There is a network tire changer in Chelyabinsk, there are their little stalls at every corner. They figured out a clever way to increase sales. During the tire fitting season, especially in the fall, they hire a bunch of homeless people and drunks.
It turns out about the same structure in each stall: a manager, a normal tire changer, and a bunch of homeless people. The manager deals with the payment and organization of labor, talks with clients, resolves controversial situations. The tire changer does all the hard work - balancing, re-beading, controlling the tightening torque, etc.
And the bums stupidly remove and put the wheels. And, it seems, they also know how to put them in the sink.
The scheme is simple. A person arrives to change his shoes, without an appointment. He sees that there are already a lot of cars, and everything seems to be at work. He gets upset - he will have to turn around and leave, look further ... But it was not so - the manager runs up, says - glad to see you, then we will change the shoes. Gena, Kolya, pull the jack, serve the client!
Homeless people run up and take off one or two wheels. Well, that's it, the client is in the house.
He will wait an hour or two. Nobody deals with his removed wheels, they just lie in line, among the wheels of the same lucky ones. A person stands and freezes - itâs scary to get into a car with the wheels removed, and thereâs no pushing through the stall, thereâs little space.
The whole point is that the wheels were removed for him, and he will not leave. He may, of course, rebel, and they will probably put the wheels in place - they will only make him pay for the rent / installation. But no one seems to be bothering too much - because it's autumn, it's already snowing on the street, and a person understands (or thinks he understands): wherever he goes - everywhere the same garbage.
I have been using the services of tire changers for a long time, but I have not seen such an approach anywhere else. Usually they just say - everything is scheduled until evening. Or put in a live queue, but the wheels are not removed.
The difference in approaches is captivating. You will drive around the city for a couple of hours, everywhere there is a turn from the gate, and then - you are immediately "taken care of". In the end, let you wait even longer, but âthey are busy with meâ, customer-oriented guys, it's nice to do business.
Before, I didn't notice how common this approach is in IT.
The essence of the approach
The bottom line is simple: to do everything so that it would be cheaper for the customer to continue working with you than to jump to other employees or contractors. Even if you've done absolute nonsense. Actually, it is even better if you have heaped up complete nonsense.
Rollback, transition should be difficult, or even impossible.
Here are some examples.
Factory programmers
These guys, as far as I could study them, "take off the wheels" unconsciously. In general, if anything, I myself have been a factory programmer for almost 10 years - in case it seems that I don't know what I'm talking about.
Usually self-taught people suffer from "wheel removal" - those who studied programming right at the factory and saw nothing but their own walls of the closet-near-server room. These guys don't study any practices, don't read articles and free courses on programming, architecture, etc.
They live like gnomes in the forest. Nobody has ever seen their code, criticized it, or checked it for banal adequacy to anything other than "works the same" and "the user is satisfied."
All this is revealed when the programmer leaves the factory. In this situation, it turns out that the bums removed the wheels for the client, and then ran away, or he drove them out himself - not noticing that something was wrong with his car. For the sake of fairness, I note that there is usually the client's fault - he himself happily "hooks up" on the programmer.
And then another programmer comes along, especially with an hourly pay. He sees this game and rubs his hands. Because everything is done in such a way that you have to pay for elementary changes 2, 4, or even 10 times more. So the wheels are removed.
For example, instead of 50 lines of query, 3000 lines of code are written - just recently I saw such an example. And there are about three dozen such crafts. Nobody knows how they work. Nobody remembers what data they should take, how to filter, join, etc. Even what is wrong, no one can explain.
Having pushed around with freelancers, always whining new employees, wild bills from aggregators, clients, spitting and swearing, call their dwarf to come and continue the endless tire fitting.
CIS implementation projects
All the implementers have long been in the know with implementation projects, so they use the "tire" scheme on almost all projects. The main feature is the phased payment. The client, of course, at first tries to screw in his favorite requirement âimplement it for me on a turnkey basisâ, but they quickly explain to him, incl. using trendy agile terminology that even dinosaurs don't.
Then everything is simple - you have to "give up" more often, thereby removing wheel after wheel. The key point is the launch of the system, which it is advisable to carry out on a couple of working circuits, without waiting for the completion of all the work - again an agile trick (show the result more often). Here, by the way, tire changers would like to learn - periodically relieve stress from the client. For example, twist the third wheel, defiantly drag it into the stall.
The main thing in such a project is to hold out longer. The longer, the more you have time to sign acts and get money - in the event of a customer dumping, you will lose, maximum, revenue for 1-2 months. The more you act (âtake off the wheelsâ), the more difficult it is for the client to turn around and leave.
Services "conscientiously"
There is also a psychological attachment, if the client ordered not a project, but a one-time job. For example, a person calls and says that he needs to improve the system. Tells what is there and asks for a preliminary assessment. Hints or directly says that he applied to several organizations.
The clueless ones usually fall off immediately, offering to conduct an analysis and evaluation for money. Lazy people disappear a little later, because they will not give any answer to the client at all, or they will stretch the deadline to insane. Most just give an estimate from the ceiling or "by experience" and wait for good luck.
A separate category of people who have been to a tire fitting immediately starts doing something. The ideal option is if the customer agrees to a remote connection, shows and tells what he needs to do, and at the same time, in order not to get up twice, shows, at the request of the caller, other problems in accounting and automation.
But even without a remote connection, you can "remove the wheels" based on the experience of solving similar problems. Suffice it to say that you have already begun to solve the problem. It's cool if it is related to some kind of integration - then the phrase âwe have already contacted the developers of the second system, are discussing formats and solutionsâ.
A face-to-face meeting works magically, if possible. Now most of the tasks are solved remotely, and personal contact, chemistry of relationships simply does not arise. However, if you come - especially if it is not a manager, but a specialist who âwill immediately seeâ - the likelihood of receiving a task is greatly increased.
Although, all this is done not to get a task, but to get a client. All his tasks. In general, a normal move. Previously, everyone did this when there was no remote control, so nothing special was seen in personal meetings. Now, with the help of personal contact, you can "remove the wheels."
The key action here is to make it a little uncomfortable for the client to refuse. People also sit there, and if the same persons set a task and make a decision, then creating small "pangs of conscience" for them is quite a method. The rest, after all, limited themselves to the assessment, did not "study us".
Get hooked on "unique technology"
It is less and less common - customers have long understood that the more unique the technology, the more difficult it is to find support specialists - those who will complete the "removed wheels". But Russia is large and immense, and there are a dime a dozen of people who do not want to delve into, if not in the subtleties, but at least in the "thickness" of IT.
The sellers of âunique technologyâ play on the âuniquenessâ of the client - it must be understood, seen, fished out and demonstrated. For example, a site based on Bitrix is âânot suitable for you - this is a template technology for sharashki with 500 visits per day. You have the highest workload, and you need a unique system built on a unique technology that is not available on the market either. Or - the typical 1C configuration will not suit you, even with adaptation, you have unique, super-efficient business processes that the developers have not even heard of - they work for an "average company". Therefore, you need to develop a system from scratch. Well, etc.
It happens that the client himself is looking for just such a "unique" technology. He calls, tells how he has everything in a special way, and even sellers of unique systems who are healthy on their heads answer - damn it, dude, you have everything, like everyone else, do not pick our brains, buy yourself 1C: Accounting, a site on Bitrix and boxed integration between them. But the client persists, develops, supports and with all his might defends the opinion about his own uniqueness. As a result, getting 1C: Accounting, written from scratch, republished by CMS a la Bitrix, and hand-made, poorly working integration between them.
Further it is clear. The wheels are removed not only for the duration of the project - forever. The client buries his head in the sand and does not see that he is reinventing the wheel. And the contractor with all his might, regularly convinces the decision maker of the customer that all the rest, miserable day laborers, were not standing by. So it stands, for years, with the wheels removed.
Good or evil?
I don't know, to be honest. I donât want to give an assessment - in any case, the strategy of âremoving wheelsâ will have both supporters and opponents. The topic is rather slippery.
The goal, from a business point of view, is quite normal for itself - to receive the client's money and receive it in the future. The question is, rather, in methods.
Competition is usually considered to be better. Faster, better, cheaper - it is better, in general, to satisfy the needs of the client, or rather to get into them. To be different from competitors for the better in order to win the choice.
âRemoving wheelsâ reminds, rather, not of the desire to win when choosing, but the desire to deprive the client of choice. The meaning is reminiscent of the creation of a monopoly, at least temporary, limited in scope.
However, sometimes âwheel removalâ is exactly what the client needs, he wants and asks for it. For example, in conditions of a shortage of specialists or companies of the required profile. Well, if he asks, why refuse.
Summary
One well-known tire changer uses a clever trick: to remove a pair of wheels from the car when a person arrives to "change shoes" so that he doesn't change his mind and leave.
Some programmers and companies do the same.
Factory programmers automate the enterprise so that without them it would be long and expensive to accompany and modify all this.
On automation projects, the integrator tries to dig deeper into the client in small steps in order to extract a constant flow of money, while preventing the client from jumping off.
For small automation services, programmers can start work before the cost has been agreed, making it harder for the client to opt out. Or they impose on a personal meeting so that the client thinks: "they are engaged in us."
Planting on a "unique technology" - "removal of wheels" in its purest form.
Taking the wheels off is like creating a monopoly. The fact that deprives the client of choice, or significantly complicates it.