Client cheques that I rejected
m.oursky.com
m.oursky.com
But the subtly great part is that clients get better results. They know they don't own you, that you have other options. So they have to take your advice seriously. They may not follow it, but they'll at least listen. Which, counterintuitively, means you'll have a lot less desire to actually tell people to fuck off than you would in a regular job.
management: "I want an app that does A to solve business problem B"
programmer: "If you want to solve B, you're better off with an app that does C. If you do A you'll run into problems X, Y, and Z. I can do A but i strongly advise against it"
Far too many programmers just go ahead and do the first idea and then it inevitably falls apart, because they're too scared to act like professionals and give their own professional recommendations.
Management: “I want an app that does A.”
Programmer: “Alrighty. Can you give me more details on why you want that app and what you’re hoping to achieve?”
Management: “No. Now how long will it take to get App A out the door? Executive Foo said he wanted app A, so we need to give it to him ASAP.”
Programmer feels satisfies they’ve at least tried, and any screwups are managements fault. Scrambles to get App A out the door. Management comes back with feedback
Manager: “What is this? This isn’t what we asked for. It doesn’t even remotely address Business Problem B and now Executive Foo is on the warpath after championing this project and looking like a fool!”
Management finds a way to convince Executive Foo it was all the overpaid, useless developers that screwed up and reinforces the stereotype of IT being an untrustworthy and frustrating blackhole of a cost center. Management saves face and they pay a consultant to do it. The programmer is left dizzied by the sudden political flak they were just blindsided by.
In that situation, it's really a lose-lose for the developer. If they go over their manager's head, they've just made a very unfortunate enemy. And as the manager has more rapport and access to the executive, it's likely going to wind up fruitless as the manager finagles doubt into your evidence (by leaning on that existing relationship and handwaving misunderstandings and referencing non-existent verbal conversations into the points of contention that you raised).
And if they don't go over the manager's head, they now have an internal reputation for incompetence that'll negatively impact the rest of their time at that employer. So they're screwed either way.
At that point it's better to just leave rather than make waves. If you make waves they can come back to drown you later on during your career or job search. If you leave with little ado it stays more compartmentalized to that toxic environment.
There's an analogous aphorism: it's not working that sucks, it's having to work that sucks.
Even among the population in general, I don't think people enjoy being idle for long. We're curious creatures. We seek out novelty and challenges, and we don't like to feel useless.
There's a great bit in Johnstone's Impro where he has people paint simple pictures, and then shows them the work of others. The people exclaim at how bold, how creative the shown work is compared with theirs. The difference is that the old paintings are by kids, and the new ones are by adults. His point is that kids have a natural creativity that gets trained out of them over time. One can get that back. (In his case, he helps people get it back through improvisational theater classes. They work!)
90% of people have been forced to do things most of their lives. First through an industrial-age education system, then by employers running organizations designed to maximize compliance, not initiative, creativity, or agency. It's no wonder they have lost the joy of creation.
Tech for me was the ticket out of work like that. It took me years to work through my resentment. But now for me there's a joy in creation, a joy in service that doesn't match anything I can get with mere consumption-oriented entertainment. My nephew has been in a Montessori program since kindergarten, and he's far from inherently idle. He loves learning. He loves creation. We all do, deep down, if we're half encouraged in it.
But that seems to be quite an unusual case. Certainly nothing like 90%. What I see around me appears to contradict the hypothesis. Not just "rich" people, either. In the UK, a few hundred thousand pounds in total would (going over the last couple of decades of returns on pretty dull investments, although over just the last decade significantly less would do the job too) pay rent and bills forever if all you didn't engage in expensive hobbies, and a lot of people have that kind of wealth but are still working jobs.
I don't think people are idle or lazy naturally. I think they become idle or lazy because they learn that nothing they do matters.
Being able to choose the work you do matters, which is why people don't "do nothing."
I am not saying that you cannot compete with Uber in a smarter way but if you only ask about an app then you are forgetting all the stuff that happens in the back office.
The crux of this article is that it's important to quickly identify and reject idea people. They just suck on your energy and waste your time going nowhere.
“Hey, I’ve got a great idea for an iPhone app. It reminds you to change batteries in devices. You can build it, we can split the profits.”
“I’ll require a $10K retainer up front, time and materials from there, you keep all of the profits.”
<crickets>
Source: an almost literal email exchange when I owned an iOS shop. One of many I received.
Now that’s just some individual that thought they were going to strike it rich on the App Store with just an idea. It scales up to enterprise level as well.
They are, to put it mildly, a waste of time to work with.
Yes, there's escrow and other options, but it can be incredibly time-consuming and/or reputation-harming to pursue those people, especially if they're skipping out on only the last payment or two.
A customer that requires a disproportionate higher amount of time is a poor choice to work with.
Although Flickr tried to get it done in about a month: http://code.flickr.net/2014/10/20/introducing-flickr-park-or...
Eventually we did persuade him - we should have given up early on as eventually after many many months of work the whole thing ended up in a deeply stressful court case.
Edit: After the litigation settled with anyone walking away and paying their own legal costs he approached me and wanted to be friends again..... Didn't reply to that email.
Edit2: This was 20 years ago and the litigation still makes me stressed thinking about it now :-|
As someone who works on risk and regulatory management software for investments banks: often they don't know exactly what they want it to do. Well, they know what they want it to do right now, vaguely, but what detail beyond the vague that they give will differ from what they'll want next time you meet with them.
Our lives would be much easier without users!
Lead kept wanting to imitate Shopify. I kept saying if we try to compete with Shopify we're already dead -- we're just a small team with maybe a couple years runway; it has to be different.
Eventually the company we were working for abandoned the project and switched to Shopify, since, you know, we were building a poor copy of that anyway...
"You can use Lisp if you want to."
"...I'll have the POC on your desk by next week."
Is that my problem though as a freelance developer? Should I invest effort in something knowing it will fail because it can't possibly be marketed successfully against competitors?
The problem is that in reality, clients like that often turn out to be bad customers. They don't know what they want, make all the excuses to avoid paying on time (or worse, offer "equity"/revenue share), and you end up spending all your time and energy supporting them - just one more little change and I'll pay you - and not by working on actual client projects.
Sussing out which clients are like that is up to you as a freelance developer, and it's a skill that isn't programming but is well worth your time to develop.
(Putting the funds into escrow only goes so far.)
I mean, it's a well written article, I enjoyed reading it. Great for a target audience of developers.
But what will potential clients read when they see this? A company disclosing details of (possibly confidential?) meetings, talking about how stupid their ideas were. They don't name companies but they do give some very specific details - and HK isn't a huge market.
> One client answer was: “All — Android, iOS and web. And I want the mobile apps in native to make sure the responsiveness of the app is good.”
Maybe I'm misreading, but the client wanted a Yelpish kind of app. The right play, in my book, would be convincing the client that a React Native app would do. This is a really easy sell since that is actually what the client need. Maybe the author's team aren't yet familiar with RN.
React Native is super snappy and is a great choice for MVPs. It's easy to develop, the reusability is really high between platforms and the price tag is usually quite low in comparison.
Specifically, they should have cloned Uber for their client, and let the markets decide.
There are multiple development toolsets that will let you do this, without tripling your effort. There are tradeoffs involved, but I think this request was more reasonable than this article presents it as.
I purposely didn't write a "this title is misleading clickbait" comment, opting instead to describe what the blog post is actually about. I know a lot of people check the comments before reading an article (esp. from unknown blogs) so they can avoid wasting time if the article is not what they're looking for. Allowing this comment to stay at the top of the page would help people who are interested to know this.
I should say that if this down-weighting had happened simultaneous to a title change, I would feel differently. A better title would be: "Clients I Chose Not To Work With". To my ear, it's equally click-baity, but it has the benefit of accurately describing the post itself.
Also, the upvoting system isn't great for cases like this. There are certain qualities in comments that attract upvotes almost mechanically (indignation is another) and if we didn't moderate the threads, the result would be such comments at the top of every thread, and less interesting discussions. HN functions best not when it's entirely community-and-software driven, but when community, software, and moderation interact in feedback loops. Our goal is to help the community process coalesce into something more interesting than it would in a less complex system, or (put differently) to try to jig the system out of its failure modes when it falls into them.