Sensitivity and emotions are perhaps the major feelings that make us different from other animals.  Humans have extreme emotions and we ‘share’ it a lot. However, should we really be a sensitive or it is good to be insensitive?

I was told by many wise people (including experts) that don’t be too sensitive, be practical; you get more pain if you are sensitive. The main causes of all our problems in life are expectations and fear. I was told that you have more fears if you are sensitive. You cry more, your heart gets break many times, you lose and you also get disturbed a lot if you are a sensitive person. They say if you are sensitive you are ‘prone’ to be getting disturbed and unhappy.

However, I am still not able to understand the term ‘sensitive’ clearly yet. Are emotions and sentiments causing sensitivity? Being emotional is being sensitive?  If I am concerned about my family and friends, am I too sensitive?

Some people argue that there is nothing wrong in being sensitive and it does not make you unhappy, the term that makes us unhappy is ‘expectations’. If you love someone (being sensitive?) you don’t get unhappy but you get unhappy when same person doesn’t love you.  If this is so then it is not our sense/sensitiveness which makes us unhappy but it is insensitivity of the other person which causes the problem.

Sometimes we are also told to be a ‘practical’, so basically we are advised to be smart, matured and not to feel bad if someone does not reciprocate your feelings, it happens. Don’t venture to love, help or share as you may not get same response!

Basically, we are asked to be ‘Insensitive’ to someone’s insensitivity’ and make your feelings dynamic so you keep feeling good and bad based on response you get! We should allow others (their response) to decide if we should feel happy or bad.

I think there is some individuality involved and we cannot really generalize whether we should be sensitive or not. It should leave to us to decide and we do what makes us and our life happy.

Guidelines for Communication with Clients

(Expert edits and suggestions by Ken Stilwell)

1.       We are doing business and earning our ‘breads and butter’ only because clients pay us.

2.       We can be happy only if our customers are happy; there is no exception to this. Their success is “our” success.

3.       It takes months and years of efforts and expense to acquire new customers and it takes only a minute to loose them.

4.       THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT, not matter what they ask or say.

5.       We are working to solve the problems of our clients/customers and we are here to support the growth of their business.

6.       We need to help customers find solutions to a their problems, we cannot say  ‘We cannot help”, we have to say, ‘We will do all our best”

7.       Never tell client that ‘we are too busy to help’.

8.       Don’t tell clients that we have too many projects/work to do  or we are too busy to help. Let them know that we are only working for them and we are always available for them.

9.       If you don’t understand any point /requirements, before asking the customer questions, first explain what you do understand

10.   Always provide an option to the client as per your understanding, for example, I think we can implement this feature by 1.xxx 2.yyy, 3.zzz

11.   Let the customer know what you have done (research and investigation) to find the solution, even if you failed.

12.   Even though you don’t have solution to the problem, suggest possible sources where the client can find the solution.

13.   NEVER ASSUME THAT YOU ARE 100% RIGHT, There is always a chance of being wrong. Sometimes the truth lies in the middle.

14.   Please remember that what you know is not a ‘Universal truth’. There are many things that you might not be aware of. Always write/say, “As per my understanding”.

15.   Your message in email and conversation should be ‘supportive’; customer should feel that we are here to help them. Please provide all possible advice and suggestions but take care that you don’t conclude anything or make an absolute decision on behalf of a customer.

16.   Try to understand the problem and requirement from the clients’/business perspective.  Don’t only think from technical perspective

17.   Try to feel the ‘Pain’ and ‘feelings’ of a customer. Put yourself in his/her shoes for a minute.

18.   If anything is running/working properly at your end, don’t assume that it is same case at clients’ end. Try to think like the customer and imagine his problem. The customer’s idea of “working properly” may be different than yours.

19.   Make all efforts to understand what the customer is trying to explain, don’t be prejudice.

20.   Ask questions and don’t assume as it is always better to ask questions rather than concluding something, for example, ‘I sent you an update email last week but you did not reply”, instead communicate like this, you can write “did you receive my email last week with an update”?

21.   If you don’t understand any instruction from the client, don’t write ‘I don’t understand what you are trying to explain’ instead write’ can you please help me to understand this?”

22.   Never lose your patience while you are talking to the client/customer. If you do, the customer will probably do the same. Control the conversation in a positive professional manner.

23.   Listen and read the client’s communications carefully

24.   Please never say to the client that they are ‘wrong’ or they are missing something. “CUSTOMERS ARE ALWAYS RIGHT’. Please accept that you can be wrong even if you feel that you are absolutely right.

25.   Never conclude or make absolute decisions on behalf of the client.  Don’t write to client that ‘Everything is working fine’. There are always chances of missing something. So write, ‘As per my review everything is okay at my end but please review and let me know immediately if you find any issue. “

26.   Never say ‘You did not reply to my email’, always ask ‘Did you receive my email?  Can you reply back to me at your earliest convenience? Or   “Can you please reply to me when you get time?” if it is not urgent.

27.   Don’t write that “reply me immediately”, instead write, ‘I would appreciate if you can reply to me quickly’.

28.   Never write ‘You are ignoring my comments and you did not read my email”, instead write, ‘I think you may have missed my email, when you get time please read my email in detail as I tried to explain a few points”’ or “Would you mind reading my email once again?”

29.   If a client sends any email asking for request/changes/update, please confirm/acknowledge immediately, if possible with an estimated time to complete.

30.   Please note that at the end of the day, you need to update all clients, even if you have not completed any task. Just reply like ‘We are working on your project and I will update you soon’, if possible by estimated time/day.

31.   It is important that you really understand what the client is trying to achieve and develop your code to achieve this. Don’t just write code based on a request you don’t fully understand as your result will probably be incorrect.

32.   Let the client know that you find their project interesting. This will help build confidence and help build the relationship

33.   Finally, a few suggested diplomatic words/sentences you should add to your communications.

a.       As far as I know

b.      As per my understanding

c.       I think

d.      I will let you know ASAP (if you can’t have fix estimates)

e.      Can you please help me to understand?

f.        Please do me a favor

g.       Should you require any more details, please let me know.

h.      At your leisure

i.         It is little difficult (If you think it is not possible)

j.        You are right, but ……

k.       I am not sure but ……..

l.        Have you considered … ? (to make an alternate suggestion or idea.)

SEO is an integral part of marketing and branding today (read Internet or social media marketing) and it has grown tremendously in last couple of years. Few years back; for us SEO was just keywords and Meta tags but Google has forced everyone to change their strategy and go beyond the basics.

From basics standpoint I think Google has simple rule, if you have most relevant data that user is looking for you must be listed on top. If you are searching for a ‘Dog’ then you should get most important sites about dogs on top and perhaps that’s why we always get Wikipedia listed on top of all the lists because it is consider as the most authenticated information on majority of topics.

Albeit, Google or for matter of fact all search providers have the best technology in the world, I believe they are still more a ‘business’ algorithms and programs; they are still not a natural. I think it is creating ‘consumerism’ on information and it is more like ‘Rich get Richer and poor get poorer’.

Today majority of search results (Except few like Wikipedia) are fabricated and are really not natural. Creative writing is no more ‘creative’ it is more mechanical. Creative writers first now list their keywords that they want to target and then they start framing sentences around that. It is absolutely neither a creative nor natural. They many times ‘spin’ (that means creating 100 articles from same contents) from single article.

I really doubt if SEO is helping quality of information to reach more users. Information should be accurate, useful and easily available but what we see is artificial and fabricated on majority of cases.

Let me explain this by an example, if John is a scientist and writes good articles on astronomy; do all search engines list his articles at top of search results without him making any extra efforts. I really don’t think so. He will not get listed on top or ‘clicked’; to achieve this he needs to spend lots of money and there is no limit to this, he can even spend his entire fortune in SEO. He needs to hire a web designing company who can design his website/blog which is search engine friendly; he needs SEO guy who can published his article on thousands of websites and bogs; he needs link building guy who will write dummy (nonsense) articles based on his topics and keywords and then publish on all possible places.

I am really not against SEO (how can me? It is my business) but as it happens with any technology; this is the other side of SEO. I am sure and I know that all search engines are making improvements so it gets more ‘natural’ rather ‘fabricated’. If you cross the limit they sometimes blacklist you as well. So be naturally fabricated and technically they call it ‘Grey-hat methods’ (Not a white-hat or Black-hat)

I sometimes laugh at myself when I think of my thoughts at different age; when I think of my opinions and thoughts at age of 15-20 years, some of them seem quite absurd and funny. They seem quite irrelevant and illogical. What I was thinking about an employer as an employee was absolutely different than what I think about an employee and employer today. What we (or shall is say I?) were thinking about a ‘wife’ before a marriage and what we are thinking about her after a marriage is absolutely different (Don’t take me wrong, I am only talking from ‘personality’ standpoint!).

One of my friends told me a very interesting story which is quite relevant here. One friend was telling to his friend

“When I was at age of 10,I thought my father is a stupid and he does not understand anything. At age of 15 I believed that my father has not matured yet and he needs to learn a lot. When I reached at  25 I felt that my father still needs to get more matured and now at age of 35 having two kids, I firmly believe that my father is absolutely right and he was always matured and experienced person. Whatever he did was the best that could have been done by anybody in given circumstances.”

This is about how a Son feels about his father during different stages of life but, same is true when we think about our beliefs about ourselves. At some age I was thinking that I am very strong person and have very strong control on my circumstanced but today I don’t. My views about few individuals or I can say about all individuals have change drastically over a period of time.

I know this a natural and obvious, however, does this mean I was wrong at some stage and I am right today? Does this mean, we are wrong today and we will be right in future with more experience and information? If this is the case then it seems illogical to have any strong views or statements at any stage of life (time) as we know it is going to change.
But, I don’t think so, we have full rights to make statements and have views based on the information and knowledge we have at this stage.  If judgments and conclusions are relative why we should be bother about them. I might feel same about my blog tomorrow that I was wasting my time but does this mean I should stop today?

Osho says

“Consistent person is an idiot!”

This is what I read today on one of the leading bidding website

“We are looking for an experienced programmer in PHP + MySQL with good knowledge of HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ajax… Candidate must have already worked on e-commerce websites with at least 4 years experience and must be skilled enough in web security (mySQL Injections Attack, Script exploits, Null poison attack, XSS…).

DO NOT BID IF :
- You are not serious
- You are Not honest
- You are not reachable 24/24 7/7 “366/365″! by phone, sms and IRC (skype, icq)
- You are not fast in programming an fixing issues
- You are not good in communication or your English isn’t fluent

ONLY, If you think you are genius you can bid on this project. We say genius and we REALLY mean it!”

I was smiling when I read this with the budget they have assigned for this requirement.

Everyone wants ‘the best’ at the cheapest price.  Let us be an honest, we all know that this is not possible. I really don’t understand that why people don’t understand basic fact of business that ‘there is nothing free’ here. Everything has cost involved and if you are asking for the best skills; you need to pay accordingly.
Sometimes we know what should be correct price for what we are asking but still we wish to pay less, we assume few things.

We think they might be in need of money desperately and will agree to do this at cheaper rate and sometimes it happens and we get happy. However, we again forget basic fact that if we have paid peanuts and what we should probably get.

If you are expecting high quality, quick-turnaround and the best product in the world, you should be ready to pay the best price in world. You cannot “eat the cake and have it too”.
During my graduation I asked one of my friends, “What kind of a husband you would like to have?” She said “He should be tall, handsome and smart”.  I told her that this is very rare combination. I wanted to tell her (but did not) that such combination is ‘rare’ and in case, if you find in somebody, he is not going to marry you, first look at yourself !

Perhaps, this is true with everyone; we don’t want to be a  realistic and we always expect more than we are willing to pay. We assume that we are saving money but we don’t see that we are exploiting somebody and we are expecting ‘Good luck’ which is not always there and then we start blaming different factors, we get racial, we forget humanity and we lose empathy. We are not ready to admit that we took ‘chance’ and it we knew that it has high probability of failure.

Once we don’t get expected results, we start assuming our gambling as a valid business deal. We feel we are cheated but we should ask ourselves “Was that a valid business deal or we just took a chance”?

When we started PHP development in 1999 we had no idea about the future. We started because that was only an option given to us by an employer or by customers. We were still learning the technology by reading and PHP manual was the only reference available at that time and we used to read the manual one by one.

It is correctly said that you cannot join dots forward, you can only do it backward and how it is true when I think about the way I started learning PHP. I started because it was only language that was being use at the company I Joined; I was more a Microsoft guy and only knew ASP at that time. On first day I learnt ‘echo’ and ‘mail’ function of PHP and that really surprised me. How easy it was! The simplicity and easy syntax attracted me towards the language and it was smooth and easy path the learn the language

We never thought (even dreamt) that world’s most popular website Facebook after the Google will be running on PHP.  I really feel good now that I started learning a promising technology.

PHP is now becoming more a technology rather than just a scripting language.  There are numerous websites which advocates the PHP and debate continues. From a programmer standpoint, I don’t think that any other language is having a strong combination of simplicity and robustness.   There are technologies which are strong and robust but may not be as simple as PHP.

Even from businesses’ perspective it really does have a competitive advantage, from my experience with couple of other technologies; I know that it takes almost double efforts and cost to develop similar project with technology other than PHP. Of course this is really not a rule but it is probably correct at with reference to projects in which I have been involved so far.

Albeit, PHP is our best choice, we are not prejudiced and we work on any technology (.net, asp.net, PHP, Facebook, Joomla, Java, Modx  etc) which provides business and we must be learning a few new in recent future.

Sometimes I really wonder about relativity and absoluteness. What is there in this world which is absolute? Albert Einstein says time is also a relative it is not absolute. They also say that space is also a relative to time and it is expanding. Our beliefs and thoughts are not also absolute and it keeps changing with time. Happiness, paid, wealth, power, attitude and I think anything which can be evaluate or measure is a relative matter. It cannot be absolute.

Size is also a relative matter, if we think about microorganisms; a spoon can be a entire world or universe for them and who knows there can be an entity for which our universe is a size of spoon. It might look funny but it is quite possible because size is what we feel based on our perception, experience and our own size. Why universe can’t be an entity or a body of which we are micro parts like bacteria on a spoon?

Why universe cannot be a series of frames which we see moving/dynamic based on our capacity of FPS (Frame per second) observation. Do we see same world (speed, dynamisms, colors etc) that other animals do?

The question here is “What is relative and what is absolute?” Observer or scene is relative? Or both are relative? If both are relative then it creates more confusion.

I think at micro level it seems all dynamic and relative but it must be static or absolute at macro level. If we start thinking from micro level i.e. from my village, city, state, country, continent, world then galaxy it seems all complex, relative and dynamic but if we do other way it becomes more generic than it should be. I think ‘generic’ is a key and it should be simply L.H.S=R.H.S; how we derive this is a complexity we may have created, and nature may not have any idea about this?

The absolute must be unique and one. There cannot be two absolutes and I think that’s what we may call as a ‘Truth’.

Instant, fast quick, high speed and ‘on-demand’ are the words of modern times. We say that almost all client wanted project yesterday.  I think we have started expecting the results as we think. Our thinking is perhaps faster than a light and we also want t output with same speed.

It takes seconds for me to call and say ‘hello’ to a friend on other side of world.  We tweet ‘I am going for a bath’  and whole worlds knows that I am bathing at this time in few seconds. Speed has change the way we do business like never before. We talk to other side of world like we are talking with a person on next chair. We need an information and Google does a magic in few seconds, no efforts. Certainly we need to move at high speed, there is no tortoise in this race, everyone is a hare and none of them is going to sleep.

However, for a moment if we think other side of a coin, this speed has killed few very important joy of our life. We have lost Patience, Joy of journey, experimenting, learning, failure, waiting and calmness.
We don’t want to wait on 30 seconds traffic signal, we don’t want to wait for pizza to get properly cooked and prepared, and we need in 30 minutes.   I wonder if scientists are working on catalyst type of vaccine which can deliver a baby in a month, there should be a great demand.

We agree, we get something and we lose something, we don’t bicycles because we use cars.  However this trade-off does not have an advantage always. Perhaps, we are moving too fast.

Don’t you think we are moving faster than our biological clock within our body? Perhaps, that’s why we have ‘life- style’ related health issues.  Don’t you think we are moving faster than nature itself?  Are we really ready and capable of breaking a ’sound barrier’ of nature?