Good Afternoon Oprano...
saw this thread and figured I would jump in....
I am a programmer by trade and have just in the last year or so started setting up free sites and tgps...
What you guys are saying about the programmers is right....
We do not have the webmastering experience to write the stats you want... Unless you define what you want for us.
I worked for one of the big boys in adult for several years... My primary job was writing up stats report programs... These were not for affiliates, they were for the New York office... They defined what they wanted, we gave it to them, no clue as to what they wanted it for, no clue as to the significance of what we were reporting for the most part.
One of the projects I worked on, right before the layoffs, was a dialer affiliate reporting program. Someone in New York defined what the database should look like... Someone from the marketing branch of the company decided what the reports would look like and decided that they would be in excel.
Someone in our branch decided who all would be involved writing it....
One meeting of just our branch to talk about it, given a deadline of two weeks and we were off..
Needless to say, it was a piece of crap. Took forever to compile the data from the extremely over-normalized database (I think it was like 54 tables total that had to be read to get a check amount)... But they went live with it, that was two years ago... I was poking around two weeks ago, and it looked to me like the fucking dinosaur was still being used.....
Now, if instead of that, if we had instead had a meeting of several of the affiliates, then had meetings with the New York boys and the marketing department and had gotten a clear pisture of what everyone needed, then we would have been able to produce a decent piece of software....
Unfortunately this is the trend....
Back in the day, when I first got in to the computer business (1974...damn I'm old...eeek) If someone asked me to design an app for them, I insisted on coming in and watching them do there job for a while... That way, I ahd an idea of what the app would be used for, what efficiencies could be gained, etc....
anymore, it is... "Hey, I need an affiliates stst report"...programmer answer: "whats that"... management answer: "numbers for the affiliates....can I have it tomorrow".. Programmers answer: "sure (aint nothing takes over 24hrs to write).."but first...um...what's an affiliate?"
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