7 ms·
A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to com
by sly010 9y ago
A few years ago I co-founded a standing desk company without any experience in real world products in general. The plan was to source desks and sell them to companies. How complicated could it be?
Well, the freight company requires a lot of information about the destination building. The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a little different. Then actual delivery need to be scheduled on the phone. Every time. The pallets don't fit in the elevator after all, so need men to move boxes. Someone need to dispose of the pallets. The building doesn't have large item disposal.
To assemble 60 desks we need men, tools, floor-plan, access to the building, etc.
Someone has to clean up the packaging material. Then of course one of the 60 boxes were dropped, now damaged and needs replacing. Sending one box is a different game than sending 60. Even if you know what you are doing it takes a lot of emails and phone calls to outfit an office with furniture, and somehow everyone wants to communicate over phone or email, so automation is impossible. And that's how my e-commerce company turned into a service business wiped out all my profits :) (edited for typos)
- le-mark 9y agoIf you're like my old boss, just tell the employees to assemble their own desks, and then wonder why all these developers who requested a standing desk, are still using their old sit down desks.
- tdb7893 9y agoAs long as they would allow me to do it on company time it would be a nice distraction from work.
- hinkley 9y agoI gotta say, I sorta miss assembling my own computer on the first day of work. I don’t miss the bloody knuckles though.
- blaike 9y agoGet it into DevOps. Fixing your own computer seems to be par for the course.
- brians 9y agoOf course you can do it on company time. What other time is there?
- Johnny555 9y agoI'd be happy to assemble all of my office furniture if my company paid for it -- though paying $100+/hour engineers to do the work of a $15+ handyman seems like a bad deal for the company - especially when the guy that assembles desks all day will do it faster (and correctly).
- skybrian 9y agoConsider it a team-building exercise? Companies waste employee time in all sorts of other ways, so why not building desks?
- ComputerGuru 9y agoTongue-in-cheek/devil's advocate reply: I wouldn't necessarily consider building furniture a very safe team building excercise, it may just have the opposite result ;-) https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-goes-through-every-couples-mind-while-assembling-ikea-furniture_us_56f2beb2e4b02c402f65efef https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/what-goes-through-every...
- nugator 9y agoWe did exactly this where I'm an expensive consultant. The one who assembled his table the fastest won a prize. My workplace might be a little different but we also are responsible for moving the dishes in and out of the dishwasher. I'm happy to do it.
- Kluny 9y agoI'd be happy to manage my own desk procurement, including organizing the delivery and assembly, if my employer wanted to pay me for it - that's still paying an engineer for administrative work, but maybe less of it at least.
- ChiliConKanye 9y agoI question how handy a handyman who only charges minimum wage could possibly be. The union guys who put together the furniture in my last office were getting $50 or $60/hr IIRC.
- 9y ago
- loco5niner 9y agoI would love to do that.
- zaxomi 9y agoA former boss of mine told the employees to assemble the furniture at the new location. It was fast and it looked good. After a week the monitors started to fail, because the cable to the monitor was too tight, so when they moved the monitor, the contact on the back of the monitor broke.
- gambiting 9y agoHa, at my partner's work(large IT company in UK) they are not even allowed to move or adjust the height of their own desks, because it's a health and safety violation and if anything happened to them doing it the insurance wouldn't cover them. I think HR would get a heart attack at the thought of employees assembling their own desks.
- calgoo 9y agoYea i always found this funny. I was not allowed to move a monitor in the office, but was racking 4u servers by myself in the datacenter. When i asked they claimed it was because the insurance for the monitor, not me, would not be covered if it was not the local IT guy who moved it.
- liotier 9y agoThat was tradition at the first company I joined: every new hire assembles his own Ikea desk, with help from his new colleagues - it was fun !
- 52-6F-62 9y agoYour short tale reminds me of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyTf7y3ityk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyTf7y3ityk In sincerity, I found that interesting. Lessons noted!
- flamtap 9y agoI must admit, HN is the last place I expected to find a link to a Trailer Park Boys clip.
- 52-6F-62 9y agoMy interests are a tapestry... and don't get me started on Letterkenny (and how good it is). Anyway, I figured it fit the subject. ;) Ricky's a natural born hacker.
- cgag 9y agoricky explains legacy software https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6rGMNtXHgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6rGMNtXHgs
- 52-6F-62 9y agoThey have a lesson for everything.
- dsacco 9y ago> The destination building require a lot of paperwork in a very specific format just to deliver something. The paperwork is always a little different. Automating this sounds like a business worth several million in annual revenue, easily.
- hinkley 9y agoSpeakeasy, a former big ISP, presented at a Java users group one time about a logistics app they had written specifically to remind them when it was time to harass Covad about missing deadlines for wiring and circuit connections. I’d had to deal with Covad before and so had my friend who used to own a mom and pop ISP. I thought the fact that someone wrote a management app just for them was funny and sad, brilliant and justified. A few years later they sold... to Covad. D’OH!
- superhuzza 9y agoThe plan was to automate generating all the paperwork in a very specific format, with it always being a little different. How complicated could it be? :)
- jackfrodo 9y agoSounds like a mechanical turk:)
- Florin_Andrei 9y agoSounds like the minimum level of automation that would work is full blown AGI + autonomous robots that could at least match humans in terms of skill and strength.
- eru 9y agoNah, be creative. Think how Uber et al replaced the skilled taxi driver via a random human plus Google maps. (And that's a good thing!)