One of the things that annoys me about people in general is their inability to listen. Most women are a case in point; they never listen to what you tell them. They hears words, rearrange them in their head and twist them into what they want to hear. Politicians are another example. They never listen to what the public actually want. They pretend to listen in order to gain votes but then just do what they want to do, rather than doing what the majority of voters want.
I’m guilty of not listening myself from time to time. If, for example, somebody talks at me for more than thirty seconds without actually involving me in the conversation, I switch off. I can’t help it - it’s a defence mechanism. I also tend to stop listening to people when they start talking complete bollocks. So it was I found myself doing this the other day when I was at a social gathering. I got talking to some chap who apparently did the same sort of job I do. The only difference was he works for a big London agency and I actually work for a living. He spent ages telling me how he’s been working on some big project for the last eighteen months involving lots of acronym-type things that I’ve never heard of and how the change control and project management and schemas and methodologies and blah blah blah something with involving a flux capacitor have been causing him something or other.
I found myself thinking about the difference between what he does and what I do and the only difference I could find was his job involves a colossal amount of bullshit. To put it into perspective, over the last few weeks I’ve launched two new websites. In other words, two people have asked me to build them websites, I’ve designed them, coded them, had them approved by the customer and launched them onto the world wide web. Most of the time was spent going backwards and forwards with the customers to make sure I was building exactly what they wanted and waiting for them to respond. The build process itself took a few days.
So why do big companies take so long to do anything? It’s because they make things so complicated and, the more complicated something seems, the more they can charge for it. That means the chap I was talking to the other day probably earns three times what I do and no doubt drives an expensive car to make up for having a small penis. The other reason is big companies have a lot of people working for them. I, for example, take a phone call directly from a customer, do the work myself and liaise directly with the person who wants the job done. Developers who work for big companies have to go through their manager who probably has to go through their manager who needs to go through an account manager who then liaises with the client’s account manager who goes through their manager who goes through their manager who was probably told by a third party consultant to get the work done so, consequently, doesn’t have a clue. The time spent simply exchanging messages is immense and it’s really a pointless waste of time and the number of people doing jobs that aren’t really needed just strikes me as being pointless.
Here at Datapartners we like to keep things simple. We are also very honest. We may not be able to talk convincingly in Bullshitese or confuse people with jargon in order to convince them to spend more money than necessary for a website. We actually pride ourselves on this. If you come to us for a website, we will do our best to find out what you want, give you an honest quote that is probably ten times less than a big London Agency would charge, get it built in a tenth of the time and then strive to build a long-term relationship with you and continue forward in partnership. This is the Datapartners way!
