Hi, welcome to my first blog here on Inferno Tech.

For the most part these will be detailing what myself and scot (Zero Tolerance) Have been working on over the recent past, but today I want to start with something different; I want to tell everyone about the downsides to running a small, independent software house.

In particular I want to talk about time constraints. First I should lay out myself and Zero's average schedule:


Myself: I wake up at 11-1pm, and have some breakfast, then relax.

At 12pm I check support, go through each thread, check if there is anything extra urgent, and answer any questions I can (unfortunately technical support is not my area of expertise, so my answers are normally limited to questions like "Why?..." "When?..." or "Where?..."

At 1pm myself and scot have a very brief chat about the days plan, and he lets me know if he has anything specific he needs me to work on that day.

At 2pm two days a week I have a meeting with either our business contacts at InBiz, and occasionally an accountant or our business banking manager.

At 4pm I get back home, and check support again. Then I proceed to check if there is any products I’m designing (usually there is at least 2, just now there is 5) and see if I can improve them in any way. If I can't then I instead do some URL searching, to try to get the jump on the competition.

At 6pm I go through our warez system, and start adding names and URLs to the list for DMCA notification. Then I’ll do search engine searches for anywhere distributing our products, sometimes I will take actions, often I will just register with sites so I can track the downloader’s.

At 8-9pm Scot gets off work, and we start work on whatever project we are busy with that day/week; This week it has been the improving and revamping of InfernotTechnologies.net

At about half eleven to midnight scot heads off, and I check support again. Once I am satisfied everything is OK I’ll play some Unreal with my clan mates, or watch some scrubs, or do something else that lets me relax.

About 2/3am I’ll check one last time that there are no support issues I can resolve, and then I’ll head off to bed.

For the next two weeks I’ll also be doing a business workshop from 9-5 every weekday, so I’ll need to squeeze everything else in somewhere else.


Scots Schedule: He wakes up at 12pm, and goes straight to work for his independent contracting job, which is 12-8pm every weekday

At 1pm he will take part of his break, and discuss with myself anything he needs me to do, and we'll talk about the plan for the day

At 8/9pm He will start working on whatever project we have going at that time until half eleven/midnight, throw in some support, then he'll go get his relax on for a couple of hours before he sleeps, ready to do it all again in the morning. Assuming I don’t call and wake him at some unholy hour with an issue.

Now, as you guys can see, being self employed doesn’t quite afford the make your own hours status you may think - we work long, hard hours; Especially scot, because he has people over his should *all* day making sure he gets work done. When it’s not his contractor during the day, it’s me in the evening. It's tough to find time for everything sometimes.



This presents real problems when it comes to customers. Recently we had one customer, who I personally feel was being very unreasonable; he had an issue, and failed to send us the information we required to fix it. Scot just didn’t have the time to follow up on it right then, and it got placed on the back burner. Despite the customers several other questions being answered within a matter of hours, he took this as a personal insult, and decided that we were con men, incompetent coders and apparently out to make a quick buck.

Personally I think myself and scot work very hard to keep the customers happy, and that the financial rewards for the amount of hours we put in with inferno technologies is WAY less than minimum wage.

Another side effect of the odd hours (sometimes I don’t get to sleep until 7 and 8am) is crankiness. I'll be the first to admit that my bedside manner is far from impeccable, however in this instance I went out of my way to be nice to the customer, assuring him I understood his issues, I answered every one of his points individually, and assured him that his main point - the lack of documentation for our software - was important to us, and that we were doing everything we could to resolve it, including hiring. He asked in his first post what he could do to help, and I said to him the same thing I’ll say to you guys now; If you know anyone who could write support, and would be interested in a paid position, tell them to email why they think they would be right for the job, and an example to iainkidd[at]gmail.com.

The customer then responded with what he was sure was constructive criticism, which consisted of him saying over and over again "there should be documentation" Even *after* I recognised it was an issue and said we were trying to fix it. How that’s constructive, I’ll never know.

Most of our customers are great, they understand we're a small company and we care about them and their boards, and want to see them become a success. Unfortunately we do have issues with time and manpower. I think most of our customers like the personal touch we give though, and to them I say thank you, and I hope you have enjoyed this peek into the inner workings of our business.

To the minority of customers who choose to try to repeatedly run us down I say this: Thanks for your custom; we do listen to you and we will try to fix the issues you describe, but being abusive to us and being unhelpful by hijacking threads and repeating the same thing over and over will just frustrate us and alienate you.

We are here to help, we are not your enemies, and no one gets anywhere when you approach things with that kind of hostile attitude.

Thanks for reading, thanks for supporting us, and I hope you all have a great day!


P.S For those who are unaware, if you have any questions about anything, I’d be happy to try to help whenever I’m available: My personal MSN Messenger address is Decadoiceblade[at]aol.com. Feel free to drop me a line!

A question that I have, after reading this, is about writing support. Does this require simply writing or is this also a matter of testing the software for bugs and then reporting what was found, resolving that, and then writing the final product?

If it is the former, then I'd like to help. If it's the latter, then I'd like to help anyway.

It's a shame I don't live in the UK.