Journal ACK!!'s Journal: the anti-f'ed up company 2
This was a comment I wrote to a f'ed up company post a while back. It was about to fade off my 24 latest comments so I thought I would post this.
My first IT company was a model for how small IT businesses could thrive.
The dot commers are amazing. I was inspired to look up an old company I use to work for. They employed about 12 people total.
They had three sales people, three support people, on tester, one secretary, three programmers and one owner. One of the programmers doubled as their sysadmin. The support staff had to work on bugs for Q&A in their time between calls. Advanced Productivity software literally had clients that were some of the biggest lawfirms around.
They made a product. They sold a product. They made money.
The guys who started the thing took out personal loans to keep it going for awhile. They passed out profits back to the employees when times were good. Honestly, if there was a place to be promoted to or a position open when I was ready to go on I probably would have never left.
Small companies can survive in the IT world. They just have to have half a clue in their heads to do it.
Fill a niche, concetrate and expand along the niche not outside it, keep employee and overhead costs low (their building was nothing grand but I had my own office).
This is basic business stuff that many companies still have no concept of.
Sounds wonderful. (Score:2)
Rustin
Re:Sounds wonderful. (Score:2)
You saw them expanding madly and wasting big bucks on expensive infrastructures sound in the knowledge they were the hot new thing on the block.
Maybe because the few of them that had hotshot business folks behind them found out too late that the hotshots did not care about making a sound company. They only cared about the stock price in the short term?
Sadly, part of it might have come from sheer idealism. Many of the companies in their perks and packages creat