-minute set of steps for whatever change we're going to roll out.

Not only do you get great feedback on the product as a whole, they'll inevitably find ways to break your new thing within five minutes. Literally a few hours of two analysts' time and you might avoid dozens if not hundreds of man hours spent fixing things. It was beautiful. And just like you said... the customers are amazed that you want them to complain. They love it.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#123

Post by orly_bookz »

v4n4d1s wrote: post #67

We clean devices, such as notebooks and keyboards, before returning them to our internal customers/users.

That's a very nice service but I'm not sure I'd like to do it.

When I did support for a university we very specifically could turn down items (mostly laptops) that were too grody to work on. Most of the techs used their own keyboards and mice regardless but still... some people are pretty abusive to their hardware (gunk, stains, very clear food spills, etc).

Though I guess the SOP wasn't to say "ew get that out of here" but rather "here's some wet wipes can you please wipe it down we make everyone do this" which wasn't even remotely true.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#124

Post by jagtesh »

croon wrote: post #106
JoachimS wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good counterpoint. Obvious errors you should not spend much time on. But providing some references to why is probably better than simply stating "no". And I don't think the parent comment suggested to fake work and bill for work not done. We should always be honest.

I don't think the responder suggested to fake work either, but it's still 2 days wasted and no work done.

It's not two days wasted because you have other clients. It's like concurrency around an IO request. No time wasted.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#125

Post by alexdowad »

croon wrote: post #106
JoachimS wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good counterpoint. Obvious errors you should not spend much time on. But providing some references to why is probably better than simply stating "no". And I don't think the parent comment suggested to fake work and bill for work not done. We should always be honest.

I don't think the responder suggested to fake work either, but it's still 2 days wasted and no work done.

Presumably he is working on other things in the meantime.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#126

Post by orly_bookz »

angrymouse wrote: post #65

I work in a large health organisation right now and the thing that seems to blow most away is just saying yes. I don't work in the IT department and they basically say no to everything. Regardless of business value or difficulty. I work in the chief executive office and numerous departments will be amazed when I say yes... Let me look into that. Recent example was a publicly facing, real-time waiting time tracker for…

Healthcare IT is one of the most backwards areas of IT to work in, I think, in large part because of the legal red tape around everything clinical. So you get a lot of people that say no automatically.

Additionally, I think you get a lot of people that don't really have an "IT mindset." I don't know about where you work but in my neck of the woods we have so many people in programmer positions that can't even write a three line script. They're great at clinical stuff because they came from there (e.g. nursing) but have no technical background...

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#127

Post by 3minus1 »

vcool07 wrote: post #27

I never disagree with a client. Even if I internally feel it won't work in reality, I always start my response with "That's an excellent idea you proposed, let me try if it works and get back to you". I come back after a day or two as to why the proposal won't work (if it was a bad idea to begin with) with sufficient data. Client is happy you that you considered his proposal and you've avoided a potential standoff th…

So disingenuously humor the client for a day or two before shooting their idea. Honestly, if I was your client and this happened a few times, I would start to wonder why you lack the expertise to immediately know ideas won't work.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#129

Post by tacostakohashi »

raverbashing wrote: post #91
Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

How would you export it to xls? ActiveX Excel controller ("in my time this was called COM", etc)? Open source library?

HTML table in a file with a .xls extension.

Re: Ask HN: What is something you do for clients that consistently blows them away?

#130

Post by vog »

mathw wrote: post #90
Zyst wrote: post #48

Most of these seem to be very on the side of "I'm a company", so as a sole developer what I like to do for clients is implementing sockets into their apps. Adding sockets for, say, the 3 newest logs they get in real time. Or if they have anything that maps to a graph/app-overview just make sure that will always update in real time. It's not a huge time investment for me. Customers usually never request it specificall…

Oh gosh yes. Companies love their CSV exports! I think the reason is that it lets them make glue - they can take data from something, play with it, analyse it, produce graphs, using tools they understand (almost invariably Excel), and sometimes then import into another system. Yes, my employer's customers like their CSV imports too. If you're looking at a big data entry feature and they ask you how the interface work…

You're lucky. We always try to explain that CSV is a mostly-clean format while XLS and XLSX are a mess.

Yet, most of the time customers insist on XLS export, and we are happy if they at least acccept XLSX instead.

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